Making Waves: BUSH RADIO
Stories of Participatory Communication
for Social Change
TITLE: Bush Radio
COUNTRY: South Africa
MAIN FOCUS: Health, crime, education
PLACE: Salt River, Cape Town
BENEFICIARIES: General population in Cape Town
PARTNERS: University of the Western Cape
FUNDING: Nederlandse Institute voor SuidelijkeAfrika (NIZA), Shell Oil
MEDIA: Radio
When Mr Shabalala, an 85-year-old senior, went missing, his family called the station. The call came in at 5:48 p.m., in the middle of our drive-time programme. Bush Radio's policy on missing persons states that priority is given to this very important issue. The broadcast alert continued every three minutes and was included in the station's main news. Mr. Shabalala was found aimlessly wandering, disoriented and confused, ten blocks from his home. The call came in at 6:20 p.m. It had taken 32 minutes to find Mr. Shabalala using the radio. We're getting better all the time.
Tracing Missing Persons, is vital to the community: Cape Town is considered the rape capital of the world. The girl child is particularly targeted. Everyone at
Bush Radio is committed to bettering this situation. The station has an on-air policy that any programme can be pre-empted should a child or any person in the community go missing. The radio will also attempt to get the family's voice on-the-air to reinforce the appeal.In Cape Town everybody knows about
Bush Radio's story. We went up against the apartheid government and started just as a pirate station. People didn't even know that you could! But we went on-the-air illegally and blew everybody's mind. It would have been fine had we not advertised it for months ahead of time. So they busted us and kicked our ass real bad and took our equipment. We fought like hell and got it back. Because of our audacity, today we have 80 community stations in the country. Hopefully it will grow. I know that we only reach an estimated 150,000 listeners. Our output is only 250 watts, so we're not doing bad. We actually are very proud of what we're doing. We may not be popular, but we will always remain necessary. We want to be good and successful, but only so successful as it is good for the people. We can't become too popular, because we would be a threat to certain political and commercial entrepreneurs. Up till now, nobody controls Bush Radio but the community. That's why they call it the mother of community radio in Africa.
Emphasises Zane Ibrahim, the founder and director of BUSH RADIO.
Bush Radio has carefully tailored its programming through the years to serve the community and favour concrete social and policy changes:
- Bush Radio Hello: this is the station's newsletter. Issues that concern the organisation are discussed, and listeners are invited to voice their opinions.
- Community Law: this programme is run by 4th and 5th year law students; each week a different issue is dealt with, factual information, which is very seldom explained to the general population, is provided for the community.
- Backchat: representatives of various community organisations explain the role their organisation plays and how the community can have access.
- Everyday People: a magazine format is used for this programme that lasts for 3 hours each day. The emphasis is mainly on township developments. Local music is aired extensively interspersed with public service announcements.
- TRC report: since the start of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the station has been hosting a member of the commission on a fortnightly basis. The producer is Bushman Beat Senzile Khoisan, the chief investigator of the TRC.
- Africa on Time: this programme, a co-production sponsored by the University of the Western Cape, deals with the situation as it unfolds on the African continent.
- Taxi Talk: Shell Oil funds this programme aimed to stop violence and crime, and promote safety in transportation to the city centres. Role players are invited to the station to come and discuss their grievances.
- Prison Radio:Bush Radio supports the criminology department of the University of Cape Town in developing a training programme whereby young people convicted for various offences are trained to operate a radio station within the prison facility.
Everyone producing or presenting a programme on Bush Radio does so on a volunteer basis.
The majority of Bush Radios listeners reside in the "black" and mixed race township areas that are largely economically depressed. The age group ranges between 18 and 50,000 but representatives of children's groups and the aged have recently made strong demands to provide adequate programming.
Bush Radio shares the frequency with another radio station. The training of volunteers takes place during the times when Bush Radio is not on-the-air. This time is also used to produce public service announcements and conduct community-based projects: voter education clips were produced to prevent violence during the 1999elections; community outreach broadcasts are organised in the townships; and the Tracing Missing Persons Project has helped to find missing children.
The Community Radio Literacy Project invites various stakeholders in the literary field to encourage listeners to read; authors and poets are invited to discuss their work.
Workshops on the various genres of music are organised by the Music Education Project to help people better understand the music to which they listen. A programme on health carries at least one message on FAS (Foetal Alcohol Syndrome). The station carries no alcohol advertising because of these kinds of hardships the communities face daily.
During the apartheid regime, a group of people started producing cassette tapes with information on community issues that were totally neglected or ignored by the State media. The group called itself CASET (Cassette Education Trust). Members of CASET would record relevant information onto tapes, make duplicates and distribute them in the townships close to Cape Town. They informed inhabitants of the townships about the importance of learning to read and write, of hygiene, and the need to move away from considering crime as part of their everyday life.
The group's primary goal was to make the airwaves available to everyone in South Africa. To achieve this it was decided to have a small broadcast outlet located close to the community. The University of the Western Cape offered to host the station at the request of the founding members, who were students at the time. The University was formerly nicknamed Bush College because it was located miles away from the nearest settlement and surrounded by bush when it was first built in 1960.
After Nelson Mandela's release in 1991, South Africa lived through a period of intense political and social activity. Bush Radio "The Mother of Community Radio in Africa", started formally in 1992 as a voluntary association, operated by individuals and community-based organisations that were invited to become members. Funds were sought from various international donors to help train the members.
This was the first time in the history of South Africa that "black" people had the opportunity to learn radio skills. Many requests for a license to broadcast were turned down; by the same time an Afrikaans group in the north was broadcasting without a license. It was decided that Bush Radio would begin to broadcast, even with no license, in April 1993. The action against Bush Radio was swift; the police broke down the doors and confiscated the equipment. After physically manhandling several people who were present, two members were charged with breaking the law.
Bush Radio was finally granted a license to broadcast on August 1, 1995. It was decided to hold off going on-the-air until August 9th, South Africa's Women's Day, as a symbol of appreciation for the role the women played during the struggle for liberation.
The station has accomplished important changes in the social environment:
- Pressuring the former government to open up the airwaves and the establishment of the National Community Radio Forum.
- Brokering many peace deals between warring factions in the townships. Brokering a peace between the gangs that control the taxi services in the region.
- Training of 500 people; journalists now working for newspapers in the country were trained at Bush Radio
- Prison Radio convinced the authorities that the therapeutic effects the programmes had on the inmates were beneficial to their rehabilitation.
What makes Bush Radio unique is the fact that it is entirely member-driven. An eye is kept on the attempts by political groups who try to take over the station.
On a visit to Bush Radio in 1999, Noam Chomsky said: "Bush Radio is arguably the most dynamic radio station that I have worked with".
Since its inception, Bush Radio has done most of the training in the community radio sector. Every year in-service trainees in station management, music coordination, news and programming are trained at the station.
Bush Radio was expected by its membership to service a wide range of people speaking several different languages but finally decided to broadcast in only three of the country's eleven official languages, Xhosa, Afrikaans and English.
- Open forum: during the monthly open forums, the community is invited to give their input into the running of Bush Radio All members of the community are eligible for membership, for training, and are entitled to vote on any issue that comes before the organisation.
- The members: anyone living in the area serviced by Bush Radio is entitled to membership. The majority of new members prefer to simply provide moral support while a handful show interest in participating as volunteers. The number of volunteers had to be kept down to a manageable 70 people. The community is regularly informed through the on-air newsletter programme, Bush Radio Hello. The finance committee, headed by a board member, regularly monitors the finances of Bush Radio
Bush Radio has been required to share a frequency with another station since its opening in 1995. The other station shut down at the end of 1999 leaving Bush Radio with dead airtime on either side of the broadcast. It took four months to convince the authorities and finally be permitted to occupy the empty airtime.
The influx of religious stations coupled with the government's decision in 1999 to fund its own low power FM stations (39 to-date), could spell trouble for the already struggling community radio stations. The religious stations are receiving extensive support from right-wing Christian groups in the United States.
Bush Radio has, since 1994, received five 1-year temporary licenses. This makes it difficult to plan ahead and negotiate contracts with potential sponsors or advertisers.
Some very powerful commercial radio stations have copied features of the station's format. This has taken away from the success that Bush Radio has enjoyed on its way to becoming self-sustainable. The fact that Bush Radio has only 250 watts of output against the 2,000 watts allotted to the commercial stations makes competition very hard.
More than 31 percent of its advertising revenue is handed to the marketing agencies. This has also slowed the growth to some extent.
This chapter was prepared with information from Mission Statement (draft, February 2000), and additional e-mail exchanges with Director Zane Ibrahim.
Bush Radio: Cape Town South Africa by Francois Laureys, in Radio Nederlands Web site.
Bush Radio History and Backgrounds by Adrian Louw, in Radio Nederlands Web site
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