“Telephone Trottoire”
by
Nostalgie Ya Mboka, Harwood Wright Yokokoji (ex-Mongrel)
AIMS
The aim of the “Telephone Trottoire” project was to engage the London based Congolese community in issues that affect our day-to-day lives. “Telephone Trottoire” is based on a new form of “contagious” telephone application developed by Mongrel and named after the Congolese practice of “pavement radio” or the passing around of news and gossip between individuals on street corners.
As a new community in the UK, we - the Congolese - are seldom asked for our thoughts and opinions. Yet a great many of these same issues are core to the well being of our community. Decisions are all too often taken by social policy planners, working at a distance who rarely consult the community on the issues that affect us. However, through “Telephone Trottoire” our people have spoken out about how they really feel and what they would really like to see happening.
In order to fully understand the social relevance and background of “Telephone Trottoire” it is worth taking a slight digression into recent Congolese history.
HISTORY
A key factor in this discussion is the history of the country from which our community comes. As late as the end of the 1950s, the colonialist rulers still refused to educate any Congolese people above basic secondary school level, and prior to 1960 there were no universities within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a single country equivalent to most of Europe in size. In fact, it was not until 1958 that our first Congolese students were sent for University education in Belgium. Such treatment was commonplace, and even in areas such as health and education, Congolese were not able to progress to become doctors, only progressing as far as nursing orderlies for example. Pre independence, Congolese were allowed to become teaching assistants, but to become a teacher was impossible.
Shortly after independence in 1960, the DRC entered a period of civil war, followed by a European/USA backed dictatorship, lasting from 1965 to 1997. During the late 1970s our country’s economy also went into steep decline and bribery and corruption became a way of life. Much of the country’s existing social infrastructure collapsed and it has been that way ever since. Basic services such as health and educational provision have been non-existent for decades over large parts of this vast country.
State censorship also played a key role in the development of this society, and anyone opposing the government or expressing an honest opinion on social, political or economic policies was jailed or simply disappeared. Since the Mobutuist dictatorship was overthrown in 1997, our country has remained plagued by civil unrest and one might say that in many ways one dictatorship was simply replaced by another, with little positive change in lifestyle for the majority of people.
UK HISTORY
Because of the way globalisation has taken place over the past 20 years, refugee communities are now no longer bound to countries purely by former colonial ties. The UK has long been held in high regard by the Congolese people, as a place of justice, democracy and free speech. It was this that first brought the Congolese refugees to the UK.
Within the UK, the Congolese community has developed since the late 1980s (there are now 35,000 plus in Greater London alone). However because of the background history of the country, plus the fact that it is primarily a French speaking African community, the Congolese community here has largely remained isolated from interaction with mainstream policy makers and social service providers.
Our community has as much need as any new community settling into a new culture, for example regarding issues such as the breakdown of traditional values within the family, access to health and social resource provision, etc. These are, of course, very common worries for all migrant people. However, the attention and resources many mainstream organisations have been focused towards those communities who have established a more visible and vocal presence.
Also, as a community with little interaction with mainstream UK society, we Congolese have become an ‘easy target’ whenever there is a need to ‘scapegoat’ refugees and asylum seekers by sections of the media. For example, a media story concerning supposed ‘religious’ ritual child abuse within the UK’s African communities singled out the Congolese, with headlines which included words such as “primitives” and “savages”. Given the history of the DRC, where it was not possible for individuals to raise their voice without fear, it is thus hardly surprising that our community is very wary of coming forward to take up our right of access to free speech as well as many other rights and services taken for granted by other new yet already mobilized UK based communities.
WHY TELEPHONE TROTTOIRE?
What made “Telephone Trottoire” special is that the values and aesthetics of the project come from traditional Congolese life, where, as described above, there has long been a culture of oppression and denial of free speech. Within such an environment, many years ago, our people invented a practice known as “radio trottoire” (or “pavement radio”). This was a means of discussing and disseminating information without censorship by passing and sharing it directly between people meeting casually on street pavements or other public spaces.
In some ways, we could use a simple term to describe this – gossip! Gossip is everywhere, whether a chat with your neighbour about the goings on in your street, or the fact that a famous footballer has hurt their leg and may not be able to play in the cup final. However, within an environment such as that described above, the importance of gossip takes on a whole new meaning - the right to free speech.
For “Telephone Trottoire”, we recorded twenty short monologues or clips focusing on life both in the UK and back home in the DRC. These clips were intended to pose questions, impart information, highlight factual events, and to provoke the listener into making a comment or just to think about their lives and the future of the Congolese community in the UK. All stories and dialogue were recorded and played back in Lingala/French, which meant that listeners were much more inclined to accept the calls and participate in the project.
The stories chosen by us were of the broadest range possible, some questioning morality, others involving domestic violence, the breakdown of the family structure, young people and the part religion and traditional beliefs play in day-to-day life. All were designed to raise issues affecting the community within the UK or to highlight current events in the DRC with which the listener might be unaware. The stories were also intended to be of enough common interest that listeners would want to leave a comment and pass the call along to a friend.
HOW TROTTOIRE WORKS
The core of the “Telephone Trottoire” system is an automated telephony server that can phone people up at random from a database of phone numbers and play them any pre-recorded audio content. After being played a story, topical item or a joke, the listener is invited to get involved by recording a comment on the clip they had just heard. They can also pass the story on to a friend by entering their telephone number on the keypad (which is then added to the database). This new user will then be dialled and can also listen, leave a comment and pass it on – building up a string of users like a daisy chain effect. From that day on, each new user will automatically start receiving a fresh story on their phone.
Mobile telephones are almost a way of life within our community. This is because the national telephone system in the Democratic Republic of Congo has not worked reliably for a great many years. Using conventional landlines, it could take hours, sometimes days to simply to secure a connection (and often involve bribing the operator). It was during the late 1980s that satellite technology first allowed people to bypass this system with the use of early Motorola cell phones. These days even in Congo, many people have access to satellite telephone systems and some even have several mobile phones each. This practice has of course continued as our community has grown in the UK.
Thus we engaged our community through the established practice of spreading “polemique” or gossip, a system which they already knew very well. However, the most innovative part of this project was the means of combining this practice with a mobile telephony network that could introduce new possibilities for dialogue. The “Telephone Trottoire” system provides the listener with the safety of anonymity yet uses new media to create a means of interaction with our community, by extending a pattern of communication with which we are already familiar.
THE RESPONSE TO “TELEPHONE TROTTOIRE”
“Telephone Trottoire” ran for six weeks from March 27th to May 8th 2006. It played stories and recorded comments for 7 hours every day during this period, making a daily average of 120 attempted calls.
- 32% of all calls (including those not even answered) succeeded in encouraging the listener to take part – amounting to a total of 1,550 acts of voluntary participation over the whole project.
- Put another way, 65% of all users contacted chose to take part.
- The number of new users grew by about 100 per week to a total of 660, that’s nearly 2 every hour.
- And listeners chose to pass on or comment on 58% of all stories they heard.
The response we received from our community was tremendous. During the projects six week duration, we received a total of 448 individual recorded messages from locations all across the UK including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, as well as internationally from as far a field as Ireland, Canada, Belgium, France, South Africa and of course, the DRC itself.
Of the hundreds of recorded and informal comments we received during the project, there were a great many praising the project itself. Some comments also embraced particular aspects of a subject, whereas others simply ignored the story, preferring to praise the initiative generally and thank us for using it to bring the community together through raising a few of the core issues that affect it.
We have since been broadcasting selected clips on one of our radio shows – Londres Na Biso (ResonanceFM). Our listeners are able to hear for themselves how members of our community feel regarding these particular topics. We believe that these radio programmes both prolong and stimulate further debate within our community. We believe that the information extracted over the six week project period is absolutely crucial to the knowledge of and development of our community, and we intend to take this system forward as a method for social policy forums and service providers to understand our needs – the needs of a community without a voice in the UK.
“Telephone Trottoire” was successful simply because we engaged the community by utilising a media system with which they were already familiar – the mobile telephone and gossip. The fact that this project not only worked but was highly successful within an otherwise detached community, clearly shows a way forward for dialogue and public consultation between media providers, cultural agencies, social services and their users.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
As with any new project, one can never be sure how well it will be received. But the response that “Telephone Trottoire” found within our community surprised even us. We also believe that the “Telephone Trottoire" model can work well with many other detached and/or socially excluded communities. For example, to see how other migrant groups might respond to similar questions regarding domestic violence, youth and cultural issues and income support to name a few. After this first initial pilot, we now firmly believe that “Telephone Trottoire” needs to be run again in order to show the full range of its potential for creating dialogue, gathering feedback and data and strengthening international connections.