Mail & Guardian Reporter
Radio’s Oscars, the annual Sony awards, shone on South Africa at this year’s glam function at Grosvenor House in London’s Park Lane. A documentary presented by Mail & Guardian correspondent Eddie Koch and produced by Johannesburg-based educational broadcasters Ulwazi won a bronze.
The Last Voice – the compelling story of Kalahari resident Elsie Vaalbooi and her dying language, Auni – won third place against 120 other entries in the features section of the Sony awards. The international nod of approval is what is being celebrated at Ulwazi and by the documentary’s producer, Siven Maslamoney, who is now working in educational television at the SABC.
The continued support of British radio journalists – such as The Last Voice’s programme editor David Harding, who has worked as a consultant managing editor at Ulwazi – has resulted in several Ulwazi documentaries being aired on Britain’s Radio Four and BBC World.
This award-winning documentary is likely to echo in discussions on future commissions at the BBC, which continues to provide inspiration to radio producers around the world, whose opportunities for serious broadcasting in their own countries are slim.
Yet The Last Voice is rather more unusual than the average compelling piece of radio.
It was a fascinating collaboration between the print and electronic media as award-winning journalist Koch, who discovered Elsie Vaalbooi and wanted to tell her story, joined Maslamoney and talented senior producer Andrew Ntsele in a trek to one of the most daunting physical environments in southern Africa.
Mail & Guardian chief photographer Ruth Motau captured the important socio- historical journey on film and her pictures and Koch’s feature were published in this newspaper late last year.
Maslamoney’s and Ulwazi’s achievement at winning a Sony award, the most prestigious radio honour in the world, is particularly outstanding when one considers that The Last Voice was Maslamoney’s first production, and Ulwazi – a project of the South African Institute for Distance Education – has only been going for three years.
The project produces programmes in as many as eight of South Africa’s official languages, supplying material to community broadcasters and the SABC’s radio services. Ulwazi also trains community broadcasters.
Studio mixing on The Last Voice was by Paul Hedges, the BBC’s senior trainer in digital recording and editing.
Hedges has visited Ulwazi three times to train its producers in the use of digital equipment, and the project now boasts its own studios in Braamfontein and a highly skilled group of radio people creating programmes quite unlike any heard before in South Africa.