How a Fake African Agony Aunt Shaped a Generation: The Men Behind “Dear Dolly”

We travel back to the glossy pages that raised us - the agony-aunt columns, gossip spreads, and advice pages that shaped girlhood across Africa and beyond.At the centre of the story is Dear Dolly - an advice column that captured the hearts of readers across the continent of Africa, answering questions about love, shame, and desire. What few people knew was that, in the early days at least, “Dolly” wasn’t a woman at all, but a group of men writing under her name. Reading directly from the Drum magazine archives, we dive into real letters from the 1960s and 70s - from women asking about cheating husbands and body image, to queer readers cautiously revealing their desires in a deeply heteronormative world. We sit with the tenderness, the absurdity, and the harm in those pages: the empathy that sometimes peeked through, and the patriarchy printed between the lines.Together we ask what these columns reveal about love, morality, and modernity in post-colonial Africa - and how their logics still echo today, from tabloid talk shows to TikTok advice culture.🎧 In this episode:The secret life of Dear Dolly - how men became agony aunts,and moral arbiters of women’s livesDear Dolly advice columns - live and direct from the archivesMarriage, fatphobia, and the policing of women’s bodiesPatriarchy in print: how advice columns shaped women’s moralityQueer love, shame, and silence in 1960s advice columns“Good girl” scripts, body image, and the policing of women’s behaviourFrom Drum to gal-dem: the rise of Black women’s magazinesThe evolution from agony aunt to algorithm - how advice culture never really died🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube🔁 Share with someone raised on the magazines that taught us who to be📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: [email protected]⚠️ Content note: discussion includes gendered violence, body shaming, and references to mental health.Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.Connect with us on:TikTokInstagramLinkedInAiAi StudiosRoots & RigourThis is an AiAi Studios Production©AiAi Studios 2025 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.