It’s a strange medium, radio. Though Karabo Kgoleng may be speaking to thousands of South Africans on her Afternoon Talk show on SAfm every weekday, and on her Sunday afternoon Literature programme, when I tune in it feels like she’s talking directly to me. So it seems natural that we should simply continue the conversation when she’s sitting across the table from me.
I’m admiring her dreadlocks. She has spoken about how this was the simplest option for her. “The hair debate…” she shakes her head. “I’m not in that headspace anymore. My hair issues, I went through it when I was 14. It was actually my mother’s suggestion. I was going for hair relaxing, and burning my scalp, and I thought, if something is going to go into my eye and blind me, what on earth am I doing with it on my head?In her final years of high school, at St Conrad’s in Klerksdorp, at first it was an issue. “It was the nineties, and there was still that image that people with dreadlocks are lazy, they’re layabouts and they smoke drugs. And then fortunately Hlomla Dandala came on Isidingo, and he became the black mine manager with dreadlocks,” she laughs.
When she arrived on the radio scene two years ago, “I had very big shoes to fill,” she says, taking over the literature programme from the erudite Victor Dlamini. She did that with remarkable ease, with a big personality, and a wealth of knowledge.
Please register or log in to comment
