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Theoretical debates and literature on E-E efforts in Africa have largely focussed on understanding how and why interventions on HIV and AIDS are effective in influencing behaviour change among target communities. Very few studies have sought to investigate and understand why a substantial number of targeted audiences resist the preferred readings that are encoded into E-E interventions on HIV and AIDS. Using cultural studies as its conceptual framework and reception analysis as its methodology, this study investigated and accounted for the oppositional readings that subaltern black South African youths negotiate from Tsha Tsha, an E-E television drama on HIV and AIDS in South Africa. Results from the study show that HIV and AIDS messages in Tsha Tsha face substantial resistances from situated youth viewers whose social contexts of consumption, shared identities, quotidian experiences and subjectivities, provide critical lines along which the E-E text is often resisted and inflected. These findings do not only hold several implications for E-E practice and research, they further reflect the utility of articulating cultural studies and reception analysis into a more nuanced theoretical and methodological framework for evaluating the ‘impact’ of E-E interventions on HIV and AIDS.

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The entertainment-education (E-E) strategy in development communication has been widely described as the panacea to development challenges in Africa. However, despite its growing application on the continent, E-E is still argued to be inhibited from contributing meaningfully toward development efforts. E-E interventions are argued to be hamstrung by their failure to embrace theoretical advances in development communication and E-E scholarship and for remaining rooted in the modernization paradigm. Using the social change paradigm as its framework, this article assesses the notions of development, change, communication, audiences, and education that underpin the conceptualization and design of Tsha Tsha, an E-E television drama that uses a novel cultural approach to address issues surrounding HIV and AIDS in South Africa. The data informing the study were gathered through a Focused Synthesis Approach and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The study's findings show that significant efforts have been made by Tsha Tsha's producers to bridge E-E practice and contemporary development communication and E-E scholarship. The data analyzed in the study show that Tsha Tsha's notions of development, change, education, communication, and audience have been significantly remoored in line with the core tenets of the E-E for Social Change paradigm. The implications of the study are that more engagement and synergies need to be cultivated between E-E practitioners and development communication and E-E scholars if E-E's full potential, in contributing to development challenges on the continent, is to be realized. Keywords entertainment-education, development, communication, social Sciences, social change, HIV and AIDS, subaltern interventions in South Africa have reached their full potential in contributing towards resolving development efforts by tapping into theoretical advances in development communication and E-E. Waisbord (2008) contends that although critical approaches have enriched the field of development communication by raising questions and opening new analytical dimensions on how development, communication, culture, and change are conceptualized and articulated into development communication interventions, the situation on the ground reflects a continuation of modernization and diffusionist practices. A number of scholars such as Tufte (2005), Dutta (2006), Waisbord (2008), and Nyamnjoh (2010) have argued that development communication efforts in developing countries are still inhibited from reaching their full potential to contribute toward development efforts due to their continued predication on modernization. They contend that contrary to claims made by contemporary development communication practitioners and scholars that the dominant paradigm in development communication has passed, a wide chasm still exists between programmatic experiences and contemporary development communication theory. This observation is particularly unsettling given that it contradicts the undergirding ethos of development commu...

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