Alex Ndawula: Charismatic natural communicator that charmed radio audiences for 2 decades

Alex Ndawula, the long-time radio personality and nightclub disc jockey, died on Monday at Nsambya Hospital in Kampala. He was 59.

One of the pioneers of the private FM broadcasting era of 1993, he had been a DJ on the Kampala club scene for five years prior.

His final half a dozen or so years saw him increasingly disillusioned with life and having difficulty walking or remembering things.

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He ended up much like his fellow radio presenter Allan (“Cantankerous”) Mugisa, finally broken by the accumulation of his lifestyle habits.

A few more objective people might privately marvel at the fact that Ndawula got to live this long at all.
It’s hard to know how differently things could have gone. Capital FM’s management gave him the little structure there was in his life.

It is often asked and wondered if a career as a nightclub DJ and a sober, clean-living existence are mutually exclusive.

It is, in theory, possible to be the former without the self-destructive habits, but that rarely happens.
The personality type drawn to the hedonistic, indulgent, often meaningless routine of partying and drinking that is club life is usually already predisposed to self-destruction.

The club is the refuge, not the cause, of the hedonism and rootless life that often marks these personalities.
The club and party scenes are, by definition, places and times for frivolity, small talk, and tough-and-go interactions rather than in-depth, personal conversation.

If that’s the environment one works and spends most of one’s time in, it’s bound to leave one feeling isolated from oneself and overextended emotionally.

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You are always pleasing the crowd, which crowd assumes that you are always happy, and very few ever notice your loneliness and inner battles.

Charismatic and a natural verbal communicator, Alex Ndawula engaged and charmed radio audiences for two decades.

Words came easily to him and, because he read widely and followed the news and current events, his radio banter had a certain intelligence and informed tone about it.

Up-close, shy, a little reserved in spite of the gregarious public persona, Ndawula was given to irascible temper tantrums and gloomy moodiness on and off air.

With incoherent listeners or those who struggled to string together a sentence in English, he was often impatient and cut them off without a second thought.

With charming listeners who spoke good English or had an urbane air about them, he enjoyed the on-air chatter and didn’t want the conversation to end.

Stylish women, debonair men, people from the right schools or family backgrounds, these were the kinds of people Ndawula preferred.

He had transferred from Nakasero Primary School to St Mary’s School in Nairobi (he was at St Mary’s at the same time as Muhoho Kenyatta, a younger brother of the future head of state of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta).
This was, after all, a person who flew to and from school in Nairobi by East African Airways, at a time in the mid-1970s when air travel was still the privilege of the very few Ugandans.Class, not cash, was his interest.
Kampala in the early to mid-1980s was a city ruined by war and the accumulated economic contraction of the 1972 to 1980 period.

Social life, however, did not reflect this. It was a city obsessed with partying and “trans-nite” dances.
“Trans-nite” was a term for going to the discotheque and dancing until morning.
There was much insecurity in the city and its environs, but the revelling and drinking had to go on, so the solution was to dance or drink till the break of day.

Also, because of the political instability and the ruined state of the economy, the Ugandan music industry of the 1960s and early to mid-1970s had ground to a halt by 1980.

So for the middle-classes, the only music to listen to was American and British pop and Rhythm & Blues, the Kool & The Gang, Melba Moore, Five Star, Shalamar, Loose Ends, Imagination, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson types.

Kampala, then, was a rusty, potholed place but sounded like a London nightclub, with music blasting out of joints like Chez Johnson, Kasisira (at Crested Towers), Kisementi, “Middle East” in Bugolobi, and other party hotspots.

It was from this seedy, smokey 1980s that Alex Ndawula emerged in the early 1990s. Along with other club DJs such as Robert Ogwal, better known as Rasta Rob MC, the late Charles (“Charzo”) Kibalama, DJ Berry and others.

The arrival of the private radio stations turned these into public figures.
These presenters, household names within weeks, were the first social influencers and influences of the private broadcasting era.

Although the privatisation of Uganda’s economy began in June 1990 with the opening up of the foreign exchange market to private actors, thus ending the government’s monopoly over the trading in currencies, in most people’s minds it was the awarding of television and radio licences to private companies that marked the true start of a flourishing private sector.

The first private television, CableSat TV, owned by a businessman named Christopher Kantiti, started broadcasting in 1992.

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With TV sets still relatively few in the country, the effect of private TV was not felt as widely as what followed in December 1993, with the launch of Radio Sanyu on 88.2 FM.

Radio Sanyu was to CableSat TV what the mobile phone company MTN was to the pioneer private phone company Celtel in 1998.

A year earlier, a private newspaper called The Monitor had been launched, shaking up the newspaper industry in Uganda.

Because of the limited reach of print newspapers and the low literacy levels, it was never going to be a mass market product. Radio, however, could be.

Radio Sanyu’s start in the week leading up to Christmas in 1993 was one of those sensational, turning points in Ugandan history.

Used for decades to broadcast on Medium Wave and Shortwave 1 by the state-owned Radio Uganda, here suddenly was crystal-clear sound and music quality on the FM meter band that until then had lain dormant in Uganda and most of Africa.

After 40 years of a dutiful programming format of mostly news, education and current affairs by Radio Uganda, Radio Sanyu and, two weeks later, Capital Radio, introduced a new format, with music as the default content and news as a filler.

With years of dullness on the social scene and the closest Uganda had ever come to state collapse, starting in late 1985, the country was in need of vibrancy and cheer.

It should be borne in mind that Uganda was the first country in East Africa to open up its airwaves to private radio broadcasting, so the pioneer presenters at Radio Sanyu were not just groundbreakers in Ugandan history but at the East African level too.

The arrival of the private radio stations set off a secondary expansion in electronic advertising.
Radio jingles and adverts for various beer, soda, tea and soap brands became as familiar to millions of Ugandans as the voices of the star FM presenters.

If a mood of optimism and reinvigoration came over Kampala, Entebbe, and Jinja after 1994, the radio stations played the leading role in making this possible.

Namasagali College in Kamuli, headed by Fr Damian Grimes, was the precursor 15 years earlier of the social culture that was to go mainstream after 1993.

It was a school run by Europeans and although it went by the mainstream Uneb curriculum, it felt like a cross between a performing arts school and holiday camp.

It had the most elaborate set of extracurricular activities of any school in Uganda at the time, perhaps in East Africa -- swimming galas, creative dancing, fancy dress balls, Sunday movie nights, Saturday dances, drama and elocution competitions, and the annual modern dance-drama production and the annual beauty contest.

When the children of president Milton Obote enrolled at Namasagali and the First Lady Miria Obote became an unofficial patroness of the school, its reputation as the school of the country’s who’s who socialites was cemented.

For lack of a better term, Namasagali College became a byword for snobbery, vanity, and style.
The pressure to look and act classy and trendy was so high, many students succumbed to it and their lives were ruined.

An emphasis on correct diction, poshness and an air of sophistication were the school’s core culture.
It was not only important to speak grammatically correct English; the accent with which one spoke it mattered as much.

At Namasagali, Ndawula was in his element: a swimmer, well-spoken, stylishly dressed, keen on music, and gregarious.

That explained why most of the first crop of presenters at Radio Sanyu and Capital Radio in 1994 were former students of Namasagali.

They were accustomed to a school curriculum and environment in which academics sat comfortably alongside the performing arts.

Speaking to an audience came naturally.
Until then, journalism as a career was perceived by most white-collar middle-class families as at about the same level of disrepute as being a club DJ or, in central and parts of western Uganda, joining the army.

The first female presenters at Radio Sanyu, Gloria Kamba and Christine Mawadri, and Jamila Jah and Nanfuka (“Nanfi”) Nagenda of 91.3 FM Capital Radio, were at pains to present a lady-like persona to the public, self-conscious about the negative image of being regarded as a club DJ.

Gradually, though, the stigma faded away and the radio presenters took up a respectable position in society alongside the traditionally more respected professions such as medicine, banking, and engineering.
What breakdancers had been in the mid-1980s, radio presenters were in 1994, the first full year of private broadcasting.

The Monitor (later renamed Daily Monitor) fed into and off this great national interest in radio, with monthly reviews starting in 1996 of radio stations, presenters, and who ranked where and why.
Written by Timothy Kalyegira, they became both highly controversial and eagerly looked forward to by presenters and the general public.

Just over 20 years into the private radio era in Uganda, a new phenomenon called social media, led by the American company Facebook, began to change the public’s taste not just in the country but around the world.

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What radio was in the final five years of the 1990s is what social media became starting in the latter years of the 2000s decade.

Radio and TV stations, newspapers and magazines found themselves increasingly competing directly with Facebook for people’s attention.

The abundance of MP3 music websites on the Internet reduced the need for many to tune in to radio to discover the latest songs, especially when smartphones started becoming ubiquitous in the mid-2010s decade.

For some reason, the westernised radio stations in Kampala have not yet adjusted to the new consumption patterns brought about by social media platforms and it sounds rather sad to hear them still going about their presentation as they did in the 1990s.