COLUMN ONE : The Power of Africa’s Airwaves : On a big, rural continent racked by poverty, radio is the medium for the masses. It is a lifeline cherished by villagers, exploited by governments and hailed by relief officials as a potent weapon in an uphill fight.

To speak of radio in Africa is to discuss life and death. And a good deal of everything in between. Shortwave, FM, transistor, battery, solar, clock, windup--radio is the central nervous system of this very nervous, decentralized continent.

Much of the rest of the world may be drowning in the flood of data from the Information Age. But in Africa, for hundreds of millions of people, events over the next hill and beyond are known by just two means: word of mouth as carried by travelers--and word of mouth as broadcast on radio.

Yes, Cable News Network reaches some big hotels in African capitals. Newspapers flourish in cities. But on a continent that is crushingly poor, undereducated, rural and remote, only radio can truly be called the medium for the masses.

Radio also is power, an extension of Africa’s oral tradition in which each important idea is amplified dozens of times over by village chitchat and campfire gatherings.

That’s why soldiers with machine guns are dug in behind sandbags to protect the perimeter of government radio stations all over Africa.

That’s why information ministers are among the most important figures in dozens of governments.

That’s why the United States, Britain, France, the Vatican and all kinds of other outsiders spend millions of dollars broadcasting to Africa.

And that’s why a mud-hut peasant family buys batteries before it buys shoes.

At last count in Rwanda, there were perhaps half a dozen newspapers, no television station, 14,000 telephones and 500,000 radio receivers listening to three local and any number of international broadcasts.

Evariste Twahirwa, a young businessman, recalls with awful clarity the Radio Rwanda broadcast in Kigali on the morning of April 7, 1994: “I heard gunshots, so I turned on the radio. It was playing classical music. A bad sign. I listened, and there was an interruption. An announcer said the plane carrying the president had crashed and he was killed. The radio said everyone should stay home.”

Twahirwa understood what the announcer really meant: “My immediate thought was, ‘They’re going to start killing everyone.’ ”

And they did.

The horrors of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and civil war are now widely known. Perhaps more than 500,000 unarmed ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers were slaughtered in the weeks after the mysterious downing of President Juvenal Habyarimana’s jet.

What is not so easily understood is how a population of subsistence farmers could be incited so quickly into a frenzy of neighborhood butchery.

“It is difficult to overstate the importance of the mass media in whipping up popular sentiment. Most rural people in Rwanda could only obtain their news from radio broadcasts,” Africa Rights, an independent, non-government human rights group, said in a long study of the genocide.

Reporters Without Borders, the French-based media watchdog organization, concluded that Radio Mille Collines, a onetime radical station here in the Rwandan capital, “has been the principal vehicle for incitements to the crime of genocide.” The station was an arm of the Hutu extremist movement, and transcripts of its broadcasts contain fear-mongering and invective propaganda: “Take your spears, clubs, guns, swords, stones, everything, sharpen them, hack them, those enemies, those cockroaches. . . . Who will fill up the half-empty graves?”

Investigators for a U.N.-backed international war crimes tribunal are known to be considering genocide charges against at least one of the station’s founders.

Although surely exemplifying the most malevolent misuse of radio, Rwanda is far from alone in stirring trouble over the airwaves. The International Center Against Censorship documented that in South Africa, “neo-Nazi” Radio Pretoria was used in March, 1994, to “organize paramilitary opposition to democratic change.” And government radio in Zaire was blamed for stirring ethnic violence in 1992-93, resulting in the displacement of 500,000 people.

In most nations of Africa, control of radio is the sole province of the government. Other countries, such as Uganda, permit independent stations. But such outlets usually are controlled by those with connections to the government.

As a result, those in political power tend to perpetuate themselves and their sometimes fanciful views of their countries even as they claim to be supporters of pluralism, analysts note.

Multi-party politics may be fine for discussion in diplomatic salons or in newspapers read by elites. But those who are the easiest to manipulate--the poor and undereducated--are broadcast a steady diet of ruling-party propaganda.

Listen to just the Kenya Broadcasting Corp. and it is easy to conclude that there is no political opposition, although three rival parties hold seats in Parliament; listeners might also assume that the populace is dreamily content, despite a downward spiral of poverty, violence and official corruption.

Contrary voices simply do not make the news.

Pope John Paul II recently traveled through Nairobi, the Kenyan capital--one of the biggest news events of the year in the country. But government radio began its evening broadcast with the standard seven-word opening, “His Excellency, President Daniel Arap Moi, today . . . .” The report went on to chronicle the fact that the president had attended the Pope’s public Mass.

All of which brings into play the other phenomenon of African radio: shortwave broadcasts of news from abroad. The British Broadcasting Corp., Voice of America, French National Radio, Vatican Radio and programs from Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and elsewhere bombard the continent in a cacophony of languages, European and African.

The consequence is one of the great wars of Africa: the battle for enlightenment.

Shortwave receivers are considerably more expensive than standard FM radios and consume batteries faster. But only the most primitive, poor community lacks at least one shortwave. They can be seen in refugee camps where families are otherwise reduced to wearing rags and eating gruel. They can be found in remote villages where not even the wheel has made an appearance.

Two anecdotes illustrate the force of these independent sources of information:

* Earlier this year in Kenya, youthful thugs, carrying out the government’s wishes, publicly beat up Richard Leakey, the famous paleontologist and opposition political leader, to try to quiet him and restrict his travels. It was not by happenstance that they simultaneously turned their clubs and whips on the BBC-affiliated reporter on the scene. The BBC is one of the few outlets for opposition politicians to get their message to Kenya’s citizens. Louise Tunbridge recalled one attacker screaming, “BBC slut!” as he thrashed her with a bullwhip, leaving her permanently scarred.

In the coastal city of Mombasa, repairman and radio listener Joseph Okunya explained the difference in how the event was reported that evening: “I first learned of Leakey’s whipping on the BBC, while KBC [the government radio] reported that everything was normal.”

* The other story is recounted by Voice of America’s East Africa correspondent, Alex Belida, who was surprised to find himself a celebrity among Ethiopians by virtue of his news reports: “A man came to my office and introduced himself. He told me his name was Alex Belida. Odd, I thought, because that’s my name. Well, actually, the man said, it was only his nickname. He was a faithful listener and always was talking about what he heard on the news, so his friends started calling him Alex Belida. Radio meant that much to him.”

Meantime, across the continent in Liberia, a long, chaotic civil war destroyed the fabric of society and its communications capability. Warlord Charles Taylor found he could reach the citizenry by calling via satellite telephone to the BBC’s Africa Service and offering himself for an interview.

Perhaps with justification, Africans and Westerners working in Africa find it ironic that developed nations such as the United States are debating cuts in international broadcasting of the news at the very time they are pushing the nations here to embrace pluralism and democracy.

Naturally, not all of Africa’s radio is edgy, serious, bloody or political. The rage in East Africa is a soap opera with an educational subtext, focusing on the problems faced by women on the world’s poorest continent. Now broadcast to a test audience in one region, the show attracts an estimated 1 million listeners twice a week. The story follows life in rural Africa. A woman with a drunken philanderer of a husband lives in dread of AIDS. Grandma drives a teen-age girl from the family with the threat of female circumcision, or mutilation. And so on. The British government has pledged funds to produce a similar soap for nationwide broadcast.

Still, for most Africans, radio remains more essential as a source of news than as entertainment. In Timbuktu, Mali, on the remote edge of the Sahara Desert, there are only two telephone lines going out and two radio stations broadcasting in.

“Things come to a stop for the news. That’s the only way people can know what’s going on in the world,” said local politician Moulaye Haidara. In Mali, the United Nations estimates, newspapers have a circulation of about 10,000 while there are 415,000 radio receivers.

Back in Rwanda, the power of radio to do evil has energized those trying to transform it into doing good in the year since civil war ended, minority Tutsis took control of the country and 2 million Hutus fled to refugee camps in neighboring nations.

Increasingly, the United Nations and some relief agencies argue that radio is a high-priority humanitarian tool. So far, the effort to exploit that idea has been marred by thick layers of bureaucracy and lackluster management. But the idea remains sound. How else can one counter the fear-mongering of ethnic extremists? How better to check the authoritarian impulses of governments? Why not nourish refugees with knowledge as well as food?

So the U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda operates a news radio station in Kigali, and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees operates another in refugee camps, with financing from the Swiss government.

“Because of the oral tradition, everything that is put out on radio is sucked up like a sponge,” said Julian Bedford, a former Reuters news service correspondent who reports and prepares news for Radio UNAMIR.

African culture also makes it important that listeners be exposed to competing ideas and perspectives: for instance, the government’s view of events contrasted with an outsider’s. “Because there is no history of objective reporting, people tend to give trust to what they hear,” said Bedford.

Recently, more than 100 rural Rwandans, including children, were gunned down by government troops in an all-night outburst of rage and revenge after the ambush of an army officer in the unstable western edge of the country. The government’s Radio Rwanda reported the death of the army officer with expressed sympathy. It added only that “a number” of other people were killed in “cross fire.”

By contrast, the United Nations was broadcasting news of the massacre within hours, and it soon forced the government to admit that the soldiers had overreacted.

No problem so bedevils the region as the massed Hutu refugees on Rwanda’s border. These are people fearful of going home, not knowing if they will be killed or imprisoned. Meanwhile, they are manipulated in the camps by extremists who want to rebuild an army and resume civil war, and they are bullied by soldiers of their host countries.

Some officials of the U.N. refugee agency believe that information is as vital as medicine, food and clean water. Its station broadcasts into three sprawling clusters of refugee camps in eastern Zaire and reaches more than 1.2 million people. Some of the information relates to health, such as the scheduling of immunizations. The broadcasts also are used to help reunite families. And part of the broadcasting copies the formula of independent news reports, carrying feature stories from inside Rwanda about the lives of refugees who have gone home.

“Information is an essential tool of humanitarian aid in an emergency,” said Chris Bowers, a former BBC correspondent who supervises the U.N. refugee agency radio. “The U.N. sends in doctors, nurses, water engineers. What is also needed is information. FM radio is a flexible, cheap solution.”

So far, the United Nations has failed in its hopes of enticing the refugees to return en masse. But that has not dampened the spirits of the U.N. radio’s backers.

Bowers frets that there just aren’t enough radios to reach the sprawling encampments. He tells of stopping his U.N. truck randomly among the refugees, opening the doors and playing a cassette of the news, gathering huge crowds every time.

Nothing excites Bowers as much as a technological breakthrough that recently received broad news coverage in Africa. No, not something like the introduction of Microsoft’s Windows 95--but word that a South African company was beginning production of a simple, windup FM radio. The London Times said in an editorial: “President [Nelson] Mandela [of South Africa] was voicing the congratulations of a continent when he shook the inventor’s hand.”

“Just think,” said Bowers, “humanitarian agencies can buy millions of them.”