Into the TV Age

After decades of debate over the potentially corrupting influences of television, South Africa last week was -- in the words of one Johannesburg columnist -- "dragged, kicking and screaming, into the TV age." More than a million view ers, mostly whites who paid up to $1,200 for color sets, watched the five-hour nightly programs, broadcast in both English and Afrikaans. They included Shane, the Bob Newhart Show, news broadcasts, a concert by the Orchestre de Paris and the film oldie Oklahoma!

Hardly the sort of licentious fare that would inflame Zulu houseboys to run up stairs and rape madame, as former Minister of Posts and Telegraph Albert Hertzog used to warn. Most of the country's 18 million blacks, in fact, were unable to see the programs because they live in urban slums and rural townships without electricity. One African, who won a television set in a contest last year, was given a portable generator to operate it. After weeks of watching the test transmissions, he decided to sell the TV and keep the generator. Many whites, on the other hand, for the first time saw what South Africa's black regions and their leaders looked like when Zulu-land's Chief Gatsha Buthelezi and the Transkei's Kaiser Matanzima appeared on news programs.

Propaganda Weapon. Prime Minister John Vorster described television as a mixed blessing and warned that "slanted news" would be corrected. Opposition newspapers feared that any abuses might come from the government, which has sole control over the network. "The mere presentation of the world at large is bound to have a far-reaching effect," editorialized the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail. But so powerful a visual medium, it said, could also become a propaganda weapon "particularly when, as in South Africa, it is so much under the thumb of the political party in power."

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