‘Radio Death’
radio in a land almost without TV and with an
illiteracy rate of over 50 per cent of the popula-
tion. A broadcast in April 1994 claimed that ‘by
the 5th May the elimination of the Tutsis should
be fi nished’. In the fi rst week of the killing spree,
upwards of 200,000 people were murdered as
Hutu militia combed the countryside.
In 1995 reporters sans frontières
(Reporters Without Borders), a Montpellier-
based group of journalists set up in 1987 to
defend press freedom worldwide, initiated a
civil law suit in Paris against the founders and
organizers of Radio Death alleging their respon-
sibility for genocide, violation of humanitarian
law and crimes against humanity.
In response to the torrents of hatred emerging
from RTLM, Radio Gatashya was formed and
took to the air for the fi rst time in August 1994
in Goma. Its own nickname was ‘Humanitarian
Radio’, and it provided an information service of
help and support for the thousands of refugees.
In June 2000 a Belgian-born announcer on
‘Radio Death’, Georges Ruggiu, was sentenced
by an international criminal tribunal to twelve
years’ imprisonment on two counts of inciting
the Hutu massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda.
Radio drama The first ever radio play was
Richard Hughes’s Danger (1923), about a couple
trapped in a mine, but the play that appears to
have had the most substantial impact as a work
in a new medium was Reginald Berkeley’s Th e
White Chateau, broadcast by the BBC to an
audience of over 12 million on Armistice Day,
1925 and telling an extremely harrowing story of
the trench-war.
Since that time hundreds of writers have been
given a start in their professional lives by radio,
one of whose many virtues is cheapness: today,
a 30-minute radio play requires one day’s studio
time; an hour-long play, two days. The radio
playwright need not concern him/herself with
the massive costs of scene-changes; there is little
need to keep costs down by writing plays for two
people and an armchair. Th e whole world of time
and space is at the writer’s command.
Most importantly, there is the awaiting imagi-
nation of the listener. Th e best radio plays take
listeners on a journey into their imagination,
where the play is given its own unique setting,
the characters a unique appearance – all with the
help of voices, sound eff ects and silence; an art
form, as the poet W.H. Auden once said, that is
‘not spoiled by any collision with visual reality’.
Radio drama possesses the characteristic of
intimacy: it has made the interior monologue,
the soliloquy, a dramatic device perhaps moreTh e greatest fear of the broadcasters was, and
continues to be, government interference. Reith’s
caution was as monumental as the extent of his
control. His desire to render the BBC beyond
political reproach led to the Corporation often
censoring itself so as to be one step ahead of
being censored. Th e risks to the BBC were not
imagined. During the General Strike of 1926
Winston Churchill wanted the government to
commandeer the Corporation, a move Reith
managed to resist – but at a price: during the
strike no representative of organized labour
was permitted to broadcast, and the leader of
the Opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, was also
banned.
With the introduction and swift public take-
up of television, radio lost dominance and for a
time looked as if it would be displaced as a major
player on the stage of mass communication. In
the 1990s and into the New Millennium, both
the BBC and commercial radio responded to the
challenge, diversifi ed, took audience tastes into
account as never before, introduced new chan-
nels, new programme modes, adopting digital
broadcasting with alacrity. Radio acquired a
dynamic new profi le, not only for music but also
for talk programmes, sport, the arts, drama and
comedy. See wireless telegraphy. See also
topic guide under broadcasting.
▶Asa Briggs, Th e History of Broadcasting in the United
Kingdom (Oxford University Press, four volumes,
1961, 1965 and volumes 3 and 4, 1979); P.M. Lewis and
J. Booth, Th e Invisible Medium: Public Commercial
and Community Radio (Macmillan, 1989); Paddy
Scannell and David Cardiff , A Social History of British
Broadcasting: Vol. 1 1922–1939: Serving the Nation
(Blackwell, 1991); Andrew Crissell, Understanding
Radio (Routledge, 1994) and An Introductory History
of British Broadcasting (Routledge, 1997); Stephen
Barnard, Studying Radio (Arnold, 2000); Caroline
Mitchell, ed., Women and Radio (Routledge, 2000);
Michele Hilmes, ed., Radio Reader: Essays in the
Cultural History of Radio (Routledge, 2001); Asa
Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media:
From Gutenberg to the Internet (Polity, 2002); Guy
Starkey and Andrew Crisell, Radio Journalism (Sage,
2008); Hugh Chignell, Key Concepts in Radio Studies
(Sage, 2009).
‘Radio Death’ Or ‘Hate Radio’; nickname given
to Rwanda’s Radio Television Libre des Milles
Collines (Thousand Hills Television Radio)
which, following the assassination of President
Juvenal Habyarimana, conducted an intensive
campaign of hatred against the minority tribe,
the Tutsis (9 per cent of the population as against
90 per cent Hutu). RTLM proved the power of