Radio in African History

In the context of the contemporary history of sub-Saharan Africa, the negotiated nature of national identity as constructed through and mirrored by radio becomes es-pecially clear. Nevertheless, the issue of how media shaped national identities on the continent has only recently been taken up by scholars. Scholars long interested in the continent analysed the role of radio (as that of other media) in colonial and nationalist propaganda from the perspective of the liberation movements. These analyses were mostly confined to a critique of colonial ideology and the liberation movements' efforts to counterpropaganda. They largely followed the narrative established by Frantz Fa-non – repressive colonial media vs. revolutionary liberation media.⁵⁰ On the other hand, political scientists after the first wave of decolonisation were mostly interested in the media policy of independent states. Although they acknowledged the dominant role of radio in relation to other media on the continent, analyses were confined to a normative discussion of policies, evaluating states and governments depending on whether they complied to previously defined notions of democracy, transparency, au-tonomy of media outlets and journalistic standards (such as protection of sources, se-paration of news from comment, autonomy of journalists) or whether they influenced or censored the media in any way. Thus, journalism and media were linked to the dis-cussion of the African state, evaluating governments' performance in terms of demo-cracy rather than looking at the media themselves, the production and reception of content and their effects on society.⁵¹ This led to depressing assessments on

postco-50 cf. for example Frederikse, Julie. 1982. None But Ourselves: Masses vs. Media in the Making of Zimbabwe, New York; Heuva, William. 2001. Media and Resistance Politics. The Alternative Press in Namibia, 1960-1990 (Basel Namibia Studies Series 6), Basel; Mosia, Lebona/Riddle, Charles and Jim Zaffiro. 1994. From Revolutionary to Regime Radio: Three Decades of Nationalist Broadcasting in Southern Africa, in: Africa Media Review 8:1, pp. 1-24.

51 cf. Bourgault, Louise M. 1995. Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bloomington; Hachten,

William. 1971. Muffled Drums: The News Media in Africa, Ames; Id. 1993. The Growth of Media in the Third World: African Failures, Asian Successes, Ames; Head, Sydney W. (ed.). 1974.

Broadcasting in Africa: A Continental Survey of Radio and Television, Philadelphia; Tudesq,

lonial Africa, where many governments heavily restricted media freedom either through legislation or by simply incorporating private newspapers and parastatal ra-dios into the civil service. Many studies were commissioned by NGOs that used them to consult governments or to develop own campaigns on media literacy or journalism training.⁵² In this context, the role of media in nation-building was generally acknowl-edged to be extremely important, but seldom followed up with analyses of the actual social effects of the policies that had been advocated.

Since the early 1980s, media history in general followed a cultural studies ap-proach to media, and focused on their interactions with society rather than politics.

Actually, it was the so-called "cultural turn" that sparked historians' renewed interest in communication and helped establish media studies institutionally in many univer-sities.⁵³ In the wake of the cultural turn, media studies changed their focus as well as their instruments of analysis. On the African continent, this trend was first picked up in South African academia, where Marxist analyses of culture and ideology resonated with scholars' engagement in the social and political struggles of the period. Institu-tions such as the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS) at the Uni-versity of KwaZulu-Natal (established in 1976) or the seminal journal "Critical Arts"

quickly became rallying points for liberal and Marxist scholars of media and cultural studies, and remain influential for scholars as well as media practitioners in South

Af-André-Jean. 1983. La Radio en Afrique noire, Paris; Id. 1998. L'Espoir et l'Illusion. Actions positives et Effets pervers des Médias en Afrique subsaharienne, Talence.

52 A classic example is the edited book that resulted from a cooperation of the Nigerian government, the African Council on Communication Education (ACCE; an NGO that was established in 1975 and today has national chapters in all African countries) and the German Friedrich-Ebert-Founda-tion (FES; a public trust with close ties to the German Social Democratic Party SPD): Domatob, Jerry/Abubakar Jika and Ikechukwu Nwosu (eds.). 1987. Mass Media and the African Society (Af-rica Media Monograph Series 4), Nairobi. The authors focus on technological, political and social issues concerning media in Africa and give policy recommendations. The ACCE published more in this vein, e.g. Kasoma, Francis (ed.) 1994. Journalism Ethics in Africa, Nairobi. Not surprisingly, media scholars focusing on Africa were often concerned with pressing issues of contemporary media education and policies, cf. Francis Kasoma's works on Zambian media: Kasoma, Francis.

1990. Communication Policies in Zambia, Tampere; Id. 1992. From Ministries of Information to Ministries of Public Communication: A Synthesis of Four Case Studies and Proposal for Commu-nication Policies in Africa, Tampere. Kasoma also worked out a draft media policy for the Zam-bian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. His papers are held in the Francis Kasoma Foun-dation in Lusaka.

53 It took some time until the cultural turn had arrived in countries with academic traditions different from the Anglo-American. Similar to the analyses of African media politics described above, Ger-man and French media history, for example, until the 1990s focused very much on laws, policies and institutions, cf. the standard work on German radio, Bausch, Hans (ed.) Rundfunk in

Deutschland (4 vols.), Munich; Duval, René. 1979. Histoire de la radio en France, Paris. For the reception of the cultural turn in German media history cf. Bösch 2011. An early example of Ger-man media history taking up the challenges of Cultural Studies is Dahl, Peter. 1983. Radio:

Sozialgeschichte des Rundfunks für Sender und Empfänger, Reinbek bei Hamburg.

rica today.⁵⁴ From this context stem the first analyses of the role of media in South Af-rican society.⁵⁵ Another impulse came from the realities of the media landscape in 1980s South Africa, where community media sprang up in dozens during the decade.

These defied an analysis oriented on government policies and traditional ideas about journalism (such as news values or censorship) and instead called for a new theoreti-cal framework.⁵⁶ It did, however, take some years before these were put to use in analyses of electronic media that were still under government monopoly. Keyan and Ruth Tomasellis and Johan Mullers volume on state broadcasting in South Africa was the first attempt to analyse the interdependent connections between policies, pro-grammes and societal effects of South African broadcasting since its establishment in 1924.⁵⁷ Works on other African countries followed suit.⁵⁸ In contrast to the earlier trends that were dominated by the political sciences, these developed an analysis of African media systems from an historical approach, taking into account the fact that the media systems – not just the infrastructure and institutions, but also their place in the political system and the attitude of politicians towards media – had been taken over from colonial states.⁵⁹

In the following decade, media studies in Africa were further enriched by new ap-proaches from another scholarly field. Anthropologists started to look at practices sur-rounding media, usually focused on reception, but also took content and production circumstances into account. While these studies usually draw on the arguments and

54 cf. for an overview, and for the role of Keyan Tomaselli in these institutions Masilela, Ntongela.

2011. Keyan Tomaselli and Cultural Studies in South Africa, unpublished paper, http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/general/essays/tomaselli.pdf (accessed 07.11.2011).

55 cf. Muller, Johan/Keyan Tomaselli and Ruth Tomaselli (ed.) 1987. The Press in South Africa, Denver; Muller, Johan/Keyan Tomaselli and Ruth Tomaselli (ed.) 2001. Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa, Denver; Keyan Tomaselli/ Hopeton Dunn (Hgg.): Media, Democracy and Renewal in Southern Africa, Colorado Springs

56 A later example from Namibia is William Heuva's MA thesis from 1996, which was published as Heuva, William. 2001. Media and Resistance Politics: The Alternative Press in Namibia, 1960-1990, Basel.

57 Tomaselli, Keyan/Ruth Tomaselli and Johan Muller. 2001 (1989). Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa, Denver.

58 Zaffiro, James. 2002. Media & Democracy in Zimbabwe, 1931-2002, Colorado Springs; Veur, Paul R. van der. 1996. Colonial Legacies in Mass Education and Mass Communication in South-ern Africa with Special Reference to Broadcasting in Botswana: 1920-1995, unpub. Diss.

59 This is not to say that the two approaches are mutually exclusive. The already mentioned influen-tial proponent of media studies in Zambia, Francis Kasoma, had written his dissertation on the history of the press in Zambia. cf. Kasoma, Francis. 1986. The Press in Zambia: the Develop-ment, Role and Control of National Newspapers in Zambia, 1905-1983, Lusaka. Some historical analyses until well into the 1990s also focused on media-government relations. cf. Tudesq, André-Jean. 1998. Journaux et Radios en Afrique aux XIXe et Xxe siècles, Paris; Zaffiro, James.

1991. From Police Network to Station of the Nation. A Political History of Broadcasting in Botswa-na 1927-1991, Gaborone.

theories established by Cultural Studies, they go deeper and undertake detailed analyses of communities and the cultural practices surrounding media, often ac-knowledging the complex relationships between media production and media recep-tion.⁶⁰ Another strand of anthropology that is more concerned with analysing the social and political role of music also takes radio into account. Here, rather than ac-ting a simple medium of diffusion, radio is treated as an instrument that through its technical aspect and cultural and social implications plays an important role in the so-cial construction of communities through music.⁶¹ The issues taken up by these studies resonate in this thesis; most importantly, anthropological analyses of media, and specifically of broadcasting, are concerned with changes in social interaction and the audience's perception of the world. Many follow and expand on Anderson's argu-ments in that they argue that radio initiates changes of temporality and spatiality closely linked to notions of modernity, and thus lays the foundation for imagined com-munities such as the nation, as well as instilling a wider sense of being connected to the world. Kelly Askew, for example, argues that nationalism is not just an elite pro-ject, but in the case of Tanzania shows as a "profoundly dialectical process", in which nationalist principles are negotiated between local musicians and state agencies and adopted selectively by both.⁶²

An important example for this approach in the context of this thesis, and one of the pioneers of this new trend in media anthropology, is Debra Spitulnik's work on radio in Zambia. In her dissertation and several articles, based on fieldwork conduc-ted during the democratic change in Zambia in 1989 and 1990 (in the course of which the Zambian broadcasting system was restructured), Spitulnik analyses issues sur-rounding the radio that are very similar to what is under scrutiny in this thesis: the specific "temporality" of radio and its connections to the imagined community of the nation, radio's historical connection to modernity, and the question of the construction

60 for an overview of theoretical approaches to media in the field of anthropology Askew, Kelly/

Richard R. Wilk (eds.) 2002. The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, Oxford and, more recently, Bräuchler, Birgit/John Postill. 2010. Theorising Media and Practice, New York/Oxford; some influ-ential empirical studies are collected in Abu-Lughod, Lila/Faye D. Ginsburg and Brian Larkin.

2002. Media Worlds. Anthropology On New Terrain, Berkeley et al.

61 examples of these are Moorman 2008; Turino, Thomas. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, Chicago/London. Askew, Kelly. 2002. Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania, Chicago/London only mentions the state broadcaster in passing, but her arguments about the role of music in nationalism inform parts of this thesis. All three generally agree to Anderson's central arguments, but correct them in important details.

62 Askew 2002, 270.

of audiences.⁶³ While this thesis, in the parts that focus on Zambia, is concerned with an earlier historical period, and looks at the very beginnings of this media culture (in production as well as reception), it owes much to Spitulnik's findings in the context of Zambian audiences. Nevertheless, it follows a different approach in that it tries to en-compass media systems as a whole, as an entirety of interactions between media politics, infrastructure and structures of hierarchy, ideologies and media content, and reception as well as struggles for hegemony in society.

The anthropological approach to media studies was quickly taken up by other me-dia scholars.⁶⁴ Additionally, probably in the wake of the resurgence of the category of ethnicity in political conflicts in many African countries in the 1990s and 2000s, ques-tions of identity and its role in politics and society became central again in African studies. Francis Nyamnjoh calls these the "politics of belonging" and analyses the central role of media in the precarious democratic changes of the decade. He argues that media in Africa often take on "a Jekyll and Hyde personality", propagating "liberal democratic rhetoric in principle while at the same time promoting the struggles for re-cognition and representation of the various cultural, ethnic or sectarian groups with which they identify."⁶⁵ Kimani Njogu and John Middleton assert that the "media, whether global or local, represent ways of living and provide models of how one might appropriately relate to others, as well as how recognition, status, honour, and prestige are given or withheld."⁶⁶ However, these studies are concerned with ethnic or religious identities transported through particular media, such as private TV stations and newspapers catering to specific groups. While the larger arguments on the role of media in shaping identities are important, the issue of nation-building through me-dia is very different. Governments directed their efforts towards using meme-dia to imple-ment a controlled process of identity formation towards a national community; the construction of ethnic identities and their mobilisation through mass media are a phenomenon of a privatised, fragmented media landscape and fragmented polities in

63 Spitulnik, Debra. 1994. Radio Culture in Zambia: Audiences, Public Words, and the Nation-State, Ann Arbor.

64 Two edited volumes show the persistent influence of Cultural Studies, but also the advancements and new approaches stimulating the field of media studies in Africa: Fardon, Richard/Graham Furniss (eds.) 2000. African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, Oxford; Beck, Rose Marie/

Frank Wittmann (eds.) 2004. African Media Cultures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Cologne.

65 all quotes from: Nyamnjoh, Francis. 2005. Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging, London/New York/Pretoria, 3.

66 Njogu, Kimani/John Middleton. 2009. Prologue, in: Id. (eds.): Media and Identity in Africa (Interna-tional African Seminars 7), Edinburgh, xif.

which parties seek to play the 'ethnic card' to mobilise their constituencies. Not sur-prisingly, such issues resurfaced in the 1990s, after processes of democratisation in many African countries (the so-called "Second Wave of Democracy") were followed by a significant liberalisation of media laws. The so-called "Windhoek Declaration", a list of demands for guaranteeing free media in African countries, served as a blue-print; however, selective implementation and the reshaping of politics along ethnic lines led to the problems that are discussed in the aforementioned studies. However, the issues are not that new, and have been used in Zambia, e.g., to argue for the implementation of the one-party state in 1973 as well as for the tightening of govern-ment control over newspapers and the broadcaster in the preceding years.