Interview with Angie Kapelianis

Angie Kapelianis attended Rhodes University in the 1980s. After a stint with the NBC in Namibia, Angie returned to South Africa, and joined the SABC, where she has remained ever since, initially as a radio journalist in the unsettled period before the 1994 elections, covering pre-election violence on Gauteng’s East Rand, ANC President Nelson Mandela’s election campaign, local government, political news and features. In 1995 Angie was promoted to senior radio journalist, and during her five years in this position she reported on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1998 Angie realised that only 52 of the radio stories on the TRC had been catalogued in the SABC Sound Archives, and thus began a year-long project to transcribe what was, in the final count, 900 cassette recordings of the proceedings. Using this rich archive, Angie and colleague Darren Taylor scripted the six-hour audio documentary South Africa’s human spirit: an oral memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2000, Angie explained: ‘I just felt that we as the radio journalists who had covered the Truth Commission … if we wanted to add value to what we had already done, it had to be based on sound. It had to be based on the people’s stories in their own voices and their own words…And so I suggested: “What about a CD?” And one CD became a CD collection.’ In the years since this seminal project, Angie has moved through the echelons of the SABC, and is currently the national radio current affairs editor.