Radio Freedom: A History of South African Underground Radio

Radio Freedom was the underground radio arm of the African National Congress during the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa from the 1970s through the 1990s.

href="http://vimeo.com/36148856">ANC Radio Freedom - Kea Rona (It Is Ours) from jonneke k on Vimeo.

At seven p.m. sharp, seven nights a week, during the darkest days of apartheid, an incendiary radio broadcast beamed out from Lusaka, Zambia. It began with the clack of machine-gun fire, followed by a familiar call-and-response:

Amandla Ngawethu!
“Power to the People!”

Three hundred and fifty miles to the south, people gathered  in Johannesburg’s industrial townships and community centers in the Cape Flats and thatched-roof huts in black homelands to hear the transmission. They had to use extreme caution as listening to Radio Freedom in Apartheid-era South Africa was a crime carrying a penalty of up to eight years in prison.

Read more at The Appendix