Three Wise Monkeys

Volume 2 of Three Wise Monkeys explores Catholic Mozambique's role in the leisure economy of Protestant South Africa, as a place where bachelor miners and Randlords alike could project their fantasies of subtropical exotica, whether in the raucous bars and brothels of the port or in the development of the upmarket Polana Hotel and the vision of segregated 'tourist zones' for race-conscious Rand holidaymakers. Mozambique's liminal place in the leisure and entertainment universe was nowhere better represented than in the rise and eventual fall of Lourenço Marques Radio. For decades, LM Radio beamed the hit songs of the day, and a certain vision of post-war modernity, to white South Africans increasingly in thrall to the stifling rule of Calvinist churches, the National Party and the Broederbond-dominated SABC. The eventual triumph of the SABC in muzzling LM Radio was a foretaste of the police state that came to imprison South African minds during the 1960s and 1970s.

CHARLES VAN ONSELEN is the author of several award-winning books, including The Fox and the Flies, Masked Raiders, The Night Trains and The Seed is Mine, which was voted one of the hundred best books to come out of Africa in the 20th century. He has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Yale universities and has been Research Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) at the University of Pretoria for the past two decades.