This article examines how consumer magazines for black South Africans function as an agency of repertoire-formation and repertoire-transmission, and outlines how the history of the magazine-form in South Africa's black print media is intertwined with the rise of a `South African' consumer culture. Specifically, the magazines in question are (1) part and parcel of the urban, middle-class repertoire of dispositions initially derived from the 19th-century missionary enterprise in Southern Africa, and (2) a means of strategically transforming this repertoire `from below', in keeping with the changing needs and interests of many black South Africans. Evidence from the magazines in question suggests that, despite having been deprived of political rights for so long, black South Africans have long since been more than passive subscribers to, and casualties of, colonialist legacies and the apartheid regime. By promoting `aspired to', not necessarily `given' states of affairs, consumer magazines have provided valid ways for black South Africans to devise new ways of doing things in life, enabling them to access new resources and strategies directed at the social and individual production of selfhood.
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