Blonde Cherie Curry, demurely gazing at the camera, she must have been around 15 years old at the time. Gazing at the photo of the Runaways, two girls stood out from the rest. According to her, the Nationalist government in South African suppressed females, sexual minorities and black people, in order to maintain control. Christi van der Westhuizen has written, white South African women during the apartheid era were both oppressor and oppressed. My reaction might seem strange now, but as the academic, Assoc. I remember being a bit angry because this revelation of seeing girls rocking collided with my Christian National upbringing, “How dare they? Girls don’t play rock”. I remember staring at the black and white photo of the girls, I was dumbfounded, I couldn’t believe that there was a girl rock band.
The caption noted that this was a band based in Los Angeles and that they were known as “The Runaways”. One day I was paging through the Personality, not expecting much when a picture of five young girls immediately caught my attention. I would scour my mother’s magazine, flipping through the make up tips, desperately looking for any music news that sometimes made it into the latest Personality. Personality targeted white housewives with a mix of fashion, beauty tips, recipes and updates on what Miss South Africa was doing. One of the unusual sources of music news was Personality magazine. Television was only introduced into South Africa in the mid-1970s and the radio stations were mostly controlled by the government, so a music lover like me had to rely on unlikely sources. There were the UK weeklies like the Melody Maker and NME, but there were also other sources for a young girl desperate to find out about what was happening in the outside world. Growing up in apartheid South Africa we were reliant on various sources for our music news. I saw Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in concert earlier this year.
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