Gogo Breeze: Zambia’s radio elder and the voices of free speech by Harri Englund (review)

[Corrigendum]

Situated at the crossroads of the anthropology of media and political anthropology, Gogo Breeze is a highly original ethnography of the social space of a private radio station in Zambia. Harri Englund embarks on a locally contextualized study of ‘free speech’ (parrhêsia), aiming to ‘investigate what people do with the value of free speech, what effects its pursuit has, how it relates to their other values, and what it all can tell us about issues such as speech, mass media, voice, morality, obligation, freedom, and so on’ (p. 7).

This book conjoins two anthropological interests emerging from his previous work: the search for justice, and the mass mediation of everyday life. While Human Rights and African Airwaves 2011 provides an incisive account of the aesthetics of claim making in a Pentecostal-inflected radio show in Malawi, Gogo Breeze analyses the mediating performances on and off air of an elderly radio host publicly known as Gogo Breeze (gogo in Chinwanya meaning ‘grandparent’) who appears on the commercial rural radio station FM Breeze in Zambia. The radio station was established in 2003 after a former state media professional retired and settled in Northeastern Province. Gogo Breeze, a former teacher, was hired immediately because of his storytelling, and ever since has become the hallmark of the station. In all his interactions – with other radio staff, with listeners, and with state agents and businessmen, Gogo Breeze plays with the idiom of grandfatherhood, which gives him the prerogative to explain, to have the last word, to reject or exclude viewpoints put forward by his public, and to seek a particular degree of intimacy that investigative reporters would not be able to do (p. 198).

The book contains a critique on the American-European understanding of radio culture, public sphere and democracy. First of all, Englund argues that the idea of a neoliberal, anonymous radio public does not make sense in this rural context, nor does the idea of ‘a difference-blind democracy’. Rather, mass-mediated interactions between Gogo Breeze and his audience are based on the grandfatherly authority to correct the latter’s behaviour. Gogo Breeze does not work via the encouragement of free (‘frank’, ‘courageous’) speech (as in ‘speaking one’s truth’, ‘daring to tell the truth’), but via what Englund calls ‘multivocal morality’. The main argument is that Gogo Breeze’s popularity derives from his mobilization of (fictive) kinship relationships and linguistic play when addressing cases of injustice that his audience (‘grandchildren’) communicates to him via letters, SMS messages, personal visits and so on and for which they seek his assistance.

A second original intervention is his critique of conventional analyses of media worlds as public spheres where voices of autonomous individuals make claims for better futures. For Englund, there are two fundamental mistakes in this conventional conception of media, public sphere and democracy: the idea that voice properly belongs to one speaker; and that voicing various opinions equals plurality. Englund suggests that political debates on the radio often lead to monological orders; by contrast, the radio grandfather, Gogo Breeze, performs multivocality far better when he tries to settle disputes. By often summarizing stories in which various opinions and experiences are mentioned, while also at the end communicating his own comments, Gogo Breeze – so Englund argues – embodies multivocality in one and the same person. These themes are further complicated by reflections on the relationship between money and media; modalities of truth telling; feminisms in rural Zambia; and ideologies of ‘voice’.

This empirically rich and theoretically engaging ethnography is presented over seven chapters and contains two annexes (a summary and a transcription of two debates, of which one is in Chinwanya). Undoubtedly, this book will be a major contribution to both African studies and the anthropology of media, and I expect it will generate much debate on what voice, justice and...