Heeding the Voiceless: A Guide to Use Oral Testimonies for Radio Documentaries

This 76-page manual, published by Panos Institute West Africa (PIWA), explains the philosophy of the oral testimony (OT) and suggests a step-by-step approach for community radio volunteers, and radio journalists in general, who may want to use this format. According to the publishers, OT focuses on "hidden" voices, contexts, and content. The hidden voices refer to the masses in the country that do not have the opportunity to make their voices heard at government level, or through public platforms. The methodology of OT radio reporting is based on a specific interview method using the oral testimonies of the local population in their original languages.

From the Foreword: "The Oral Testimony is a new format in community radio, adapted from a social research tool set up by Panos London. It is an inverted interview because it is guided by the interviewee and not the interviewer. It stems from the principle that to know what is really going on in a community, you have to listen patiently to the people at grassroots level, instead of asking only the leaders of that community as is usually the case."

The manual is designed for radio producers and programme directors. It assumes a basic know-how of talk radio production, as well as sound editing capacities, and focuses on the expansion of traditional methods of interviewing for radio. Each chapter covers a different area of using oral testimonies for radio documentaries.

• Chapter 1: Why this guide?
• Chapter 2: What is oral testimony?
• Chapter 3: Why Oral Testimony for radio production?
• Chapter 4: Some practical guidelines for listening and airing Oral Testimonies for radio.
• Chapter 5: Listening, Logging, and Editing (Producing).