"Hate Radio" Chucks the Transcript

"Videos of these harrowing monologues, prerecorded by actors speaking in French, were projected onto a mysterious opaque box at the center of the performance space, as audience members listened through headphones and read English subtitles. Then venetian blinds shrouding the box slowly rose to reveal glass walls and, inside them, a sinister diorama-a replica of RTLM, or Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the radio station that fuelled the catastrophe."

"The broadcast was rhythmic and insistent, full of propaganda deriding the country's Tutsi minority as "cockroaches"-hate speech that helped lead to the death of more than eight hundred thousand people. Yet the trio spitting this poison seemed full of joy. When they laughed, it was easy not to laugh along. When they danced, it was harder not to join in."

The play "Hate Radio" stages a recreation of RTLM, the Rwandan radio station that broadcast propaganda during the 1994 genocide. The production begins with prerecorded monologues from genocide survivors describing atrocities, projected onto a central box. When revealed, the box contains a replica radio station where actors perform as shock jocks delivering hate speech mixed with popular music, jokes, and call-in segments. The broadcast includes dehumanizing language targeting Tutsis as "cockroaches" alongside upbeat songs and entertainment, creating an unsettling juxtaposition that forces audiences to confront how joy and popular culture coexisted with genocidal propaganda. The performance deliberately blurs entertainment and atrocity to expose uncomfortable truths about how mass violence becomes normalized.

Read at The New Yorker