Happy Birthday SW Radio Africa

By Richard Allfrey

19 December 2005

Monday the 19 th December is a special day for SW Radio Africa as it was four years ago today that we started broadcasting to Zimbabwe.

It had been a hard slog to get the radio station up and running after its predecessor Capital Radio was shut down by armed police in Harare.

There had been a mountain to climb in terms of bringing the station to London. The employees were relocated from Zimbabwe. Funding had to be found, a suitable premises, a way to transmit on the Short wave frequency and so forth and so on. But on the 19 th December the people of Zimbabwe had a new frequency to find on their radios and this is what they would have heard.

Since its inception the radio station has gone from strength to strength. We were providing independent news and telling people in Zimbabwe what was happening in Zimbabwe as the ruling government became increasingly hostile to independent news. The government of Zimbabwe got together with other SADC states and tried to get the EU to ban us. Then they put the names of people working for the radio station on a banned list.

Over the last four years it has been a rocky road with one funding crisis following another. We were never sure of being able to continue more than 3 months at a time. But survive we did and from the core group of Mandisa, John, Violet, Tererai, Richard, Steve, Georgina and Gerry all but two are still with the station. Georgina and Steve left and we welcomed on board Keith, Lance and Tichaona.

Happy happy birthday to us.