The Eagle has Branded

By abiding memory of running tour operations in Zululand was the time a powerful local headman in a gold-plated Mercedes (I am sure it was not just gold paint) drew up alongside our Land Rover and said, through his driver-bodyguard-mediator: ‘You’re welcome to camp next to the river but leave my dagga crop alone.”

This was translated into English and sonorously enunciated as only Zulus can, with full rounded vowels and a tone both warm and menacing. Behind me the six pink faces of would-be Tugela river rafters, beaming the adventure of whitewater, suddenly paled, as did mine. The tubby headman in the passenger seat of the Mercedes roared with good-natured laughter and shouted: ‘Enjoy yourselves!” in perfect BBC isiNgisi (English).

Strange, I could have sworn the same British-educated chief and his henchmen, of whom there were several gun-toting individuals that I knew from personal encounters in the wilds, were the very men who cut me dead at a soccer match at the Princess Magogo Stadium in KwaMashu near Durban a few years later. They were adorned in Kaiser Chiefs regalia, the man himself flourishing a dented bugle and wearing a Kaiser Wilhelm spiked helmet of Great War vintage. I was there as a journalist and trying to seem as inconspicuous as possible anyway, surrounded by chanting impis, so the fact they did not acknowledge whitey was no problem.

But I had wished to ask one question: ‘Just how rich are you?”

This was not long after a respected Natal academic had announced that by his calculations the dagga crop was worth six times what the province produced in sugar, and that was maybe an underestimate. Our tourists did, of course, help themselves to the odd zol from the stuff growing on the riverbanks, but the real trade was (and still is) carried on in trucks and taxis that police found it impossible, or inadvisable, to stop and search.

I guess he was pretty rich. All the same, he was a listener to the downmarket Radio Zulu, one of the old Radio Bantu stations, which since those years has transmogrified into Ukhozi FM. If transformation is the goal of broadcasting today, black public broadcasting is having a hard time reinventing itself, because—well, language and ethnic footprint are hard to paint anew. My acquaintance the headman has sons and daughters who listen as he does to UKhozi FM though some no longer live in KwaZulu-Natal but have migrated to Durban and Gauteng. They are urbanites but have not forgotten their roots.

According to a national sample of lifestyles compiled as part of AMPS 2002B, Ukhozi FM listeners are scattered through several categories, suggesting that the Zulu identity overrides other socioeconomic variables in determining media habits. Ukhozi means ‘eagle” and the station’s logo shows an eagle with a microphone, symbolising that it strives to reach as large an audience as possible. Indeed it does, remaining the largest station in the country with 6.58 million listeners or 22 percent of total radio audiences.

Black radio stations are so big and popular that outside of television they constitute the biggest single segment of mass media audiences in South Africa [see graphic]. To establish an enduring presence amongst those audiences is a key goal of most sellers of fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCGs) and household durables.

This being the case, where are its commercial competitors? Answer: there aren’t any – at least not any following the same broad format and targeting the same Zulu heartland of KZN and Gauteng. Just why such a massive audience has failed to interest the entrepreneurs of the airwaves is a matter for some speculation, but we think it is fuelled by a belief in business and marketing circles that the niche is filled by Ukhozi.

‘Ukhozi has a difficult job,” says SABC Board member and Natal University associate professor in the Programme for Cultural and Media Studies, Ruth Teer-Tomaselli. ‘The station’s brief is to reach everyone who speaks Zulu, which means it has to span all ages and tastes, both genders, incomes and educational levels, and bridge the urban-rural divide. It has to do this with a full spectrum of news, sport, music, drama and talk shows – in short it is a kind of Springbok Radio in Zulu.”

Rather than confront the behemoth head-on, rival stations adopt varying tactics to share Ukhozi’s audience or poach listeners off it. Metro FM springs from the same SABC stable but is a commercial music and infotainment station in English, and is positioned to capture younger listeners. In fact, the English medium allows it to garner listeners from all black language communities and there is even a small component of ‘non-black” (white and Coloured) listeners tuning in too.

SABC stations and mass black listenerships

Meanwhile, certain independent commercial stations are gunning for the top in radio and they include YFM and Kaya FM – both having only limited public responsibilities under their licences, and again, broadcasting in English. YFM has been wildly successful as the station for the teenaged nation, while Kaya seeks to be the mainstream Afro-centric station for the Johannesburg region.

Even in KZN itself, Ukhozi faces an upstart community radio station based in Greytown called Radio Kwezi (not to be confused with the SABC’s Ndebele station, Ikwekwezi FM). This unique venture with Lutheran support offers programming in no less than four languages – Zulu, English, Afrikaans and German (there are plenty of German speakers around Greytown) – and is building listenership across all races.

A number of ‘white” stations are attracting increased black listenership too, and notably in this context, 5FM seems to be the station that younger black listeners graduate to once they have bopped their way out of YFM. Through all this, Ukhozi and some of the other African language stations maintain a teenage and young adult listenership along with older audiences.

The major black public radio stations are locked into a broad spectrum format and could not compete directly with the music stations even if they wanted to. Little can change without regulatory changes and perhaps adverse reactions from audiences. Still, things are not just being left as they are. According to Teer-Tomaselli a lot of planning and reviewing is going on to determine how to reformat or improve the African language stations.

My colleague Refiloe Mataboge, who helped to research this article by listening to all the stations, says she cannot help but wonder what would happen if alternative commercial indigenous radio stations were set up to compete with them directly. Some have been going for well over 40 years, and though they have shed the trappings of Verwoerdian ideology they remain, oddly, in a kind of ethnic time warp.

Even before the changeover to a democratic South Africa, most of the black channels were revamped with new names and more varied formats. Yet still today a visitor to the SABC Airtime Sales website finds that most of the stations are described with a deadening sameness. It suggests there is plenty of room for a fresh look at each one.

‘Radio stations such as Metro FM, Kaya FM and YFM have carved a niche for themselves by clearly packaging programmes and music that directly appeal to their identified target markets – Metro to the hip-hop generation, Kaya FM to the sophisticated urban listener who wants to remain true to an African identity, and YFM has elevated kwaito music and the kwaito generation,” says Refiloe.

Pulapula Mothibi, station manager at Lesedi FM, says the black public broadcasters cannot be compared with commercial stations. ‘We are listener driven. Programming is designed to satisfy the needs of the previously disadvantaged. Black Radio is about information, education and entertainment. Black Radio speaks to people in the language that they understand.”

If there are constraints, they may be self-imposed. In one recent case, a sports journalist, James Shikwambane of Mungana Lonene FM, was reportedly suspended by the SABC for doing what many journalists would consider their role. He called Sports Minister Ngconde Balfour to ask him directly whether he had a hand in appointing the national soccer team’s coach for a game against England. Neither the minister nor his spokesman had an answer, and callers later complained that they felt marginalised as a language group.

The people are talking, but are the politicians listening? Our impression is that the indigenous radio stations have a big following and they attempt to capture popular views that are expressed by communities but neglected at the top – until election time, that is. There are rigorous and interesting debates about the state of the nation and the world, including what to do about the situation in Zimbabwe. But maybe because the opinions are not expressed on mainstream radio stations, even the listeners themselves seem despondent about being heard.

We hear too that certain managers are purists when it comes to the use of African languages on air. That’s fine, comments an academic specialist in cultural studies, but then the public broadcaster should not ignore the complaints levelled at the poor use of English on SAFM: ‘It’s a double standard”.

Ethnic sensitivities may never go away and probably have to be treated as booby-traps that come with the terrain of a multi-lingual broadcasting system. Yet if transformation is to mean anything, in marketing terms at any rate, the public stations need to fine-tune their offerings and position themselves for a more dynamic approach to audiences.

The driver of change is lifestyle – the changing face and fashions of South Africans -and this is where the black language stations seem stuck where they are. The so-called AIO model of consumer lifestyles, which stands for activities, interests and opinions, provides a guide to where the people are going.

If I think of my headman acquaintance in Zululand, his lifestyle was changing as the homeland of KwaZulu rejoined the national fold. He bought a home in Soweto and filled his homestead in the Tugela valley with white goods – I mean fridges and stoves. And sugar, of course. A massive generator drove one of the biggest deep freezes I have ever seen, while Ukhosi FM blared out over misty hills.

He was not stuck in any kind of time warp but moving on, and Ukhozi needed to move with him. Here was a rich, well educated, land-owning (well, at least guardian of tribal lands), soccer-crazy, township tycoon and illicit agricultural entrepreneur fitting the profile of a ‘Bars&Betters” lifestyle – one of the ten clusters identified by the SA Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF), in AMPS 2000B.

Bars&Betters are those who, according to SAARF are not quite ‘Gamers”, not ‘Mainstream Sports”, and certainly not authentically ‘Traditional” – no, they are the types who like braais, soccer and horse-racing, who take part in stokvels (mutual savings associations), visit shebeens and casinos, go to night clubs and discos, listen to Metro FM or Ukhozi FM, and – quaintly – still manage to work fulltime. Many have the money to lash out on comforts and durable.

Marketing Consultant Clive Corder presents the lifestyle analysis on the SAARF website (www.saarf.co.za). It suggests that African language-speaking audiences are crossing over, back and forth, from stations like Ukhozi FM to Metro FM and 5FM with a freedom that may surprise station managements. How many marketers realise this or have taken the trouble to look hard at the available research?

Listeners have primary and secondary radio station preferences: they patronise more than one station, and on average South Africans listen to more than 2.5 stations in a week. So it makes sense for marketers to spread their wares beyond the commercial stations. Ukhozi FM is not just the same old Radio Bantu see-nothing know-nothing ostrich in new feathers. The eagle has branded.

Graeme Addison is former Professor of Communication at the University of North West and once ran and marketed a rafting company. Refiloe Mataboge is founder of a Centurion-based marketing research consultancy, Ideas Zone.