Keep your voice alive

Always cutting edge, Bush Radio explores issues in an insightful and meaningful way, giving the people of Cape Town access to media that highlights their voices – through music, entertainment, social upliftment and getting hands-on with media training.

The wide range of programming includes human rights, LGBTIQ+, gender, labour, job opportunities, basic health care, entrepreneurship, and offering information deemed necessary by our communities.

Africa’s oldest community radio station project, it was started in the 1980s by community activists and alternative media producers to explore ways in which grassroots media could be used for social upliftment and as an alternative voice during the apartheid era.

Today Bush Radio ensures it remains relevant, necessary and effects change through carefully curated media projects by working with partners to build dynamic programming. These projects include the Children’s Radio Education Workshop, where children aged between 6 and 18 years going live on-air, and the Media Kidocracy Konference where children aged 12 and up are trained to produce media content.

As an incubator for new media talent, Bush Radio has trained many young people from the Cape Flats and beyond who have now moved on into the media industry and beyond, also helping to build young start-ups and artists.

The community media sector is struggling in South Africa and even though Bush Radio is engaging on various levels, including with the government, to find a solution, we need daily costs such as rent, transmission, communication and stipends for the young people to get on-the-job training covered.

Your contribution will go towards ensuring that young people have a place where they can get access to quality media training and experience and that Cape Town’s communities continue to actively contribute to discussions around the issues affecting them.

Related: Community Media demands to be heard

The battle to get to work and home

The majority of the Bush Radio team have to rely on public transport to get to work and home. As most of us live on the Cape Flats taking this mode of transport can be scary at the best of times. Mkhuseli Veto was trekking home when he captured the following footage.

The Actor, the Canadian and the journalist

This past week at Bush Radio was filled with several reunions at the station.

On Tuesday well-known stage and television actor Vinette Ebrahim popped into the station to talk to Denisia Adams about her current play “My Naam is Ellen Pakkies“, which is on at the Baxter Theatre.

Vinette Ebrahim and Denisia Adams

Vinette is most popular for her role in the soap opera 7de Laan, but we at Bush Radio remember her as the narrator of a series of
programmes we produced in 1998 with Molo Songololo, the national children’s rights network, called Silent Shame, Silent Crime which dealt with incest.

We pulled a recording from our archives and played it for her. Click here to listen

John Tottenham, Wesley Wessels (centre) and Janelle Nichols

We then had another visit from someone who was last at Bush Radio in 2004. John Tottenham was a participant in a programme run at the station with a group called Canada World Youth. John was a student at the University of Waterloo at that time and during the project he was teamed up with former Bush Radio trainee and now editor of The Dankish, Wesley Wessels, who also came along for the visit.

John is currently working for an engineering company in Canada and came to show his wife, Janelle, South Africa.

Rhode (6th from left) with some of the Bush Team

Also this week, former trainee producer and newsroom intern Rhode Marshall, now a content producer for the Mail and Guardian, came to say hi.