TV channels Guinea

Guinea's television is a young private field growing beside a much older public one - a landscape shaped by decades of state broadcasting and a late but energetic opening to private voices.

From one channel to a field

For most of its history, Guinea knew only the state broadcaster. Radio came first - the colonial station that became Radio Guinée at independence in 1958, later the Voix de la Révolution - and television followed only in May 1977, first in black and white, in colour within weeks and fully in colour by 1979. After the death of Ahmed Sékou Touré in 1984, the service took its present name, the Radio Télévision Guinéenne, which today runs two television channels - RTG Koloma and RTG Boulbinet - beside its radios, and which has been carried by satellite since 2002. In 2007, a Guinean Air Force jet crashed into the broadcaster's Conakry headquarters; the pilot ejected unharmed.

The liberalisation of the media sector through the 1990s and 2000s - crowned by the press freedom law of 2010 - opened the audiovisual space: private radio stations multiplied across the regions, and private television channels followed, first in the capital and then beyond, under the oversight of the Haute Autorité de la Communication. Conakry concentrates the field: the private channels broadcast from the capital and its communes, from Lambanyi to Matoto.

The private news voices

Espace TV and Afrik Info TV are the news side of the private Guinean field: Conakry-based channels covering national politics, public debate and the life of the regions - the kind of daily scrutiny that state television alone never carried. Espace TV, part of the Hadafo Médias group, simulcasts the best-known debate programme of its sister radio, Espace FM; Afrik Info TV runs continuous news with a West African outlook.

The music and culture channel

Kalac TV rounds out the field from the other side of the dial: a Conakry channel devoted to music and to the cultures of Guinea and West Africa.

Radio still reaches further than television in Guinea, but the opening of the airwaves changed how the country watches itself: elections, trials and great public debates now play out on the private channels as much as on the state service.