WITNESS HISTORY is another product of the decision by Radio 4 to go head-to-head with commercial podcasts by producing programmes clearly made as much for streaming as for broadcasting. One of these short nine-minute features is released every weekday. They are anchored in first-person narration of relatively recent historical events by direct participants. The cancellation of the essay feature A Point of View, much to my chagrin, seems to have been a direct result of Witness History’s development; but the new programme deserves consideration on its own merits.
Friday’s episode revisited the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, where the white-supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine worshippers (News, 26 June 2015), through Polly Sheppard’s experience. An elderly member of the congregation, she was specifically told by Roof during the massacre that he was allowing her to live so that she could tell others what had happened.
The programme’s most dramatic moment was a recording of her call to the emergency services while Roof was in the middle of his spree. It made for powerful radio. Such recordings feature prominently in both podcasts and TV in the United States, although I worry that they end up glamorising violent thugs.
It was more than halfway through the programme before there was any narration, and this was extremely brief. While I understand the current trend for trying to avoid editors’ rewriting events to suit an agenda, even programmes narrated in the first person are the product of decisions about lines of investigation, and which material is included or excluded. This can end in merely obscuring rather than reducing editorial bias.
None the less, one could only be humbled by Ms Sheppard’s own belief about why she survived Roof’s assault: to tell the story of how good God is.
Heart and Soul: Pulpit to palace (BBC World Service, Friday) focused on the story of someone who had recently left the United States. Ghandi Olaoye, latterly pastor of a Pentecostal church in Washington, DC, returned to his native Nigeria after being elected King of Ogbomosho. The kingdom is located in Oyo State, in the religiously mixed south-west of the country.
Mr Olaoye has faced criticism from Christians, because the king must, by convention, receive tribute from local Muslims in elaborate Islamic ceremonies, and also from adherents of the region’s traditional religion, who argue that the king must be a true believer in that faith’s tenets, not merely an observer of its external forms.
Interestingly, the presenter, Peter Macjob, said that there was a return to traditional religion among Nigerian young adults. I had not heard this suggestion before, and, while there is a similar phenomenon on a small scale in South Africa, Mr Macjob said that he was himself such a neo-traditionalist; so this may be an instance of wishful thinking. It is, however, a possibility worth keeping an eye out for.