Looking at listening: gender and race in commercial advertising for radio sets in Southern Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s

This article takes a visual approach to the study of an aural medium. It
argues that the radio set had a powerful visual presence in popular
culture in Southern Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s when
most people bought their first radio sets. Advertisements for radios
carried by the press offer the most prominent examples of this
iconography. In South Africa, Rhodesia and Zambia, radio
advertisements developed a distinctive aesthetic that blended
global and local influences and framed the relationship between
the new technology and society. Although the radio set was
presented as part of a forward-looking, ostensibly inclusive vision
of modernity, sales strategies also served to associate radio with
whiteness and masculinity by looking backwards to the racial and
gendered hierarchies of the colonial past. The homogeneity of
advertising on both sides of the liberation divide demonstrates the
pervasive cultural influence of settler colonialism both before and
after formal decolonisation.