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With the Broadcasting Amendment Act of 1960, the South African government began to regulate forms of entertainment intended for public and private consumption. Radio broadcasts were controlled and musical recordings were regulated under this and subsequent legislation, with over 100 albums being banned outright and many more individual songs classified as ‘undesirable’. This legislation was applicable in the ‘homelands’, and musical productions – especially for SABC Radio Bantu – were censored. However, enforcing censorship laws in terms of live performances in the ‘homelands’ proved more problematic. Whilst the evidence from Venda lends some support to the established, romantic notion that musicians – and their music – were deeply embedded in the struggle against apartheid, there is equal evidence to suggest that many musicians at the time had little interest in revolutionary activity. Whilst self-censorship was prevalent on many levels, the motivation for this was not clear-cut. Christian convictions that those in power had been put there by God, or the liberating conviction that musicians were ‘simply entertainers’ and not politicians, prompted musicians to abide by censorship laws. Even for those who were politically aware, challenging the system was generally perceived to be not worth the risk. In the former ‘homeland’ of Venda, important exceptions to this stem from one family – the Mukwevho of Tshitomboni – whose most famous son, Colbert, made himself a target of the state by adopting reggae as his genre of choice. By charting Colbert's transition as a musician from the late 1970s to the present day, this paper demonstrates that musicians in the former ‘homeland’ of Venda had more freedom to record and perform ‘undesirable’ songs than has previously been accepted. However it does not follow that they all did so. The story of the Mukwevho family shows how different artists reacted in diverse ways to the political situation in which they found themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1970s and 1980s bore witness both to a consolidation of the controversial bantustan system in South Africa – accompanied with the notorious neglect of key services such as health care in these areas by the apartheid state – and the revival and development of a radical global vision of primary health care encompassed by the World Health Organisation's mandate of ‘health for all’. This paper describes the influence of these diverse forces on mission hospitals operating in the ‘homeland’ of KwaZulu, which were eventually taken over by the KwaZulu government. While existing literature about the bantustans has tended to focus on the enormous financial constraints and the inadequacy of service provision, I argue that the period of ‘homeland’ rule in fact provided a certain degree of autonomy from the prescriptions of the central state, along with a relative increase of funds which, though inadequate, nonetheless created an opportunity for these hospitals to develop and implement a progressive model of community-based care. By using this example, I do not intend to challenge the many indisputable critiques of ‘homeland’ rule, but rather to suggest that some of the nuances of its diverse operations may have been overlooked as a result of the polemical approach of earlier scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The'black film industry' was established in 1 South Africa in the early 1970s following the introduction of a differential state subsidy for film production in African languages. This paper is a critical examination of some of the productions of this B-Scheme film subsidy. The'black films' analysed here are identified as those that fall in the 'back to the homeland' category. These films represent an urban/rural binary that reflects the apartheid government's preoccupation with spatial separateness, most notoriously in the policy of separate development in ethnic homelands or bantustans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]