Human Rights and African Airwaves. Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio (review)

With Human Rights and African Airwaves, Harri Englund offers us an excellent monograph of a program on Malawi’s public radio, Nkhani Zam’maboma, which has become extremely popular among urban and rural Malawian for its stories on witchcraft, adultery, and the abuse of power. Radio is probably the most important mass medium in Africa, but research on it is still lagging behind, in contrast to television and film studies. Here, we have an ethnography that fully grounds the radio program in its social, cultural, and media landscape. Based on years of intimate knowledge with Malawian religious and development-related worlds, Englund follows stories as they arrive to correspondents and move to the newsroom, analyzes the selection of the data, and documents the editorial work done on those that eventually are broadcast. Finally, we learn how these broadcast narratives are received (around dinner time) and gain public and private meanings. Englund indicates overlap with other genres (proverbs, the genre of news, radio drama, etc.) and points to the role of ambiguity within proverbs and also within the radio show. This ambiguity allows for multiple interpretations by the listeners themselves and it contrasts strikingly with the aesthetics of NGO-sponsored radio broadcasts, which are extremely didactic in style.

The ethnographic material is interspersed with reflective moments, through which we obtain a glimpse of the actual fieldwork he carried out and the interactions with his informants. Englund also seams in theoretical insights, such as his deconstruction of rupture in the Pentecostal imagination through an indication of the parallel with the metaphors of dying and being reborn as symbolized in local initiation rituals.

Englund is also careful not to fetishize the popularity of the show by providing critiques of it by fellow Malawians, in particular Pentecostals. This significant contextualization relates to an epistemological concern that guides the theoretical thread of this book, mainly the issue of human rights and equality. Englund points out that much anthropological work is biased by a liberal imagination where Western ideas about freedom and the individual reign. As such, African worlds are usually depicted in negative terms, as absent of freedom, suppressed, and static. Yet, there are other social contexts in which the same key ideas of liberalism (especially equality) are debated and negotiated; the radio broadcast Nkhani Zam’maboma being only one of them. Englund writes: “Anthropology must be attentive to its mandate to explore intellectual and political alternatives in the most unexpected domains, propelled not by exoticism but by a desire to engage a mainstream debate with observations it would otherwise not encounter” (58). Therefore, the key conclusion is “methodological rather than technocratic” (228). Englund thus challenges anthropologists to look for the various alternatives that people have to construct their own lifeworlds. One way to do this is to emphasize the agency of journalists, thus bypassing the stereotype within Africanist discourse about them being vessels for state propaganda. Another method in which to do this is shown in his analysis of claims to equality via radio broadcasts.

This book will certainly inspire anthropologists working on popular culture. And, because of its thorough theoretical discussions and claims, the monograph will help us not only to disentangle the complexity of Africa’s public culture, but it will push us to reflect on methodological and epistemological traditions within the discipline.