Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the meaning and conditions of free speech through the figure of a grandfather whose popular programmes on Breeze FM, Zambia, deploy allusive language and hierarchical demeanour to address listeners' problems.

Paper long abstract:

So obvious is the value of free speech that it discourages careful investigation of its genres and conditions in practice. This paper embarks on such an investigation by exploring the meaning and practice of free speech under the conditions of widespread poverty and socio-economic inequality. Breeze FM in Zambia's Eastern Province is a privately owned radio station that combines in its broadcasting ethos principles of public service, commercial gain and community empowerment. A central interest for the paper is how the value of free speech comes to assume different forms and consequences within these contradictory principles. An emphasis on connecting to the public through their SMS messages, typically lending itself to the statistical analysis of public opinion, contrasts, for example, with the allusive language and hierarchical demeanour deployed by the station's most popular presenter, Gogo Breeze. A grandfather figure involved in several programme formats, he interacts with his audience both on and off the air by responding to grievances, telling stories, explaining esoteric phrases and interviewing the common people. The paper follows his voice as it traverses these different programmes and mediates listeners' experiences of poverty and injustice. His hierarchical, if affectionate, status as the grandfather reserves to himself the ultimate access to judgment and good opinion. In this context, free speech resides less in the efforts to give the poor 'a voice' as their individual, unmediated property than in creating the conditions for moral authority within which grievances can be recognised and addressed.