the wind-up radio

When South Africa's 1994 elections came to her village in the northern foothills of the Drakensberg (Dragon's Mountains) in Kwa Zulu Natal, Santi Mkondo knew just how she'd vote: exactly as her husband and their tribal chief told her to.

In many of the country's rural areas, a tribal chief's word is not only the law of the land, but a news medium unto itself, too. Because distances are vast and poverty acute in many of South Africa's isolated regions, villagers often rely entirely on their chiefs for news and guidance. Many believe this kind of tight control over information has been a major factor in the ten-year civil war that has claimed 16,000 lives in Kwa Zulu Natal, a province on the Indian Ocean. With only one news source, propaganda often becomes entrenched and rumors of attacks and preemptive strikes can become self-fulfilling prophecy.

But a recent invention may improve the situation, in rural South Africa and other developing nations. Even as well-to-do South Africans, hungry for new technology after a decade of international sanctions, scramble onto the Internet, the innovation that may have the most far-reaching impact is a simple one: a wind-up radio.

The BayGen Clockwork Radio was invented by a Briton, Trevor Baylis, who, sparked by a documentary on AIDS in Africa, realized the need for news for people in technologically impoverished, inaccessible regions. It is the size of a cereal box and features three bands -- short wave, medium wave, and FM -- and it provides forty-five minutes of playing time for every twenty-second wind. The life of the generator is about 7,000 hours -- three years of playing time at five hours a day.

The radios -- currently costing about $30 -- are slated for mass production in September, and more than 60,000 have been ordered from its manufacturer, BayGen, by the Crown Agents (a United Kingdom-owned trading organization), the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and the International Committee of the Red Cross for distribution in Rwanda and Burundi. Also expressing interest are CARE, Unicef, Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, and USAID, agencies that envision using the radios to ease the plight of refugees, or in war zones.

President Nelson Mandela's deputy minister of constitutional and provincial affairs, Mohammed Valli Moosa, is looking at projects where the radio "will not only go into remote areas of the country to encourage free political activity and freedom of expression, but also long-distance education." The development of the radios was supported by a grant from the Overseas Develop- ment Administration, an agency of the British government.

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