South Africa could have been the trailblazer in television broadcasting in Africa, had it not been for the reluctance of the apartheid government to introduce the service, when it became available in the 1950s. Although the government’s excuse for delaying the service was supposedly due to limited financial resources, politics and the fear of the possible dilution and erosion of the Afrikaans language, culture and Christian values were seemingly the main real reasons behind the government’s reluctance to adopt the television service. The apartheid government feared it would voluntarily surrender the gained Afrikaner independence, back to the English colonisers, as television programmes were only in English back then. Furthermore, through its policy of racial segregation and separate development under apartheid laws, the government also feared its deeds, perpetrated on the native black South Africans, would be exposed by television to the international community. Notwithstanding that South Africa was eventually the ‘late majority’ in the introduction of terrestrial analogue television, it, however, ultimately became an ‘innovator’ and trailblazer in satellite analogue and satellite digital television in Africa, as explained through Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory, which provides the theoretical framework of the chapter. Against this background, this chapter, thus, traces the history of television in South Africa, with particular focus on the political and social context surrounding its introduction in 1976. The chapter provides a narrative literature review of the available knowledge from books, journals, academic papers, the Internet and newspaper articles, amongst others.