Radio as an Agent of Modernity

The constructivist approach to nationalism sees mass media as closely connected and interwoven with processes of modernisation. While the idea of modernisation as a linear process with a (relatively) fixed societal endpoint has been scrutinised and subjected to much critique – not least from postcolonial theorists –, Cultural Studies and media anthropology have reintroduced this connection from a different perspec-tive: Radio, they argue, is an agent of modernity in that it is seen and used as such by colonial and post-colonial governments alike. Radio, through its technical setup and its infrastructure, acted as a powerful symbol of modernity and progress, but it was also the medium through which ideas about modernity were spread. Core ideas of modern society, like communication across vast distances and the changes in lived space that it implies, are strongly present in the discourse about radio, be it in gov-ernment proposals or listeners' letters. Colonial govgov-ernments, in a period when the main legitimation for colonialism was that it would lead colonised societies into a bright, modern future, used radio, together with other infrastructural projects, to show their willingness to do so. Radio, while being itself one of these projects, and at the same time (because of its presence as a material artefact in the home) an important symbol for the process as a whole, also served to present them accordingly.

"The infrastructural work of radio diffusion was embodied in its antennae and loudspeakers and studios, and also in its programming on infrastructures. One gave publicity to the other. Bridges, roads, health initiatives, and radio sets were combined into concrete, material expressions of the

develop-mentalist work of the colonial regime and its continual aim of progress."⁶⁷

Modernity and modernisation, however, are problematic concepts. Both moderni-sation as a (linear) process and modernity (or, in the plural, modernities) as analytic concepts, although much discussed and critiqued, remain relatively vague, at the same time universal and specific, monolithic and pluralistic, and often are used to simply mean all social change that happened in the last two centuries. However, the concept, be it used in the affirmative or criticised, rarely allows for contradictory pro-cesses or continuities. As Frederick Cooper states: "the covariance of commercialisa-tion, secularisacommercialisa-tion, achievement orientacommercialisa-tion, rationalism, and individuation fit poorly in the history of 'modern' Europe or 'modernizing' Africa or Asia."⁶⁸ Another problem concerns the historicity of the concept: How is it possible to use modernity and mod-ernisation as analytical terms, when the concepts themselves have a such a long, complex and problematic history and have to be historicised themselves?

This, however, leaves the scholar in a dilemma that was accurately identified by Frederick Cooper as the "confusion" whether modernity is a "condition – something written into the exercise of economic and political power at a global level", or a "re-presentation, a way of talking about the world in which one uses a language of tem-poral transformation while bringing out the simultaneity of global unevenness, in which 'tradition' is produced by telling a story of how some people became 'mod-ern'[.]"⁶⁹ From the subject of this study follows a tendency to focus on the latter. How-ever, the condition of modernity cannot be separated from its representation – and, as a history of radio that takes the practices surrounding the medium on several lev-els serious shows, representations have to be written in the plural. While colonial in-stitutions propagated their version of modernity and its benefits in countless leaflets, newspapers, books, films and radio shows, there was enough space for broadcast-ers, musicians and listeners to deal with the social changes that accompanied what colonial institutions termed "modernisation" on their own terms. The Zambian musi-cian Alick Nkhata became popular in colonial Zambia precisely because he was able to fuse 'traditional' Zambian music with 'modern' pop music, singing about the daily experiences of colonial subjects struggling with processes of social change and

up-67 Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham/London, 61.

68 Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 121.

69 Ibid., 114.

heaval. At the same time, he was involved in a large project to record 'traditional' mu-sic to save it from extinction. Thus, the representational aspect of modernity is in the focus in this thesis; however, it is not just seen as a colonial ideological project, but takes into account that there was a plurality of representations of modernity that play-ed out in debates around and programmes in radio, albeit from different positions of power.

The analysis can be broken down further. Debra Spitulnik identifies four different areas of modernity, which all play into an analysis of radio as a modern medium:

"ways of talking about modernity (linguistic), experiences of modernity (phenomenological), practices of modernity (social action, which includes communicative practices that are linguistic and representational), and projects of modernity (ideological, and even epochal)."⁷⁰

Clearly, the establishment of radio in African colonies is a project of modernity. But quickly, these areas get muddled and strongly play into each other: radio as an ideo-logical project becomes a medium through which colonial subjects experience moder-nity, it talks about modermoder-nity, and the way people use the radio shows practices of modernity – which, in turn, are informed by the way radio talks about it. It is therefore necessary to analyse these four areas as a set of interwoven aspects of modernity, while taking into account the power relations underlying the project. This can be done by understanding ideas about modernity and modernisation as ideological in the sense that Antonio Gramsci coined: as a kind of "common sense", a "conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and and cultural envi-ronments in which the the moral individuality of the average man is developed" that is shared by all actors in a given historic situation. This common sense is not a cohe-rent ideology; rather, "even in the brain of one individual, [it] is fragmentary, incohe-rent, and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is", and it strongly informs practices which in turn reinforce the original mindset.⁷¹ The set of ideas embodied in the term 'modernity' – commercialisation, secularisation, rationality, and, in the colonial situation most im-portantly, general improvement of living standards – were seen as entirely desirable by the actors involved in broadcasting, colonial subjects and colonisers alike. They were part of a growing African middle class that shared this attitude towards

moder-70 Spitulnik, Debra. 1998. Mediated Modernities: Encounters with the Electronic in Zambia, in:

Visual Anthropology Review 14:2, 63-84,

71 all quotes from Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London, 419.

nity. Nationalist movements after the Second World War did not make claims against modernisation, but demanded it for themselves. And the desire for modernisation was not confined to the middle class either. As James Ferguson has shown, for Zambian mineworkers in the 1950s and 1960s, modernity was an "expectation", a promise that economical and social standards would continually rise to "converge at the level of the most affluent societies."⁷²

"The early years of Zambian Independence seemed on the verge of delivering on that promise. The color bar was indeed dismantled as educated black Zambians rose to unprecedented positions of pow-er and responsibility; a booming economy and strong labor unions meanwhile helped even ordinary workers to enjoy a new level of comfort and prosperity. Zambia, as an 'emerging new nation', appeared poised to enter the world of 'First Class.'"⁷³

The language of modernity and, connected with it, progress and development, can also be used tactically, neither embracing nor rejecting modernity, as Steven Robbins argues: "responses to development interventions are often selective appro-priations of specific components of development packages rather than an unqualified embrace or rejection of modernization."⁷⁴ A Gramscian notion of modernity as "com-mon sense" allows to take these variations and tactical approaches into account while maintaining that the underlying ideas were shared by all actors involved in broadcasting. Many of the persons interviewed for this thesis show ongoing commit-ment to ideas about the role of media in society (be it in the fields of entertaincommit-ment or journalism) that can be classified as modern, while not explicitly discussing modernity or modernisation.⁷⁵

There is another important aspect of the argument that modernity and mass me-dia, especially radio, are strongly connected. When taking into account a host of ways to deal with processes of modernisation, the category of 'tradition' inevitably comes into play. Radio, as this thesis shows in a close analysis of broadcasters and programmes, defined 'traditions' and fixed them in time, simply by recording and broadcasting (variants of) songs, stories and rituals and, in a second step, subjecting them to a scholarly analysis that attached values to it. Broadcasters in Northern

Rho-72 Cooper 2005, 131.

73 Ferguson, James. 2008 (1999). Global Disconnect: Abjection & the Aftermath of Modernism, in:

Geschiere, Peter/Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels (eds.): Readings in Modernity in Africa, Oxford et al., 8-17, 9.

74 Robins, Steven. 2003. Whose Modernity? Indigenous Modernities and Land Claims after Apartheid, in: Development and Change 34:2, 265-85, 281.

75 cf. Interviews Charles Muyamwa, 26.09.2006; Joseph Chileshe, 19.01.2008; Cosmo Mlongoti, 10.10.2006.

desia, having worked with the ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey, shared his idea that musical traditions were in decline in what was then Southern Rhodesia, as well as the prevailing assumptions among contemporary ethnomusicologists – like Hugh Tracey – that traditions were "dying out" and needed to be preserved.⁷⁶ In South West Africa, the whole infrastructure of the broadcaster was based on the Apartheid principle of

"separate development" which stipulated that each ethnic group was to be broadcast content that represented the traditions of this group and this group only.⁷⁷ Radio could therefore, at the same time, come to embody modernity and ascribe traditions to the different cultural groups among its audience. This is less contradictory than it seems, given that 'tradition' itself is a modern category.⁷⁸ Anthony Giddens' argument that tra-dition cannot think itself as such, and "receives its identity only from the reflexivity of the modern"⁷⁹ implies also that modernity can only think of itself in contrast to tradi-tion. This refers not just to "invented traditions", but to the category as a whole, and an analysis of radio content shows that the medium played an important role in defin-ing tradition in contrast to modernity, as well as identifydefin-ing specific traditions and fix-ing them in space and time.