Abstract
This article attempts to examine the efficacy of indigenous language newspapers that operated in
South Africa during the colonial era. In doing so, the article is particularly interested to see how
the success achieved by those publications could be replicated to boost post-apartheid indigenous
language media in their encounter with the hegemonic onslaught of the mainstream media whose
scope and hegemony continue to expand at an alarming rate. The article embraces the notion of
the public sphere and the theory of hegemony to make sense of how indigenous media permeated
the language and political discourse and emerged as a strong voice for the oppressed, reinforcing
at once what Herman and Chomsky (1988) refer to as “class consciousness”. The notion of the
public sphere is found to be particularly profitable in highlighting the exclusion/inclusion of
wide-ranging voices in the public affairs while the robustness of the theory of hegemony lies in
its strengths to unravel the political imperatives and the ideological contest that characterized the
colonial era. The article argues that indigenous publications succeeded in becoming viable
platforms for the indigenous communities who had been pushed beyond the realm of public
sphere and the margins of citizenship. The article concludes that indigenous language media
were particularly important for their political mobilization and contribution to media diversity,
resulting from the range of voices that they orchestrated.