Human Rights and African Airwaves

Harri Englund

Description

Local discourse in the global discussion of human rights

Human Rights and African Airwaves focuses on Nkhani Zam'maboma, a popular Chichewa news bulletin broadcast on Malawi's public radio. The program often takes authorities to task and questions much of the human rights rhetoric that comes from international organizations. Highlighting obligation and mutual dependence, the program expresses, in popular idioms and local narrative forms, grievances and injustices that are closest to Malawi's impoverished public. Harri Englund reveals broadcasters' everyday struggles with state-sponsored biases and a listening public with strong views and a critical ear. This fresh look at African-language media shows how Africans effectively confront inequality, exploitation, and poverty.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Human Rights, African Alternatives
1. Rights and Wrongs on the Radio
2. Obligations to Dogs: Between Liberal and Illiberal Analytics
3. Against the Occult: Journalists and Scholars in Search of Alternatives
Part 2. The Ethos of Equality
4. A Nameless Genre: Newsreading as Storytelling
5. Inequality Is Old News: Editors as Authors
6. Stories Become Persons: Producing Knowledge about Injustice
Part 3. The Aesthetic of Claims
7. Cries and Whispers: Shaming without Naming
8. Christian Critics: An Illiberal Public?
9. Beyond the Parity Principle
Appendix 1. Presidential News
Appendix 2. Graveyard Visit
Appendix 3. Drunken Children
Appendix 4. Giant Rat
Appendix 5. Reclaiming Virginity
Appendix 6. The Truth about Porridge
Appendix 7. "Makiyolobasi Must Stop Bewitching at Night"
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Asian Studies
• African Studies
• Political Economy
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• África
• Reference
• Politics
• Journalism
• Cinema
• Anthropology
• Africa
• Radio
• Social
• Culture
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005434
• Langue: English

Extrait

Human Rights and African Airwaves
Human Rights and African Airwaves
Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio
Harri Englund
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2011 by Harri Englund
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Englund, Harri.
Human rights and African airwaves : mediating equality on the Chichewa radio / Harri Englund.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35677-2 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22347-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Radio broadcasting-Social aspects-Malawi. 2. Radio broadcasting, Chewa-Malawi. 3. Nkhani Zam maboma (Radio program) 4. Public radio-Malawi. 5. Human rights in mass media. 6. Malawi Broadcasting Corporation. 7. Malawi-Social conditions. 8. Ethnology-Malawi. I. Title.
PN1991.3.M3E55 2011
302.2344096897-dc22
2011013555
1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12 11
For Mikael
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
P ART 1. Human Rights, African Alternatives
1 Rights and Wrongs on the Radio
2 Obligations to Dogs
Between Liberal and Illiberal Analytics
3 Against the Occult
Journalists and Scholars in Search of Alternatives
P ART 2. The Ethos of Equality
4 A Nameless Genre
Newsreading as Storytelling
5 Inequality Is Old News
Editors as Authors
6 Stories Become Persons
Producing Knowledge about Injustice
P ART 3. The Aesthetic of Claims
7 Cries and Whispers
Shaming without Naming
8 Christian Critics
An Illiberal Public?
9 Beyond the Parity Principle
Appendix 1. Presidential News
Appendix 2. Graveyard Visit
Appendix 3. Drunken Children
Appendix 4. Giant Rat
Appendix 5. Reclaiming Virginity
Appendix 6. The Truth about Porridge
Appendix 7. Makiyolobasi Must Stop Bewitching at Night
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Once again I have to register my debt to the many friends and acquaintances in Dedza District and Chinsapo Township in Mala i who not only suggested intriguing topics to research but also offered perspectives on them that helped me revise my initial interpretations. Because I have not used the services of research assistants for this book, I can do no more than thank my interlocutors collectively, all too aware that writing academic books may not be the best way to adjust this sort of debt.
I felt welcome at the Blantyre headquarters of the Mala i Broadcasting Corporation during the tenure of two successive pairs of director generals and deputy director generals. The employees I worked with may not want their names to appear here for reasons that will be evident to the readers of this book. However, having rather reluctantly been interviewed by some of them on the radio (twice in Chiche a and once in English), I believe I am not the only one in our relationship who enjoys the powers that come with representing others. This book bears witness to some of the ways in which they have exercised those powers under the constraining conditions of public broadcasting in Mala i.
A number of academics were generous enough to read or listen to parts of this book when it was a work in progress. Some offered their comments and criticisms in seminars or during casual conversations, others in writing, but it feels right to acknowledge them in equal measure: Georgina Born, Erica Bornstein, Matei Candea, Blessings Chinsinga, James Ferguson, rnulf Gulbrandsen, Sian Lazar, John Lonsdale, Giacomo Macola, Liisa Malkki, Tomas Matza, David Maxwell, Wapulumuka Mulwafu, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Isak Niehaus, Francis Nyamnjoh, Derek Peterson, Anthony Simpson, Sharath Srinivasan, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Marilyn Strathern, Megan Vaughan, Richard Werb ner, and Wendy Willems. Dee Mortensen and the peer reviewers assigned by Indiana University Press had a profound impact on shaping the final version of this book.
The research for this book began during a project funded by the Academy of Finland. The final fieldwork and the period of writing were made possible by the support of the University of Cambridge and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Human Rights and African Airwaves
Introduction
Palibe cholakwika , nothing is wrong, Yohane Banda assured the BBC in an interview in 2006. The father of Madonna s African child feared that the pop star would send the child back to poverty in Mala i if she became angry with human rights activists complaints about the illegalities of the adoption case. The child would return to crushing hardship, a life of tedium and deprivation that could spell his early demise. Would the human rights activists feed the child once the clamor of the high-profile case had died down?
Banda s words in Chiche a, Mala i s most widely spoken language and a regional lingua franca, were barely audible amid the fury of English-speaking human rights activists in Mala i and elsewhere. 1 Their viewpoints were readily juxtaposed in the world media with Madonna s claims to compassion. Not only did the poorly formulated legislation and Mala i s failure to be a signatory to the convention on transnational adoptions expose the country to the whims of the rich and the famous. According to activists, Madonna s aims and methods were also morally wrong. Commenting on her alleged choice of the child from a parade of twelve pre-selected children, one activist likened the procedure to slavery, another to shopping. 2
It is possible, without denying that the controversy over Mala i s adoption laws was necessary and worthwhile, to discern in Banda s concern an alternative perspective on the moral dilemmas posed by severe poverty and inequality. Transnational adoption does not need to entail the uprooting it represents to some of its critics. 3 It can become a part of the manner in which some poor people seek relationship with the affluent world, suggesting that fostering might be a more accurate term here than adoption. In his interviews with the world media, Banda emphasized that he would not have allowed the adoption to take place if it had meant that the child was no longer his son. 4 When Madonna returned to Mala i in 2009 to court more controversy with her plan to adopt a second child, a meeting was arranged between Banda and his son. Now remarried with another young son, Banda commented that David still resembles me, but he looks very much like his half-brother Dingiswayo. I can t wait to see the two brothers reunite, he was also quoted as having said. 5
These were not the words of a hapless and ignorant victim of a Western celebrity s vanity. With the world watching, Banda was asserting his relationship to his first son and thereby to all the security and prosperity that the son s association with a Western millionaire seemed to involve. Yet it was far from certain that the world would take note of Banda s perspective. Around the same time, a spokesperson for the Save the Children Fund in the United Kingdom pronounced, The best place for a child is in his or her family in their home country. 6 The pronouncement matched the search for a proper order in the legal objections against Madonna s adoption sprees. Just as the law was expected to provide an unambiguous definition of various parties rights in transnational adoption, so too was the pronouncement unambiguous about subjects belonging to particular communities. Banda s claim to a relationship in transnational adoption, his evocation of an obligation despite a breathtaking discrepancy in distance and wealth, could only complicate the order activists and experts sought to assert.
While neither Madonna nor transnational adoption will feature in the pages that follow, the broader questions raised by this example are at the heart of this book. What insight might be gained into rights and obligations if claims expressed in African languages were taken seriously by activists, academics, and policy-makers? The question of language-for instance, the sharply uneven opportunity to hear Chiche a and English in the world mass media-is important in both literal and metaphorical senses. Close attention to the African-language mass media can yield insights into the form and contents of claims that elude not only foreign observers and policy-makers but also some of Africa s own intelligentsia and human rights activists. As such, the attention to language raises in a more metaphorical sense the question of discursive resources and the extent to which African-language genres stand any chance of influencing debates on contemporary African conditions beyond the particular context in which they are broadcast. 7
This book explores such questions through the ethnography of a popular radio program in Mala i. Nkhani Zam maboma (News from the Districts) was launched in 1998 by the Mala i Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) to gather stories from the public. Its matter-of-fact styl