iHeritage

This Week’s Hidden Gem March 12, 2009

This month we have a real hidden gem – an old radio serial from the 1930s, which we found in the vast audio archives at the Internet Archive.

Not much is known about the radio series Moon Over Africa. It is thought to be a South African radio show which aired around 1937 or 1938. There are 26 episodes lasting 15 minutes each. Since nothing is really known about the series we are not sure if there were episodes which aired before, or after, these 26 episodes. The 26 episodes follow an expedition led by Professor Anton Edwards as they search for the missing city of Atlantis. They follow the directions of a shrunken head which speaks the ancient language of the people of Atlantis and run into many strange dangers in the African jungle.

It’s a real Boy’s Own Adventure story, a swashbuckler straight out of H Rider Haggard. If you’d like to hear the other 25 episodes in this epic tale of love, adventure and danger, you can download them from the Internet Archive here. They’re licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives license, so you’re free to download and share them.

This radio broadcast is old, and a throwback to another era, when people thought differently about Africa and it’s people. But we can’t discount its historical value, as a piece of ephemera from another time. The ideas in this broadcast are in no way a reflection of the principles or values of the iHeritage project.