Building a Nation: The Sowetan and the Creation of a Black Public

Lesley Cowling

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2014, vol. 40, issue 2, 325-341

Abstract: The Sowetan, a black readership newspaper established in the 1980s, grew to be the biggest circulation daily in South Africa in the 1990s. In the apartheid era, the Sowetan served disenfranchised urban black communities and promoted their interests in a society in which they were not democratically represented. The project was not simply oppositional to apartheid policies, but also engaged in and encouraged certain kinds of community endeavours, which it dubbed nation building. Led by its editor, Aggrey Klaaste, the newspaper engaged in an ongoing process of social re-imagining under this flag of nation building, partly through its editorial columns and partly by initiating and reporting on community projects. The Sowetan thus allowed a collective re-imagining of black public life that formed a counterweight to apartheid representations of black Africans and facilitated public engagement with questions of citizenship and nationhood long before the inception of South Africa's constitutional democracy. The story of the Sowetan illustrates the ways in which a newspaper can become an influential institution of public life.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2014.901639 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:40:y:2014:i:2:p:325-341

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2014.901639

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().