Radio in Africa

Published by Wits University Press, Radio in Africa is a collection of essays on the multiple roles of radio in the lives of listeners in Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone Africa. According to the publishers, radio has been called "Africa’s medium." Its wide accessibility is due to a number of factors, including the liberalisation policies of the "third wave" of democracy and radio’s ability to transcend barriers of cost, geography, language, and low literacy levels. Publishers add that this sets it apart from other media platforms in facilitating political debate, shaping identities, and assisting listeners as they negotiate the challenges of everyday life on the continent.

The book is divided into three parts: Radio, Popular Democracy, and New Publics; The Cultures of Radio: Languages of the Everyday; and Radio and Community: Voices of Change. The essays cover a wide variety of perspectives. Some discuss the history of radio and its part in the culture and politics of countries such as Angola and South Africa. Others, such as an essay on gender and religion in Mali, show how radio can both create tensions and encourage social innovation. According to the authors, a number of essays look to radio’s current role in creating listening communities that radically shift the nature of the public sphere. Essays on the genre of the talk show in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa point to radio’s role in creating a robust public sphere. Radio’s central role in the emergence of informed publics in fragile national spaces is covered in essays on the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. The book also highlights radio’s links to the new media, its role in resistance to oppressive regimes such as Zimbabwe, and points in several cases, for example in the essay on Uganda, to the importance of African languages in building modern communities that embrace both local and global knowledge.