Baccalauréat · Série A · Anglais — 2022

TEXT — The radio that teaches

At five o'clock in the morning, when the village of Sabou is still dark, a small transmitter starts to hum on the roof of a mud-brick building. Radio Wend Panga is on the air.

The station broadcasts in three languages: Mooré, Dioula and French. It has four employees and about thirty volunteers. Its programmes are simple: the price of cereals, the weather, health advice, school announcements, disputes between farmers and herders, and, on Friday evenings, music.

« A newspaper is useless here, » explains Madame Kaboré, who founded the station in 2006. « Half of our listeners cannot read, and the nearest bookshop is ninety kilometres away. But almost every family owns a radio, and a radio costs less than a bag of rice. »

The most popular programme is broadcast on Wednesday afternoons. It is a lesson: forty minutes of grammar, arithmetic or hygiene, prepared by retired teachers. Women who never went to school listen while they work, and some of them have since learned to sign their names.

The station has no advertising and very little money. Twice it has stopped broadcasting because it could not pay for fuel. « We are not a business, » says Madame Kaboré. « We are a school with a microphone. »