South African Media Policy during the Apartheid Regime

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, whose focus is on the South African apartheid propagandist Piet Meyer – a highly power political operator influenced by Calvinist morality, and Chief of Radio for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Meyer was demonised by the more liberal press, and the present paper draws on his personal archives. He came from Boer heritage, and was highly educated; he was suspected of ideological allegiances to German Nazi ideology, but it may be more appropriate to see his major influences as a quasi-theological commitment to self-determination for white South Africans.

Meyer was deeply involved in the FAK, an association to promote Afrikaner culture and promoting a spirit of nationalism amongst them. In 1958, he became the Chairman of the SABC, where he clashed with SABC Director-General Gideon Roos, a highly principled non-nationalist, and who had formal influence over the direction of the SABC. However, the Director-General’s role was gradually diluted, and an Executive Chairperson role was created; Meyer was installed in this position.

Under his leadership, the SABC pivoted from English-language to Afrikaans content, while developing separate and less high-powered services for Bantu-speaking black South Africans in order to maintain a policy of separate development. The underlying aim here was to create an SABC of one’s own for Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, and thereby to position English-speaking white and black African communities as ‘other’ and different. Different languages had different stations and different services.

For this reason, the introduction of television was also long resisted; it was seen as a plot by English capitalists to undermine Afrikaner identity. Finally, it was also the global broadcast of the moon landing that brought the government to introduce television, and Meyer was again central to this – and in policy-making on this issue he directly involved members of the Afrikaner nationalist Broederbund organisation, which he also chaired. Television was introduced in a highly controlled manner.