As a teenager I saw television just once, when, some months after NASA's triumph, the government sought to quell local discontent by arranging limited viewings of the taped landing. We had to line up at a planetarium: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for whites; Tuesdays and Thursdays for blacks. The turnout was immense. Policemen with German shepherds and Dobermans straining at the leash patrolled the line. After hours of waiting I entered a barricaded enclosure and joined twenty other people seated on collapsible metal chairs. A sullen moustached man tugged a sash, a purple velvet curtain slid back, and a television was revealed. For fifteen minutes I witnessed a lunar landing that seemed no stranger than the unearthly presence of that black box in the room. Then the curtain was closed again and we filed out, abandoning our seats to the next twenty people in line.

By the time I acquired my B.A., in African languages, I had spent no more than that solitary peepshow moment with a television. The year I graduated, apartheid's apparatchiks cautiously introduced a single, state-controlled channel.

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The ban earned Afrikaners some American admirers. Writing in the National Review in 1966, James Burnham, the author of Suicide of the West, argued that TV had proved catastrophic for American race relations. "What is 'the civil rights movement,' what could it be, apart from the media?" he wrote. Burnham concluded with envy and approval that "the absence of a 'native' liberation movement in South Africa is equivalent, very nearly, to the enforced absence of TV in South Africa."

The ban coincided with an ambitious scheme of forced removals, based on a kind of ethnic fundamentalism. Under this scheme black South Africans were divided into ten inviolable ethnic "nations" and compelled to live segregated from one another in ten dusty, overcrowded reservations. Apartheid's visionaries hoped (and failed) to persuade the world that these patches of land were legitimate incipient independent ethnic states. The "bantustan" scheme, in the dismissive parlance of its opponents, was a form of mandatory multiculturalism that allowed apartheid's defenders to pretend that South Africa had a white majority.

In this context official hostility to television made perfect sense. The state recognized that TV's market-driven voracity would show scant respect for the jigsaw of militarily enforced ethnic boundaries. Hertzog condemned TV on these grounds: "There is no more powerful medium for dismantling the population groups' sense of identity." As one of his parliamentary colleagues put it, rather more emphatically, "Television, like communism, promotes sameness."

But after the Apollo landing whites campaigned in growing numbers to have the moratorium overturned. TV's ab-

sence, they protested, made South Africa look primitive. Black South Africans showed less interest in the debate: TV wasn't high on their list of deprivations. When the government finally capitulated, it did so in response not just to internal dissatisfaction but also to a new threat from abroad. NASA-led advances in satellite technology meant that foreign transmissions could now reach any South African with a concealed satellite dish and TV set. This possibility roused apocalyptic fears. One parliamentarian exclaimed, "Satellite broadcasts will be a mighty force in the hands of the Russians and Americans." Better to blanket the country with pro-apartheid TV as a pre-emptive strike.