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Is African radio a medium for the devil?

Saturday April 12 2014

Rwanda is observing the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide, in which nearly one million Tutsi and opposition Hutus were slaughtered.

The Rwanda genocide was horrific, but it was not exactly new. Human beings have been murdering each other on a genocidal scale since at least the 13th century, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad.

In Africa, though, in 1994, Rwanda first brought to public attention, in a very deadly way, the twin brothers of “hate speech” and “hate radio.” Until then we mostly talked of “tribal hatred” and “tribal killings” in Africa.

In a macabre sort of way, therefore, the Rwanda genocide rescued the language about mass murder in Africa from its narrow anthropological prison. The star of this grim drama was the government-backed Radio Mille Collines.

There is perhaps no better way for those who didn’t live it, to understand what exactly hate radio did there than to watch the documentary Shake Hands With the Devil by the Canadian Gen Romeo Dallaire, who led Unamir, the hapless UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda.

Based on real footage from the genocide period, a part of it captures the hate radio messages directing machete- and-club armed gangs to the plantations and bushes where the Tutsi were hiding.

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What Radio Mille Collines did in Rwanda, settled once and for all the issue that had been debated in journalism scholarship for years, about whether media was actually effective in mobilising listeners toward certain goals.

Because the Rwanda genocide happened just as Africa was beginning to liberalise its airwaves, the hate radio phenomenon heavily influenced broadcast regulation and licencing rules elsewhere on the continent.

Since then, be it in the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, or the Kenya election of December 2007, the role of radio in merchandising hate has given rise to the sense that it is an evil medium.

The Internet can be deadly, yes, but it is also very effective in mobilising for good as East Africans saw in the Kenya post-election violence in 2008, and after the Westgate Mall terror attack last September.

TV and newspapers can be divisive too, but they have also proved powerful platforms in rallying troubled countries to come together and do good.

So does the devil live in African radio? No, obviously. There are many views about why radio is particularly suited to mobilising for mass murder. One that is a little racist argues that the African is an oral creature, not a reading animal.

A good radio presenter thus simultaneously draws from the traditional drum, the fables of our societies, and the tales of our grandparents, and touches us deep where no other medium can go.

Secondly, radio is more democratic. It doesn’t have the snobbery of newspapers and TV (where you have to be either very clever, or if you are of average talent then photogenic and well spoken, to succeed on the tube). Many radio presenters are DJs, comedians, beloved drunks, chaps with a man-on-the-street touch who connect with listeners at a visceral level.

Twenty years later, it seems we are all still paying for the original Radio Mille Collines sin. To reassure jittery media regulators, an African radio station somewhere will need to do good at a dramatic level that bests the harm it caused in the Rwanda genocide. And soon too.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]. Twitter: @cobbo3

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