Forget the Poor

Radio Kinship and Exploited Labor in Zambia

Bibliographic Data

ID2224499
AuthorsH Englund (0000-0001-6063-4986, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume56
IssueS11
PagesS137-S145
Publication date2015-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/682059
OpenAlexW1235248993
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited29

Gogo Breeze, a popular radio personality in Zambia's Eastern Province, responds to his listeners' frequent evocations of poverty by refusing to consider them as members of the generic poor. Instead, he deploys idioms of kinship by which his status as the listeners' grandfather on air assigns him moral authority that is both intimate and infallible. In this article I examine radio kinship in the context of abundant labor and scarce opportunities to be gainfully employed in Chipata, the provincial capital. A labor dispute between Zambian workers and Chinese management brought to the fore grievances about wages and conditions. When the grievances fell on deaf ears with both management and the government, the workers turned to Gogo Breeze with a letter in which they asserted themselves as children. The radio grandfather responded by visiting the provincial labor office and by broadcasting a richly allusive story about exploitation. The article concludes by discussing hierarchy and conflict as intrinsic to the mutuality and dependence that the workers yearned for. Radio kinship as one modality of mutual dependence offered a frame for making claims that was compatible with what the workers demanded

Capital (architecture · Context (archaeology · Government (linguistics · Hierarchy · Kinship · Linguistics · Negotiation · Personality · Political science · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Psychology · Social Psychology

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