UPTOWNflavor

Chaka Ngwenya, former TV and Radio personality in Zimbabwe broadcasts live out of the Salvation Army in Harlem.

“Stay tuned to SARFM Radio, the heartbeat of Africa in New York,” said Ngwenya, who is an assistant pastor at the church. He leaned into the mic and adjusted the levels of his mixer.

A Harlem resident since 2000, Ngwenya was once a popular radio and TV personality in Zimbabwe. He started SARFM, an Internet radio station, three years ago, because he missed his on-air days and the music from his home.

The station broadcasts around the clock, boasts 16 deejays and more than 20 shows weekly, all with the African diaspora in mind. Listeners simply visit the Web site (www.sarfmradio.com) to tune into the free live-stream broadcast.

While African radio has sprung up worldwide – due to the easy accessibility and startup the Internet provides – SARFM is the only Zimbabwe-focused station based in the metropolitan area.

For recent immigrants – there were an estimated 100,000 Zimbabweans living in New York State in 2000, according to the nonprofit RAND – SARFM sounds almost like home.

“This is an African radio station, and we are telling the African story as it is,” Ngwenya, a handsome man of 36, says while seated in front of a tall bookcase filled with CDs labeled Gospel, America, Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe. An American flag and a batik wall decoration with an African vase hang from the shelf behind him.

“When you listen to all the radio stations in America, even the black-owned stations, they don’t play any African music,” says Ngwenya, adding that SARFM has up to 2,500 listeners for some of its shows.

Busi Sibusisiwe, 35, a listener who lives in Harlem, tunes into American radio – but also SARFM. “For us to have an African radio station, it makes us proud,” she says. Sibusisiwe says she listens to the station for announcements on where she can send money back home.

Both Sibusisiwe and Ngwenya are among the approximately 3 million citizens who fled Zimbabwe because of the economic downturn that began nearly a decade ago.

Ngwenya found his calling in radio and TV and by serving the Salvationist community. He trained at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corp., worked for several years and became a radio celebrity.

He met his future wife at a youth camp, and soon after was offered the job as assistant pastor of the church in Harlem. Three days after they were married, the couple headed for New York.

Ngwenya’s job at the church put him in the pulpit and in charge of programs for youth and community out-reach in Harlem.

Since taking over the room that shares a wall with the chapel to start SARFM, a fair portion of his own paycheck has gone toward sustaining the venture.

Though geared primarily to the African diaspora, Ngwenya says more listeners from Zimbabwe have started tuning in for the news of the recent election controversy, since journalists in Zimbabwe do not work under a free press.

“If I was a deejay over there, it wouldn’t be effective, because it would be government controlled,” Ngwenya says.

The station has three in-country journalists who work under aliases. They send dispatches from Zimbabwe via e-mail, which Ngwenya reads on the air.

Pamela Stitch, another SARFM deejay, originally from Nigeria, has noticed that the open forum – on air and through online chat rooms – elicits surprise from some listeners.

“There are a lot of angry voices in the African diaspora,” she says, adding that listeners are occasionally surprised they can express their opinions so openly.

But for some fans of the station, it’s not newfound freedoms, music, or news that keeps them tuning in.

For Farai Bere, a 37-year-old doctoral student, it’s nostalgia. Bere, who immigrated to New York from Zimbabwe eight years ago with his family, remembers Ngwenya from the radio back home.

“To hear his voice again,” Bere says joyfully, “it’s like nothing has changed.”

Read the whole article: NY Daily News

Photo credit: NYC News Service