Veteran broadcaster David Mashabela is set to bring his long-running podcast, The King David, to national television, marking a major milestone for South African podcasting as the show prepares to debut on SABC2.
The move represents a rare transition from digital streaming to public broadcast television, placing The King David among a small number of locally produced podcasts to successfully cross into mainstream media.
For Mashabela, the shift is driven less by prestige and more by accessibility.
YouTube reaches about four million people in South Africa, while the SABC reaches over 20 million,” he told Sunday World. This move allows stories that were previously limited to people with internet access to reach everyone, including ordinary mamas and papas.
Renowned for its raw and unfiltered conversations, The King David podcast has built a loyal audience by creating space for South African public figures to speak openly about their lives, careers, and personal struggles—often in ways rarely accommodated by traditional media platforms.
Mashabela says the podcast was born out of frustration with how South Africa records its own history.
We don’t have a proper library of South African stories, he said. If you want to understand the full journey of some of our biggest names, there’s nowhere to go.
That concern became even more pronounced during his involvement in a government project aimed at archiving the history of nursing in South Africa.
The archive stopped in 1994, Mashabela explained. 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.
