Speech made by Ole Reitov at Copenhagen Wild Cards
June 30, 1996, Copenhagen

It was the famous South African Broadcaster, Evidence Bodibe, that in the year 2010 in his globally known programme - Another world - made the Norwegian refugees in Sudan aware of some forgotten and extremely interesting recordings of Same (laplanders) world music of the late nineties.
After the nuclear disaster in northern Europe in 2002, many Scandinavians had left Europe and were now found in pockets in Africa and their favourite programme was Bodibes "Another world".

What was to become the "Dream Society" had shown to become the "Nightmare Society" and although many of the dreamers of the nineties had believed that radio in the future would play a minor role they now realised that one of the inventions of the former century had become more important than ever with its ability to filter out the enormous amounts of information and its abvility attract brilliant minds.

In "Another World", Bodibe presented interesting and sometimes forgotten music of the world and he was known to find interesting music in the archives of radio stations all over the world.

You may say that he was repacking the music that was already there, but he did it in a very subtle way so much so that people talked about "bodibe music"
That was the brand of any good quality music from around the globe.

Another world had become the single most succesfull radio programme not sponsored by one of the two transglobal compagnies left over in the music business.

In fact one of the conglomerates - namely to warso - had tried to convence Bodibe that he should work for them in tjheir world series, but having long worked for South Africas Radio Metro, Bodibe felt that he wholeheartedly belonged to the ancient world og radio broadcasting.

Warso had long been established in South Africa. It was the amalgation of Warner and Sony. Some people felt that warso was a rather uniimaginative name, so warso was often ridiculed by names like worse so or jokes like warso - so what ?

But Warso did actually also get a lot of recognition for being the compagny that made South African music one of the major influences in music life of the new millenium.
And already in the late nineties the then two compagnies has along with the S.A.B.C. realized that working together made the music so much stronger.

Having passed its new music policy in the late nineties, the SABC had started involving itself in a major project of recording contemporary south african music, and the response from listeners had shown the record comapgnies that there was much more talent around than anyone could imagine.
The result was that a number of South African local stars had now become worldwide household names following the succes of Bayete, Lucky Dube, Splash and Chico.

The record companies had done what their best at - namely marketing big names.
The S.A.B.C. had not only tracked down a nlot of new talent but also launched them in their well known transcription service.

All over Africa radio stations were gald to recieve the transcription CD's with new music from South Africa, but even more important the S.A.B.C. had launched to "another world" programme in the beginning of the new millenium.
In the beginning the programme focussed on African music and for the first time in the history of music an African radio station now offerede a high quality programme presenting music, recording and interviews from all over Africa.
It may sound strange to you in this audicence, but actually in the nineties the only programme offered to African radio stations presenting music from all over Africa was a programme called Afropop . And that programme was produced in the US and presented by an american presenter with a strong french accent.
Although a very well produced programme it was after all presented by people in the US, so for many africans the offer from SABC had really become an instant hit in all engliosh speaking countries of Africa and even in the francophone zone when SABC started dubbing it in french.
The programme succes was soon followed by a programme produced in cooperation of Radio Mali and Dakar 2000 - a radio that had grown out of the studio 2000 production enviroment.

One shouldn't really wonder why Radio Mali had gone into the transcription market. Already in the year 1996 the director of Radio Mali has been amazed by the fact that sone of the recordings that Radio mali hbad done twenty years earlier suddenly had become the hit of the summer at European world music programmes.
The old recording of the famous guitarist Ali Farka Toure had been revitalized and nicely packaged by a small british record comapgny - world circuit - and lauched in Europe.
The network of european radio presenters called - the world music workshop - had voted the CD as the CD of the year - so no wonder that the director of Radio mali had started thinking seeing the name of his station as number one on the world music charts europe.
To those of you who were not aroung in 1996 I will just show you a rare copy of the chart from that period, and I can even show you my own personal copy of the wonderful recording.
One can only wonder why more radio directors did not immediately rush to their archives to trace unknown or rare recordings, but in those days braodcasting in Africa was still very dominated by
government puppets with no real interest in music programmes.
In fact at many stations the old tapes with fantastic recordings were actually erased in lack funds, and only a couple of years later Unesco the otherwise impotent UN body had realized that a world heritage was wiped out .
Fortunately Unesco had started taking an interest in its own policy papers.
In 1995 the world commission on culture and development had called out for at significant change in cultural priorities.
The most important was that the world commission had recommended that higher priority was given to non physical culture - meaning that more money should go into developing and preserving non fysical culture such as music, language and story telling rather than buildings, museums and what not.

It took a couple of years before donor agencies in the north adopted some of the principles but in my own country Denmark the local donor agency Danida started discussing the new principles of cultural development assistance only a couple of months after the Images of Africa festival and a rather interesting conference called Copenhagen wild card - a conference I had the pleasure of visiting.
Now back in 1996 I tried to imagine what the future of african music industry and media would look like in 2010 . And obviously some of my imaginations never took off and some happened before I could even think of it.
Let me just mention some of the visions I hade in 1996.:

One was concerning my fellow broadcasters in Africa
Another one was concerning the music industry as such.

The first vision was that my fellow broadcasters would be able to establish an efficient network amongst themselves.
I should have known better because even though we had a relatively well functioning network in Europe udring the eighties and nineties in many fields of music, we still seemed basically to be able to cooperate when greater events were lying ahead of us.
We never succeded in establishing an exchange of interviews or genuine programme ideas. So I should have known better.
But I was naive enough to believe that my African friends would manage.
What we saw was rather a few outstanding individuals that were capapble and interested enough to cover the whole of Africa in their programmes.

It was also just a few radio stations in Africa that actually formulated at music policy that went further than the typical European protectionist policies of playing between 30 to 40 pct. national music - meaning music recorded by artists in the particulat country - and then leaving the rest to the multinational market of anglo american music.

The few exceptions were fortunately formulating a policy that apart from the socalled local protection even reserved a special quota for the music from the continent.
What was apalling for my colleagues in Africa was that they had to go through the same difficulties as we did in europe.
The hassles being that we could not depend on the transglobal compagnies. In fact when we wanted a record from say Sony in Brazil we couldn't just call the local Sony comapagny to get a copy. We had to find our own ways of gettinjg cd's that the local representatives of the transglobal compagnies never understood had a potential.
So unfortunately our Africasn colleagues had the samme troublesome experiences. That couldn't call the Warso compagny in South Africa to get a copy of the music that warso released in Ghana.

My other vision that the record industry would grab the golden opportunity to develop and even exploit the enormous amount of talent in the African continent in the nineties - equally failed.

In spite of the fact that there were a huge potential in West Africa, especially in Senegal and Mali, the multinationals hesitated. They were expecting legislation to change without being around .
The fortunate thing about the lack of interest was that local entrepenuers found new ways od dealing with the piracy situation and acutally invested money in the local infrastructure.

The development of community radio in the more democratic countries equally showed the potential for local music, and even though they felt that playing the music and therefore promoting the music meant that they did not have to pay for the use of music, gradually some of the stations understood that the money for recordings had to come from somewhere.

Again this new awareness were partly created by a combination of local consciousness and inputs from outside.
As I mentioned earlier Unesco had finally taken a task to look into the non physical culture. And although most donors in the north were extremely sceptical to the world commision report, it sparked off a lot of discussions and eventually helped forming new policies amongst the donor agencies.

Although the amount of money spent were rather modest the impact on ploticians and culture workers in Africa was rather big.
They helped formulating music policies in a number of countries and the funds helped to a certain degree the establishment of facilities for music and broadcasting.

So looking back I am quite happy to say that here is a scetor where donor aid has actually helped African countries in moving forward.

I was mentioning the recordings from Radio Malio, originally done in the seventies and released with great artistic succes in the mid-nineties.
Fortunately a number of African radio stations started looking into their archives and got support from donors to release the most interesting material plus make safety copies of the rest.

That was an extremely important step as African social and cultural researchers are now finding a treasure of dimensions that tell the story of modern Africa.
Just look at some of the interesting cases being published these years.
One researcher from Uganda has shown how you could acutally tell the whole post colonial history in Africa through songs, and I find her latest educational kit absolutely fabolous.
Although using relatively old fashioned CD-rom technology, the kit is an eye opner to many teachers and students with its massive information, music, pictures and case stories.
I think it is a brilliant way of getting young Africans to understand an important part of their cultural heritage.

I would also like to point out that some radiostations in Africa during the last couple of years have opned up their studios for musicians from all over the continent to experiment and meet.

In europe in the nineties we sometimes felt a bit embarassed that all the fantastic meeting should take place in the real world studios in England or at festivals, and I am very happy to see that these meetings are now taking place in Africa.

So being here almost 20 years after the first Wild Card Conference it may be a bit prestigious to try to guess about the future of say 2030

How will the African music scene and media interact the next 14 years.
Well honestly being more than 60 years old I wouldn't be the right person to ask, but I am certainly very glad that in this year of 2015 you were kind enough to invite me to your Forum and talk about the past.

Thank you.

Ole Reitov (c) 1996 

The African Future - the media is a speech held by Ole Reitov at the Copenhagen Wild Cards conference.
Ole Reitov is the editor of the World Music programme Verdensmusik on the national radio, P3.