Veteran broadcaster David Mashabela is taking his long-running podcast, The King David, to national television, marking a significant moment for South African podcasting as the show prepares to air on SABC2.
The move sees the popular digital platform make the leap from online streaming to public broadcasting, placing it among a small group of locally produced podcasts to successfully cross into mainstream television.
For Mashabela, however, the transition is less about prestige and more about reach.
“YouTube reaches about four million people in South Africa, while the SABC reaches over 20 million,” Mashabela told Sunday World.
“This move allows stories that were previously limited to people with internet access to reach everyone, including ordinary mamas and papas.”
Known for its raw, unfiltered conversations, The King David podcast has built a loyal following by giving South African public figures space to speak openly about their lives, careers and personal challenges, often in ways rarely seen on traditional media platforms.
Mashabela said the podcast was born out of frustration with how South Africa documents its own history.
“We don’t have a proper library of South African stories,” he explained. “If you want to understand the full journey of some of our biggest names, there’s nowhere to go.”
That concern deepened during his involvement in a government project aimed at archiving the history of nursing in South Africa.
“The archive stopped in 1994. That’s when I realised that if we don’t document ourselves, our stories will eventually be told by other people, and from their perspective,” he said.