Set at the onset and during the total lockdown of March 2020, the three episodes examine its impact on working class lives that were already precarious. A family and their friends and relatives interact, exposing different aspects of this draconian shutdown of ‘ordinary life’: police high-handedness, the curfew, the emerging black markets in alcohol and cigarettes, growing hunger, family pressures and gender violence, isolation. Underlying all the action, is the realization that people face twin viruses: the physiological (covid 19) and the virus of capitalist accumulation, alienation and inequality. The play utilises many chants and songs as well as a ’play within a play’.
Lockdown
Meltdown
Breakdown
Lockdown
Meltdown
Breakdown
Shutdown
Crackdown
Backdown
Shutdown
Crackdown
Backdown
Crackdown
Lockdown
Breakdown
Crackdown
Meltdown
Smackdown
Shutdown
Ripdown
Hackdown
Shutdown
Ripdown
Hackdown
Trackdown
Trackdown
Trackdown
Crackdown
Crackdown
Crackdown
Lockdown Uptown
Lockdown Downtown
Lockdown Uptown
Lockdown Downtown
The poor must eat!
It’s showdown!
The poor must eat!
It’s showdown!
“The radio play was broadcast on a total of 22 community radio stations across all nine of the country’s provinces covering an almost equal amount Neroli Price | Laura Garbes 66 Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media of urban and rural populations speaking all eleven of South Africa’s official languages (see Appendix 2). Although there was a lot of diversity in many aspects of the audience, they intentionally targeted predominantly workingclass and Black communities (McKinley 2020). ILRIG’s Dale McKinley (2020) explained, ‘that was our target because that’s who we work with’. This is a clear way in which KKQC was an extension of ILRIG’s existing political education efforts. The audience is clearly reflected in the cast of characters, as well as the use of code switching to incorporate exclamations in multiple languages. In this way, KKQC is building an audience that is defined by their relative economic marginalization rather than on their ability to fund this or future productions. Indeed, often ILRIG and the Botsotso Ensemble had to pay the cash-strapped community radio stations to air the play (McKinley, personal correspondence, August 2020; Phaloane, personal correspondence, October 2020). Thus, community radio networks not only allowed KKQC to reach particular audiences, but also introduced a new iteration of radio drama, one with a working-class activist lens, to these existing airwaves
While the radio drama form was not their original plan, the creative use of sound enabled the collaborators to create a sense of both structural constraints of the pandemic and an imagined community of an idealized, feminist and multicultural working-class solidarity. Specifically, we find two elements of sound as tools for worldbuilding in the creation of KKQC. First, polyvocality, or the use of multiple voices as a means to show both divisions of power between authority and working class, and complexity and fullness within the working class itself. Second, the use of sonic markers sets the main plot within the domestic sphere. The dialogue, in foregrounding the personal as a space for political discussion, in which the matriarch is a central decision-maker, disrupts patriarchal dynamics.”
Radio drama as a tool for activism in South Africa: The case of Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona – Neroli Price and Laura Garbes
Botsotso Ensemble – Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona (Part 1)
Botsotso Ensemble – Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona (Part 2)
Botsotso Ensemble – Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona (Part 3)