Athanase Karayenga

Rural radio consultant, based in France

Perspective

Rural radio in the new millennium

Due to the dramatic political and democratic evolution in Africa, the media landscape is changing in a very spectacular way. There are more and more private TV stations, more and more radio stations, more and more newspapers. African media are blossoming.

This very fast growing transformation is not affecting the urban areas alone. It is very noticeable even in rural areas. By far, the predominant media is radio. In Mali, in Madagascar, in Burkina Faso, in South Africa, hundreds of radio stations are now on the air. Even if their legal statutes are different, community radios, neighbourhood radios, associative or commercial radios, they all seem to play the same role. They introduce pluralism of opinions, they provide a wide range of information and entertainment. They open up people's minds.

How important, therefore, is the radio for the African rural population? What kind of deep transformations does this media explosion in rural area announce? What are the radio perspectives in terms of freedom of expression, of access to knowledge, of entertainment, of job creation, of artistic creation, of gender issues like free and equal access to school and job opportunities for girls and boys, of the perpetuation and renewal of oral traditions? Do rural radio programmes coincide with the needs and expectations of local people?

These are some of the main questions that arise when one looks at the rural radio evolution in Africa. This list is not exhaustive and the answers are not easy.

Soon after the opening of a rural radio in a very remote, small town in the Dogon region in Mali, an old lady came to the radio station and asked to see the director. Intrigued, the director came out of his office to meet the lady. The greetings process in Mali is a long ceremony. How is the family, the lady asked. How is the wife, the children, the father, the mother, the uncles, the aunts, the cattle, the cows, etc. etc. How is everyone doing? Thanks be to God, said the director, everyone is fine. After a short time of suspense, the lady said: "Young man, you don't know me. But I've come to greet you and to ask you to accept my humble present. Here is a bowl of fresh cow milk for you. Because, in my lifetime, I would have never dreamed that I would hear a radio speaking my own language."

Although this sounds like a genuine traditional African fairytale, this is a true story. According to Dogon tradition, offering milk is a sign of great appreciation and a good omen for the rural radio.

Now, who says that rural radio has no future in Africa? Who can predict how rural radio will evolve if challenged by greater access to TV and even by the Internet? Of course it is very easy to predict that TV would diminish the radio predominance in African rural areas, that people's fascination for moving pictures will be much stronger. But is a massive access to TV in African rural areas likely to happen in the foreseeable future? One would like to make the bet that many other rural radio directors will be offered bowls of milk before this happens.

Rural radio will definitely continue to play a meaningful and predominant role. In the future, it will form the matrix of information sources for rural people in Africa.

Much has been said about the predominance of oral traditions on the continent. But what is most striking is the fact that, even in the most advanced countries, it is the audio-visual media which are mainly affected by an extraordinary expansion vertigo. Radio and television have never been so omnipresent and omnipotent. The Internet, which used to transmit exclusively written messages is now stretching its web over the world and broadcasting sound and pictures. In fact radio is the most modern old media and the African oral traditions will not be better preserved and transmitted to younger generations than by audio-visual media.

But, as a contrast to the old lady with her bowl of milk, one old, lonely Dogon monk has decided to escape from the surrounding, deafening noise transmitted by radio. He is retired and lives in a natural grotto carved in the famed Dogon cliffs overhanging his village. There, he says, the noise of the village will not reach him.

Ironically, being higher than his people in the village, he would be in a far better position to listen to the local rural radio programmes. But, in his case, the rural radio might as well talk to a stone wall!

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