Scheduling for rural and urban listeners on bilingual Radio Zimbabwe

This article explores the ways in which Radio Zimbabwe (RZ) programme schedules reflect and affect Zimbabwean rural and urban daily life. Daily and weekly linkages between national radio programme schedules and national everyday life were analysed. I argue that RZ was popular because its schedules appropriately approximated the habits of Zimbabwean national everyday life. It is the broadcasters' duty to reach audiences with relevant content at convenient times. The article is based on fieldwork in Zimbabwe, from 200003, involving interviews with RZ staff, its listeners and observation notes. Scheduling was examined as part of the temporal and spatial aspects of RZ broadcasting, discussing how the radio service has adapted itself. Radio speaks to changed, and rapidly changing, structures of everyday life, and such change is not solely national- or mediacentric. How differences in rural and urban structures of daily life, weekly routines and national reception contexts form part of an ongoing challenge for national radio broadcasters similar to RZ is shown.