[Imc-africa] Radio Campagne

[Yacine Bah]

Merci bien
Je suis content de votre réaction. Nous avons lancé un journal , les Ondes de Guinée dont le but de pousser le gouvernement à libéraliser les ondes. Nous sommes partants pour cette campagne pour Radio dont vous parlez. Nous aimerions partager votre expérience. 
A bientôt, nous comptons vous envoyer des extraits de ce journal.
Cordialement

Jan Suchanek <janmaat at piratinnen.net> wrote:
Hello together

(for a vage french translation see below)

this is Janmaat from Germany, one of the participants of the
Indymedia Conference in Dakar.

One of the main outcomes of the conference was that the most appropriate
medium for Africa in any regard is radio. Now that our friends
from Conacry mentioned this topic again, I want to come back to
this.

We need a continent-wide campagne to build up independent radio
stations. This can be done by teams sent out in marginalised
areas with technical equipement for small radio stations. The
technology shall be based on audio tape and simple transmitters
which are both cheap, easily availiable and facil to maintain.

At the end of the campagne, we are organising a Community Radio
Festival on Île de Gorée, Dakar.

Please consider this campagne and what part in it you could play
and post on this list how you see the situation of radio in
your countries and how to improve it.

If we can bundle our efforts, we can have a real media shake up
of the african media scene and produce a lot of content from the voiceless
for the voiceless and the rest of the world.

Looking forward for your replys.

Janmaat

PS. Below a copy of an interesting article on radio which was posted
on the Dakar Conference Website before.

---- french translation ----

Salut tout le monde

c'est Janmaat de l'Allemagne qui vous parle, un des participantes
de la Conférence Indymeda Dakar.

Un des résultats de la conférence été que le media le plus approprié
pour l'Afrique c'est la radio en chaque regard. Comment notre ami
de Conacry a mentionné cette sujet encore, je returne a la issue.

On a besoin de une campagne a la échelle continentale pour établir
des stations radio independantes. Ca peut-être réalisé par des
équipes envoyées dans des areas marginalisées avec equipement technique
pour des stations radio pétits. La technologie doit-étre basé sur
cassette audio et émitters simples qui sont pas chers, facil à
conseguir et facil a maintenir.

A la fin des cette campagne, nous allons organiser un festival
de la radio communautaire sur Île de Gorée, Dakar.

S'il vous plait, considerez cette campagne et laquelle part vous
pouvez jouer dedans et postez sur la liste comment vous régardez
la situation de la radio dans votre pais et comment la meillieurer.

Si nous arrivons conjoindre nos effors, nous pouvons avoir un vrai
"shakeup" (seisme?) de la scène media africaine et produir beaucoup
de contenu des sans voix pour ceux sans voix et pour le reste du
monde.

Je me rejouer lire votre réponses.

Janmaat

PS. En bas, une copie de un article interessant sur la radio qui
a été publié sur la site webb de la conference à Dakar (en anglais).


----------------------------------

Indymedia Means in Africa - Radio
von Janmaat - 06.04.2004 16:04

first postet on http://imc-in-africa.so36.net/


The Dakar Conference was aiming to bring 
the Indymedia philosophy to Africa. African 
and European delegates had to learn from each 
other. Some of the results are summarised here. 


IN the developed countries, use of Internet has 
wide spread. Today, there isn't hardly anyone 
who does not use it. What started once as an 
information exchange tool of government use, trickeled 
down to companies and finally into everyone's 
daily life. Every day commercial actions 
such as cash withdraw or payment via credit cards 
run over IP. With PCs and other 
IT devices becoming consumer products, the World 
Wide Web became one of the Internet's moste common 
applications for almost everyone. Once the Web 
startet being deploited for entertainment, people 
discovered its vast possibilities for multiple 
way communication, e.g. starting to use it for 
participation. Platforms like Indymedia that 
allow to post almost any kind of information 
and thereby empowering the civil society to 
gather information across countries and are 
important supplements to more traditionall, one-way 
means of mass communication as are radio or tv. 
Moreover, events like the police violence in Geneva 
were documentated on Indymedia fast and with 
impressions right from the spot. Social movements 
use the Web for mobilising the civil society. 
Today, Indymedia covers over 50 countries world 
wide. 

Sartet in the 90's of the last millenium as a 
Internet platform, Indymedia is more than that. 
It is, indeed, the idea to let the people be 
the media itself. It uses the Web as the main 
meeting point, where independent radio, tv, 
and text journalism have their platform. It has 
proven its quality showing events of great 
interest for the people from an angle that would 
never make its way through the corporate media 
machine. 

So while the importance of Indymedia as a tool of 
people's empowerment becomes more and more 
obvious in developed countries, the more curious 
of its users started to wonder why there was so 
little coverage of developing countries. For 
instance, while on out of 8 people populating 
this globe lives in the Africa, the percentage 
of Internet content covering this beautiful continent 
amounts to no more than 0,3 percent. It is to 
say, the Internet, praised for fostering transparency 
world wide, is almost blind to developing 
countries. Why such? 

Initiatives as the Indymedia Africa Conference 
that was held in Dakar in March 2004, showed that 
there is great demand for Internet use in Africa. 
But contrarily to developed countries, Internet 
access in Africa is very rare. Estimations say 
that there are no more than 6 million computers 
around - in a continent hosting about 800 million 
people. Most of these computers are not connected 
to any kind of net - including the electricity 
network which is also very weak. There are only 
about 2,6 million Internet users in Africa - 
out of which 1.8 million live in South Africa. 
What role do you see for Indymedia to play in 
the rural areas of the trouble stroken continent? 
People do hardly have the dime to buy anything 
besides bread or rice for the whole family, who 
cannot even afford access to drinkable water, 
not to speak of electricity, telephone lines or 
any kind of technical equipment. In Serrekunda, 
Gambia's second city, you can easily spend more 
than 5 minutes waiting for a single web page to 
be displayed. Doing average emailing costs about 
the amount of a meal if you are fast and 
know how to do. And that is only because Serrekunda 
is very close to the countrie's capital. 

>From this perspective, it was to be found astonishing 
that delegates of the Dakar conference were 
very interested in Indymedia technology at all. 

One major outcome of the conference was this: 
you cannnot believe Africa to be functioning 
as Europe does. Even in the OECD countries, 
the civil society only started using the Web 
once it had arrived in everyones household. 
In Africa, Indymedia has to start from medias 
which are already there. To give a voice 
to the voiceless can only mean to transport the 
medias of the poor that they already posses 
to a broader public. The Internet can thus 
serve to teach dwellers of the developed world 
about the poor in the south. It can also 
serve to connect crucial information hubs 
inside of the continent, which is to say 
improving the information flows between 
different states and regions of Africa. It 
simply doesn't catch the rural poor. 

But if you understand Indymedia in the broader 
sense, once you free youself from seeing it 
as an Internet affair only, the Indymedia 
concenpt starts to be futil for Africa. It 
is only a question of technical means. 

As pointed out, Africa has a very poor infrastructure. 
Electricity, telephone lines, even roads are 
extremely scarce. In the information sector, 
wireless applications are on the run: in recent 
years, growth of mobile telephone services have even 
bypassed growth in fixed line connections. And 
there are more wireless technologies which find 
their way through the ether. Radio has a very 
good history in Africa, the number of new stations 
are increasing. But still, you don't have to 
go far from the main African cities to find only 
silence and white noise coming out of your radio. 

This is the point where Indymedia can make a 
fortune in third world countries. Small transmitters 
are definetly cheap and easy to build and maintain. 
Promoting this technology, bringing transmitters 
to the villages, can bring enormous benefits 
to the people. It would allow rural communities 
to bypass the often state-controlled media 
institutions, broadcast in their own languages 
and transmitt their own music. The equipment 
requirements are low, and the effects could be 
outrageous. A transmitter, a microphone, 
two tape recorders for cutting the program 
and some weeks of instruction are only neccessary. 

And once you get them making this kind of program, 
you can be free getting the tape down to the 
next broadband connection, digitalising it and post 
it on the Indymedia page for the rest of the 
world. 

Jan Suchanek 

All numbers from: Les Technologies de l'Information 
et de la Communication dans le développement. DISD. 
In: Ben Hamouda, Hakim / Kassé, Moustapha: 
Le NEPAD et les enjeux du développement en Afrique. 
Paris, 2002.

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