Four-fifths of South Africa’s population was black in 1994, but "a genuinely black press had not been allowed to develop" under apartheid, according toacademic Adrian Hadland*.
Apartheid and economic sanctions had led to a country where television arrived only in the mid-1970s. There was state control of broadcast TV and radio and little outside investment until the mid- 1990s.
This meant there was little opportunity for the convergence of technologies or for the amalgamation of multimedia empires among the two largest Afrikaans newspaper companies, Nasionale Pers and Perskor, and two English ones, Times Media (previously South African Associated Newspapers) and the Argus Publishing and Printing Company.
In the year after 1994 there was an 11% drop in print circulation, and in following years the subsequent disappearance of Perskor and Times Media into other entities, and foreign acquisition of Argus.
By contrast, Naspers has grown from a unilingual newspaper business into a multinational, multilingual, multibillion-rand business and by far the biggest media company in South Africa.
* The South African print media, 1994-2004: An application and critique of comparative media systems theory