This paper examines the role of local radio (radio de proximité) in the politics of reconciliation in post-conflict Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2014-2015 (just before the last presidential elections), I argue that local radio crystallises the challenges and paradoxes post-conflict reconstruction.
To understand this, I begin by situating local radio within the communicative framework of reconciliation after the 2011 post-electoral war and decade of simmering conflict that characterised Ivoirian politics since 2000. The mediation of reconciliation has been characterised by a general "silencing of the past" (Trouillot 1995) in the mainstream media, exemplified by the failure to publicise hearings and findings from the Truth, Dialogue and Reconciliation Commission (CDVR). In this context, local radio was tapped to be the primary carrier of reconciliation discourse. In fact, it was conceptualised by the CDVR as being so embedded in the social fabric as to be able to orchestrate reconciliation as a performance at the level of everyday life.
Drawing on months of participant observation with four stations in Abidjan, as well as listeners' clubs, I point to a fundamental paradox of local radio's contribution to peace and reconciliation in the Ivoirian metropolis. On the one hand, radio's everyday sociability fostered lively publics out of encounters across ethnic, age, gender and class lines. On the other hand, this everyday sociability was largely forced off the airwaves by strict regulations on "political talk," combined with a widespread fear of state listening and retribution. As a result, this sociability was largely ignored by formal peace-building programmes, even those carried by the very same stations. Using the example of a series of USAID-sponsored "public shows" in several of Abidjan's more peripheral neighbourhoods in 2015, I show that formal peace and reconciliation programmes in effect silenced public talk, strengthening the sentiment that certain "political" topics – anything tied to structural issues and state responsibilities – could not be discussed openly on the airwaves.
Thus, the issue in Abidjan is that rich dynamics of encounter and street talk do not get amplified and fail to be accounted for in the current drive toward reconciliation. From this paradox, I draw two conceptual insights. First, placing local radio (and media more broadly) in a wider "communicative ecology" (Slater 2014) of city talk allows us to go beyond simple narratives of censorship, or at least to supplement them with the complexity of social dynamics and the margins of "civic agency" (Willems & Obadare 2014). Second, and relatedly, media regulations can usefully be thought of as part of an apparatus for the management of city talk, which carefully selects the narratives and processes that get to be formally recognised, maintaining a facade of democracy while tuning out the cacophonous aspirations of civil society.