S.A. now launches apartheid on the black airwaves

Press, 28 January 1984, Page 15

S.A. now launches apartheid on the black airwaves

From

ALLISTER SPARKS

in Johannesburg

Having developed earthly apartheid about as far as it can go, South Africa is now extending it into the air. Since the beginning of the year one of the nominally independent tribal “homelands,” the awk-wardly-named Bophuthatswana, has been broadcasting its own television service. But at Pretoria’s behest, the programmes go only to black areas where there are large concentrations of the Tswana tribe. The whites are excluded. Years of systematically dividing the population has made possible this astonishing achievement of apartheid of the airwaves. Thus BOP-TV is beamed to Soweto but not to adjacent Johannesburg. It is aimed at Pretoria’s black townships but not at the capital itself. The technique has not yet been perfected, however. There is a certain amount of “spillage” into the white areas, and this is causing an unseemly scramble among people who are bored by the dry fare dished up by their own Gov-ernment-controlled service. Thousands of rands are being spent on elaborate aerials and power-boosted amplifiers to try to pick up the precious BOP spillage. Newspapers are carrying large maps showing which white suburbs are getting a clandestine signal. Property advertisements blurb about “beautiful house in suburbs, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, swimming pool, Bop-TV.” A spokesman for the Estate Agents Bokrd says good BOP reception

can add $l5OO to the value of a house. The austere South African Broadcasting Corporation, a bastion of the Broederbond secret society which seized control of it years ago to ensure that Afrikaner morals and political ideals were protected from corrupting influences, does not like any of this. It keeps warning the frenzied suburbanites not to waste their money. The spillage, it says, will be mopped up just as soon as the corporation’s engineers refine their methods. Because Bophuthatswana’s independence is not recognised by the rest of the world, it cannot apply to the International Telecommunications Union for its own broadcasting frequency. It has to borrow airwave space from the 5.A.8.C., which gives South Africa the control it needs to keep the BOP-beam segregated. This is done, first, by having BOP-TV on a separate wavelength. Whereas the S.A.B.C. broadcasts on Very High Frequency (V.H.F.), BOP is on Ultra High Frequency (U.H.F.). That means it requires a different receiving aerial, which can be expensive. Second, the - Bophuthatswana broadcasters hqtee to send their beam to one transmission tower in

Johannesburg and another near Pretoria, from where the S.A.B.C. relays it, beaming it narrowly to black townships where there are Tswanas. As a further safeguard, South Africa has written a clause into the contract specifying that neither side may broadcast material detrimental to the interests of the other. So if BOP-TV steps out of line, the S.A.B.C. will simply pull the plug on it. Segregation of the telly really began two years ago when the S.A.B.C. introduced two channels of its own for blacks. “Own Language Purity” was the means by which it was done at that stage. Although 80 per cent of urban Africans, who are the only ones who can afford TV sets, use English as their everyday language, the S.A.B.C. insisted that the programmes had to be entirely in the vernacular. It is surely only a matter of time before the other nine homelands ask for the same facilities as Bophuthatswana. Already, an Afrikaans newspaper columnist has suggested that the mixed-race Coloureds and Indians also should be accommodated now that they are getting a vote of sorts under the new constitution. Copyright—London Observer Service