Gogo Breeze

Zambia's Radio Elder and the Voices of Free Speech

Harri Englund

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226499093
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

When Breeze FM, a radio station in the provincial Zambian town of Chipata, hired an elderly retired schoolteacher in 2003, no one anticipated the skyrocketing success that would follow. A self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in the radio elder who, by allowing people to be heard and supporting their claims, reminds authorities of their obligations toward the disaffected.Harri Englund provides a masterfully detailed study of this popular radio personality that addresses broad questions of free speech in Zambia and beyond. By drawing on ethnographic insights into political communication, Englund presents multivocal morality as an alternative to dominant Euro-American perspectives, displacing the simplistic notion of voice as individual personal property—an idea common in both policy and activist rhetoric. Instead, Englund focuses on the creativity and polyphony of Zambian radio while raising important questions about hierarchy, elderhood, and ethics in the public sphere.A lively, engaging portrait of an extraordinary personality, Gogo Breeze will interest Africanists, scholars of radio and mass media, and anyone interested in the history and future of free speech.

PART ONE

Being Gogo Breeze

ONE

Mass-Mediated Elderhood

Gogo Breeze’s burden was to make judgments and advice appear as though they stemmed from his own wisdom. Much as his authoritative voice was based on assembling other people’s voices, the raison d’être of his radio personality was to offer an infallible source of guidance. Imvi or gray hair was an idiom, among others to be discussed in this chapter, that Gogo Breeze used to explain his privileged condition. It was an idiom he evoked not only with the Chinyanja-speaking public but also with foreign visitors, such as when he answered a visiting academic’s question about the sources of his advice with a chuckle: “Well, the gray hair here is doing something!”1 On air, he would occasionally use it to underscore the gray hair as an index of his moral authority but also, importantly, to address the discrimination elderly people could face. For example, while explaining the proverb “the scared crow died of old age” (khwangwala wa mantha anafa ndi ukalamba), he referred to his gray hair as proof of having lived like the scared crow.2 “What about you?” he asked his listeners. “Do you want to see gray hair on your head?”3 His advice was to “be afraid of things that can destroy your life.”4 On another program, however, the question was different. “When a person has grown gray hair like your grandfather here, do you assume that he does sorcery?”5 Gogo Breeze posed the question during his concluding comments on a short story, and he answered it with a defiant riposte. “Who knows? It is up to you what you think, but understand this: elders are required among us, because when we are in various kinds of trouble, elders are the ones who know how to solve them.”6

The response alluded to a counterargument about elderhood as a condition that could conceal occult knowledge within the depths of its language and experience—a kind of knowledge as exclusive as the wisdom that elders so freely displayed otherwise. Gogo Breeze did not often engage the counterargument in his broadcasts, but its effects were apparent in comments such as the question about sorcery quoted above and in his reluctance to admit any knowledge of witchcraft when it featured in stories and listeners’ letters. Mass-mediated elderhood was a tightrope suspended between suspicion and intimacy. Too much insolence could give rise to fear and cost him listeners. Too much amity risked making him sound like any other presenter on the radio, barely distinguishable for his moral authority as the grandfather. “I deserve respect” was what he said to the letter writer who had assumed undue parity with him in the way he had addressed the grandfather (see below). From time to time, the public had to be reminded that grandfatherly amity did not entail egalitarianism. Here also stood a contrast to the populism that his willingness to assist the disadvantaged might be seen to represent. Gogo Breeze did not hesitate to scold or reprimand the very populace whose experiences of injustice he otherwise sought to investigate and ameliorate.

When examining how an elder figure could command a vast following in a popular culture saturated with youthful styles and concerns, it is important to bear in mind the mass-mediated nature of Gogo Breeze’s elderhood. It was a disposition he inhabited with a particular public in mind—the countless listeners he addressed as his grandchildren. While aware of the plight of some elders in Zambia as burdens to their families or as susceptible to accusations of witchcraft, Gogo Breeze asserted an engaged elderhood. Some of its attributes did have a nostalgic flavor, not least when he interspersed contemporary pop music during his late-night shifts with the midcentury classics of Congolese and Zambian music. Yet he mitigated the “stranger intimacy” (Warner 2002) of mass mediation by becoming personally involved in the lives of his public. One challenge of addressing the public as his grandchildren was, therefore, to adopt the lifestyle of a village elder living by modest material means rather than that of an urban professional. He summoned his mass-mediated grandchildren through idioms that supported this identification with the village and, equally importantly, lived the part by refusing to use motor vehicles to move from one place to another unless he was visiting rural areas. Instead, his off-air personality of an elderly man either walking or cycling to his destinations became a much-remarked aspect of his local popularity that soon gave rise to accompanying idioms on air.7 His past as a schoolteacher was an important aspect of his elderhood, but Gogo Breeze was not an “urban elder” of the kind described for Kinshasa (capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo)—a figure embodying nostalgia for an urban past (Pype 2017). Despite Zambia’s historically high rate of industrialization, retirement and retrenchment there had often resulted in attempts to find land to cultivate in rural areas (Ferguson 1999). Certainly in the predominantly rural Eastern Province, whether an elder was rural or urban was not an important distinction.

To build a radio personality on generational differences was not merely to expose oneself to the stereotypical ideas of elderhood, whether for better or for worse. It also brought differences in life courses to the fore (see Whyte and Whyte 2004). Across much of Africa, opportunities for mobility and employment enjoyed by persons who now belong to the grandparents’ generation have shrunk as new generations have come of age. Gogo Breeze’s life course did not involve as much travel as did those of his generation who took part in labor migration to the mines, but he had pursued spatial mobility and professional advancement on a scale that was beyond the reach of many of his contemporaries.8 Indeed, several aspects of his life contradicted the image of a village elder. His wife was a highly qualified nurse, and by virtue of her employment, the couple had been able to purchase a spacious government-owned house when Chiluba’s regime began its program of privatization. The house was on a large plot of land in central Chipata, away from the town’s high-density slum areas. None of this was specifically hidden from the public—including his poultry farming on the plot, which he would sometimes mention on air—and so widely known was his residence that people would pay him impromptu visits at home. As is discussed in chapter 5, he also opened his home for listeners who needed privacy to meet their prospective spouses. Before considering Gogo Breeze’s on-air idioms and behavior in detail, it is therefore worth examining his life story as he presented it to me over several interviews and encounters. Language that he deployed on his programs and his emphasis on delivering justice through moral authority had evolved over a long period and were not easily shed when the radio personality was ostensibly taking a break.

The Path to Elderhood

Born in 1946, the man who called himself Gogo Breeze told me, in private, that he considered himself a “young grandfather” (gogo wachinyamata). Gray hair and de facto grandfatherhood were not sufficient to make him look and sound like the true octogenarian he longed to become. Yet by the time he made the remark to me, he had already been Gogo Breeze for a decade. Elderhood had been from the start a way of distinguishing himself from other aspiring broadcasters when Breeze FM was established, and the specific properties of mass-mediated elderhood took shape as a process that he could not fully control. Key to his evolving sense of being Gogo Breeze was a narrative about his life before he had become a provincial celebrity. It is a life story that brings the historical forces of colonialism, Christianity, and postcolonial politics to bear on a particular life, its disparate moments conjoined by an abiding commitment to justice.

Introduced on several programs as “your grandfather on air, Grayson Peter Nyozani Mwale,”9 Gogo Breeze carried in his proper names some of the different influences that had shaped his life course. Grayson, he told me, was the name he had given himself as an adolescent, while Nyozani was his father’s first name and Mwale the clan name that derived from his father. Peter had been given to him as a mark of respect for Bwana Peter, a colonial officer (mtsamunda) for whom his father had worked.10 Mwale was among the younger of nine siblings in a family that lived some twenty miles from the administrative center of Fort Jameson, now Chipata. His father’s occupation as driver for Bwana Peter suggests a measure of material security for the family. His father’s death in 1958, though, raised the question of which school Mwale should attend. His mother wanted him to go to a school run by the Catholic mission in accordance with her and the late father’s denomination, but his maternal uncle intervened to place him in a school that was closer to their home village, a decision that Mwale himself endorsed.11 Thus started his lifelong affiliation with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, first at this local school run by the church and then at a boarding school near the border with Malawi. He had made an impression on the Adventist missionaries, who had decided to transfer him to the boarding school. As his choice of a new name later in life would also attest, Mwale had no qualms about following his own path in life. He responded to my comment on his “courage” (kulimba mtima) in rejecting his father’s denomination by saying that “the religion that the father had followed was not the same as what is said in the Bible.”12 “I chose that church on my own,”13 he added, alluding to a degree of separation between him and the rest of his family. Seventh-day Adventists commonly see Roman Catholics as their major theological adversaries.

In practice, of course, Mwale’s own path was paved with contacts and opportunities that others presented. In his early years, the church provided key contacts, not only through the teacher who agreed to waive Mwale’s fees at the boarding school for his domestic work at the teacher’s house, but also when the missionaries encouraged him to embark on training to become a pastor. This phase in life took him to Mzimba in Northern Malawi, where young men from the three territories that had recently comprised the federation—Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—studied together. While Mwale had gotten used to the idea that people from these territories belonged to “one country” (dziko limodzi), no such solidarity could be taken for granted in a region now partitioned by national boundaries.14 Envious of the missionaries’ decision to elevate Mwale to the status of a leader (mtsogoleri) among the African students, a Zimbabwean student had gone to the police to report that Mwale was not in possession of a passport. Mwale was thus deported from Malawi in 1967. He saw his ambition to become a pastor vanish but found work in the church as its auditor. He was initially stationed in Southern Province but soon became a national auditor, gaining knowledge of Zambia and its languages that would serve him well later in life. The role did not appeal to him, however, because of pastors who “wasted church money” (anaononga ndalama za mpingo). Attempts to solve disputes (milandu) led to acrimony. After receiving a death threat on the Copperbelt, he stepped down to pursue a career as a primary school teacher.

Schoolteacher (mphunzitsi) became his defining profession and would occasionally be mentioned in his broadcasts. By contrast, as subsequent chapters will discuss, although he remained an active Seventh-day Adventist, references to his past in the service of the church, and to religion overall, were more rare on air.15 After taking a teacher training course in Livingstone in 1970, Mwale spent his teaching career in Eastern Province, working in a range of rural schools until the 1990s, when he joined a school in Chipata. His experiences in different schools also gave rise to stories about his witnessing or confronting misconduct and injustice. For example, in one school near the Malawian border, his success in keeping chickens caused envy that led to his transfer to another school, where he inadvertently became embroiled in examination malpractice. What he narrated as his superior’s wrongdoing resulted in the “punishment” (chilango) of being transferred to a particularly remote school, where he stayed from 1981 to 1992. He attributed his eventual move to Chipata to the newly elected president Fredrick Chiluba’s intervention. Mwale had served as the interpreter for him and his entourage when they visited the area. Impressed with his skills and demeanor, Chiluba had queried why he was kept so far from Chipata, where he could be of more use to the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), the new ruling party. He then taught in Chipata until his retirement in 2001, devoting most of his teaching to the relatively advanced Chinyanja in grades seven to nine.

The encounter with Chiluba was not Mwale’s first taste of politics. In 1988, he had contested the preliminaries in the then-one-party state and had ended up in the second position. The transition to multipartyism made him join the MMD, but the affiliation proved to be short lived when, by his own account, the expectations of bribes (ziphuphu) within the party effectively marginalized members of modest means like himself. He contested the parliamentary elections once in the 1990s as an independent candidate, proudly describing how his minimal campaign had involved him distributing flyers with his bicycle. After the votes had been counted, he emerged as the third in these elections. He also contested the parliamentary elections once as an independent candidate after he had become Gogo Breeze, but the seat in parliament remained elusive. These efforts to enter politics were well known among his listeners and colleagues, some of whom would point out that his failure to advance within the MMD had less to do with his refusal to pay bribes than with party leaders’ genuine preference for other kinds of candidates. The founder-director of Breeze FM was particularly scathing about his political ambitions. His criticism was not about improper conduct while on duty, because Mwale had taken a leave of absence when he campaigned during his employment at the radio station. Rather, the founder-director took exception to the very idea that Mwale would, on the basis of the renown he had achieved as Gogo Breeze, move to the distant Lusaka. This would have alienated him from the very base that had made him popular in the first place. While the founder-director had an obvious interest in keeping Gogo Breeze at his station, he also offered an interpretation of Gogo Breeze’s success that emphasized patterns of behavior distinct from those of the political class.

By the time I got to know him in 2012, Gogo Breeze no longer appeared to harbor political ambitions and conveyed few preferences in the hotly contested landscape that Chipata and certain other areas in Eastern Province had become.16 Rather than putting too much weight on his attempts to enter politics, it is more plausible to see them as aspects of the same life that had involved various efforts to play...