Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio

Abstract

Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. By Harri Englund. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 201 1 . Pp. 294. $70/£52 cloth, $24.95/£16.99 paper, $20.95/£14.99 E-Book."Let their money take them to hospital," said an interviewee over twenty -five years ago when discussing how he felt about Africans who gained money through the opportunities afforded by colonial capitalism but who did not share that bounty with others. Their stinginess "disappointed" people, but it also exposed them to witchcraft accusations, or as implied above, could endanger their physical lives. The remark hinted at a moral economy that made possible a clearer understanding of the nature of nascent capitalism in colonial Malawi in exposing attitudes towards the acquisition of wealth and its fair distribution.When reading Harri Englund 's recent book, I was time and again reminded of this experience. The book is an ethnography of the Chichewa language radio program, Nkhani Zam'maboma (News from the Districts), which has been broadcast by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) since 1998. The program's inception followed the democratization of Malawian political life after the fall of the totalitarian Malawi Congress Party regime led by the late Dr. Hastings Banda in 1996, and coincided with renewed interest in raising consciousness of and about human rights. The ten-minute programs are broadcast at the end of the day. They consist of five to ten stories that draw on real tales submitted to MBC from a public tutored in reading between the lines of aural and written text after thirty years of critical listening under autocracy. Coming from the poor themselves and focusing on socioeconomic injustices and the abuse of power, Englund argues, the program is a forum through which Malawians engage in moral debate outside of the narrow confines of human rights talk which has all too often conflated equality and sameness and defined freedom as individual freedom. By contrast, in the world of Nkhani Zam'maboma, hierarchy and mutual obligations are the stuff of social, economic, and political order. Far from being incompatible with equality, it is equality that is at the basis of these stories and the claims implicitly made in them. It is this equality that gives people license to criticize their social/political seniors. So, instead of seeing equality as an elusive goal or ideal (as in Uberai thought and human rights talk), Englund argues that equality is at the basis of claim making and conversations about justice and fairness.This book builds on ideas introduced in his 2006 monograph, Prisoners of Freedom, which provided a critique of human rights activism that has failed to address the continued existence of socioeconomic inequalities in Malawian life. …