Coded Resistance in South African Media
Language, Power, and Protest
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:16th Feb '27
£171.99
This title is due to be published on 16th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This book traces how black South Africans have mobilised language, oral traditions, and subtext across the full trajectory of the country’s media evolution, to engage in coded resistance that resists marginalisation and advances struggles for democratic participation.
During South Africa’s colonial and apartheid eras, coded language became a powerful tool for evading media censorship and mobilising for change, despite a media system designed to suppress the black majority. To unpack this communicative lineage, the volume traverses early print archives, apartheid-era radio, and struggle songs as a form of singing the news, bridging historical resistance with modern multimedia frontiers - including indigenous-language podcasting, television news anchoring, and fresh survey data on marginalised audiences. It challenges Eurocentric conceptualisations, such as the notion that media is the objective ‘voice of the voiceless’, offering readers a decolonial framework that demonstrates how veiled communicative techniques function as durable infrastructures against persistent institutional and technological silencing. Through its investigation of subtle language, symbolism, and hidden networks across different media platforms, this holistic analysis is important not only for understanding South Africa’s legacy of resistance but also for other countries where media plays a role in struggles against oppression.
It is an important read for researchers across politics, history, sociology, and media studies, in its dedication to illuminating the lived experiences of black journalists and journalistic texts in South Africa.
"The book is packed with insights and bristling with information about the resistance and agency of black writers, audiences and performers covering a sweep of media history that takes us up to the digital present. Why have the country’s indigenous languages been left outside a framework of power? Why is the question so urgent? And what can be done? Nkoala’s book provides some answers and calls for change and a re-think.
Sisanda Nkoala’s absorbing study tells us how journalists have handled the power of rhetoric residing in South Africa’s indigenous languages and helps us to consider how more can be done in the digital present. How have these powerful languages and their speakers been side-lined? And how have speakers, audiences and producers fought back?
This wide-ranging book teaches, informs and challenges us. It asks the reader to think differently about media and the power of language. Especially it shows us the powers of rhetoric in South Africa’s indigenous languages, and suggests how that power can be harnessed in the present age of digital media and eager but marginalised publics."
Liz Gunner, University of Johannesburg.
"For too long discourse on Black/African journalism has been dominated by white and male scholars. Sisanda Nkoala’s book, an exercise of a black/African female scholar, is a contribution towards eradicating this historical injustice amid calls for decolonized and Afrocentric education."
Simphiwe Sesanti, Professor in the Department of Language Education at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town South Africa.
ISBN: 9781041012351
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
212 pages