Witches flying in aircrafts, women lying on graveyard tombs, giant rats with charms around their necks – these are just some of the stories broadcast by the popular Chichewa-language radio program Nkhani Zam'mabona (News from the Districts) in Malawi. Rather than dismiss these accounts as bizarre fantasies concocted to attract gullible listeners, Harri Englund takes them seriously as commentaries on the injustice, corruption, and inequality experienced by poor Malawians. In Human Rights and African Airwaves, he analyzes the production, content, reception, and circulation of these and other stories from the program. Englund argues that these stories – submitted by listeners, revised by editors, heard and debated by thousands of men and women throughout the country in the local language of Chichewa – provide alternative ways of expressing claims and expectations in the context of the liberal but still authoritarian state of Malawi and the continued dominance of human rights approaches to equality. The book draws on 18 months of fieldwork from 2003 to 2008, including interviews and participant observation with listeners and radio-station editors.

Following a brief introduction, the book is divided into three sections. Chapters in the first section provide a brief history of radio broadcasting in Malawi and position the study in terms of its critiques and contributions to anthropological debates about equality, human rights, language, media, and witchcraft. The second section explores the contents and production of the program, examining recurring topics and the editorial process of selecting, shaping, and verifying stories. The final section considers the program's popular reception and impact, as well as its critics – primarily born-again Christians. Englund is an engaging and crisp writer, combining anecdotes, observations, stories, and interview excerpts with critical assessments of anthropological and philosophical discussions of human rights, language, media, alterity, witchcraft, liberalism, and justice, to name just a few. Englund is well-read and the theoretical sections are smart, but their sheer number, length, and density derail the narrative at times.

Nonetheless, Englund has written a provocative and compelling book, which, like his earlier award-winning study, Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (California, 2006), uses the methodological and theoretical power of ethnography to challenge easy accolades about the inherent value of the ideas and practice of human rights. As Englund demonstrated in Prisoners of Freedom, the language of human rights deployed by NGOs and elite activists often has little resonance in the daily lives and experiences of poor Malawians. Instead, the dominance of human rights assumptions about freedom and rights often undermine rather than promote struggles against poverty and injustice because of their failure to address the structural conditions that produce impoverishment.

Human Rights and African Airwaves provides an important complement to that work, exploring how ‘storytelling that addressed moral and existential quandaries in everyday experience presented a popular alternative to the human rights talk that had become ubiquitous after the democratic transition’ (p. 47). Despite often bizarre details or unique circumstances, these radio stories do resonate with poor Malawians, providing a platform for them to express their frustrations, grievances, and reflections about corruption, abuse, and injustice. Englund argues that the language, idioms, metaphors, and assumptions of the accounts as broadcast on the radio, and then interpreted and debated by listeners (who often share stories of their own), convey an idea of equality premised on relationality, accountability, and mutual obligation between people, especially people in differential positions of power and authority. The powerful, in other words, have an obligation to protect and support the less powerful rather than just use their positions to abuse, exploit, and undermine the poor. The claims of the poor on the powerful because of these relationships produce a more potent and efficacious sense of justice than the limp promises of rights.

Human Rights and African Airwaves is a must read for students and scholars of Africa, human rights, and media studies. While some might challenge Englund's arguments about equality and his critiques of human rights, everyone will learn from the evocative ethnographic accounts of the moral lives and dilemmas of poor Malawians. At its best, the book is a fierce, grounded commentary – through the lens of a radio program – of the rich imaginations, powerful insights, and wry critiques of everyday Malawians as they try to live their lives as moral beings in the face of poverty, corruption, and injustice.