A Modest Plant, Easily Crushed: Radio Drama in Blin, Eritrea

Abstract

THE RESEARCH FOR THIS ARTICLE was carried out in September 2008 with the support of radio broadcasters involved in the then two locallanguage radio service providers in Eritrea, Radio Bana (Light), run under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, and Dimtsi Hafash (The Voice of the Masses),1 the service which had been set up as a guerrilla station during the liberation war of 1962-91 but which has now become the voice of government.2 At the time of the research, Dimtsi Hafash was broadcasting in all nine of Eritrea's constituent languages and in English. Radio Bana was working in five Eritrean languages and English. In February 2009, government agents moved in on Radio Bana, temporarily arrested all fifty staff associated with the station, and subsequently imprisoned a number of journalists who are still in jail, being held without trial.3 The work I discuss is therefore not continuing.In a small country, the Blin people are a very small group. Estimates vary, but it is thought that around 60,000 to 100,000 people self-identify as Blin and use Blin as their mother tongue, and that they make up just over 2% of the national population. The language is an ancient one of a group known as Central Cushitic or Agaw, and associated with some of the very oldest groupings of peoples in northern Ethiopia. The Blin are the only speakers of an Agaw language in Eritrea. They are a people divided by religion, some Muslim and some Christian - both Orthodox and Catholic. They are also divided geographically, with villages scattered either side of the capital of Asmara, though they centre on the second city of Keren, in Anseba region. A key promise of the bitter liberation struggle against Ethiopian imperialism, which had included the imposition of the Ethiopian language of Amharic as the language of government and education, was that all Eritrean cultures would be honoured after independence. Eritreans had hated the imposition of Amharic in much the same way as black people resented state attempts to impose Afrikaans as the language of education and bureaucracy under South African apartheid. So, after 1991, the Eritrean state set about establishing education and media outlets in all nine of the nation's languages, with the addition of English as the international language and the medium of instruction in senior education.In the case of Blin, this meant first establishing an orthography. For most of its speakers, Blin was a purely oral language, but it had been rendered, often by Christian priests, into a variety of written forms. Now the state Blin panel had to decide whether to use Latin, Arabic or script derived from Ge'ez4 to produce a complete range of schoolbooks. Many Blin people wanted the Ge'ez form because this liturgical language of the Eritrean Orthodox Church is seen as inherently spiritual. Moreover, if Blin people could write, it was likely to be in the dominant language of the Eritrean highlands, Tigrinya, which stems from Ge'ez in much the same way as the Romance languages of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian all derive from Latin. Arabic was favoured by Muslim Blin for parallel reasons. However, the final decision was made in favour of the Latin form, largely because it was thought that this would make an eventual transition to English - the language of senior high schools and higher education - easier for Blin young people.Education in Blin in the thirty primary schools serving the community became available in 2002, fulfilling the government promise that all Eritrean citizens would be able to attend primary education in their mother tongue. Approximately fifty percent of Blin children are thought to be attending school at present, and so the first cohort of Blin people literate in their own language is now moving through the senior secondary stage of schooling.A second plank of the promise to maintain cultural diversity was the establishment of radio in all Eritrean languages. Radio Bana was mandated to run programmes dealing with health, social education, and music. …