ABSTRACT
Television entertainment in South Africa is dominated by the soap opera genre. Globally, soap operas are the most popular entertainment television, and within the South African context they play an important part in the imagining of post-apartheid national identity and culture. Each of the three free-to-air channels, as well as the popular African language channels of the subscription television service, have their own “flagship” soap operas that command the largest viewing audience of all television progamming on air. Locally produced soap operas in the 1990s focused on representing multicultural South Africa. More recently, the focus has been on single-language productions, many of which are in African languages, with strong ties to the locality and cultural backgrounds in which they are set. The popularity of these soap operas is equated with their cultural proximity and the ease with which audiences are able to identify with the characters, contexts and situations portrayed. One such programme is Uzalo, currently the most viewed programme in the country. This chapter argues that its success is not serendipitous but is the consequence of regulation and funding acting in unison to promote genuine South African televisual entertainment that strategically responded to incentives to indigenize content.
