Radio and National Identity

Anderson's argument concentrates on newspapers and novels, because he de-velops it from an analysis of the first appearances of the idea of 'the nation' among in-tellectual elites in Europe, Latin America and (South) East Asia. But it resonates very much with arguments and theories about radio, which can easily be described with Anderson's words as drawing its consumers into "the remarkable confidence of com-munity in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations".³² Electronic broadcast-ing media seem to embody the principles laid out by Anderson for the production of

"homogeneous, empty time" even more than the newspaper. First, radio not just as-sembles different events under the heading of one specific date (like in news pro-grammes that list the events of the day), but by its very technology it bridges geo-graphical differences with (nearly) no timelapse and can deliver news as they happen

32 Anderson 2006. 36. cf. also Hilmes, Michele. 1997. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, London/Minneapolis, 6. Anderson alludes to the role of radio "in mid-twentieth-century nationalisms", specifically in the Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions, in a footnote, but only as a medium that could "bypass print and summon into being an aural representation of the imagined community where the printed page scarcely penetrated." (Anderson 2006, 54 (n. 28)).

Thus, he seems to see it simply as print's successor in Twentieth Century nationalism.

("This Just In"). This is especially clear in live reportage, where reporters actively em-phasise the connection between the listeners and the event, and give the impression that listeners are part of it – even though geographically far away. Secondly, by turn-ing on the radio set, the listener feels connected not just to the announcer, but also to other listeners. More generally, "listeners' tuning in by the tens of thousands to one specific program airing at a specific time created that shared simultaneity of experi-ence crucial to Benedict Anderson's concept of the modern 'imagined community' of nationhood."³³ Again, announcers and reporters emphasise this when they adress their audience as "dear listeners" or even as "the nation", or another community en-couraging title. There are also programmes that try to enable two- or three-way com-munication by reading listener letters or letting listeners call in. These programmes were specifically popular with African audiences, because they functioned effectively as messaging service.

In African contemporary history, it is also important to note that radio was a me-dium that reached a far bigger and less fragmented audience than newspapers, not just because of largely illiterate populations in African countries prior to and for some time after independence, but also because of its more effective infrastructure. Due to the absence of fast transport routes in often vastly expansive countries with difficult geography and climate, newspapers (that could only be produced in urbanised areas) could simply not be distributed effectively in the whole country. Radio, on the other hand, once a relatively simple, albeit expensive, infrastructure of transmitters had been put up, could easily broadcast news and actuality in time. Therefore, for many African countries one can postulate an argument similar to Michele Hilmes, who puts radio taking over the role of Anderson's newspapers in the USA, because "newspa-pers remained a primarily local medium."³⁴ While the reasons for the newpaper's lack of national coverage are different, the effect is the same: radio took over as the me-dium that made it possible to imagine communities.

More generally, since the establishment of the medium, theorists and analysts of radio ascribed community-building powers to it: "Wireless eliminates not only the boundaries between countries but also between provinces and classes of society. It insists on the unity of national culture and makes for centralisation, collectivism, and

33 Hilmes 1997, 11.

34 Ibid.

standardisation."³⁵ For liberal commentators, the (theoretically) globe-encompassing characteristics of the airwaves would enable everybody to speak to the whole world, the "Babel of tongues" being the only obstacle towards creating a worldwide commu-nity of cosmopolites through radio.³⁶ Conservatives such as the editor of the German

"Funk" (Radio) magazine, Ludwig Kapeller, criticised these tendencies as undermin-ing national unity, and argued for a nationally inclusive radio broadcastundermin-ing in the na-tional language: "Germanness in Europe suddenly has a focal point, a caring mother:

German radio!"³⁷ The first Director General of the BBC, John Reith, saw the role of the Corporation in bridging class barriers and dreamt of "making the nation one man."³⁸

The role of radio in imagining communities has also been acknowledged by

scholars of media history. Monika Pater analysed the role of national socialist radio in establishing the "Volksgemeinschaft", the concept central to NS mobilisation of the German population. David Cardiff and Paddy Scannell looked at the BBC's role in constructing "national unity" in Britain.³⁹ Thomas Hajkowski expanded on their work and, in a thorough analysis of BBC programmes up to 1953, asserted that broadcast-ing "works in fundamentally the same way" as newspapers do for Anderson.⁴⁰ Maris-sa Moorman, expanding on Anderson's "print-capitalism", proposed the term "sonor-ous capitalism" to analyse the importance of radio and the recording industry for ima-gining the nation through music in late colonial Angola.⁴¹

There is, however, an important argument to be made for the special role of radio in forming national identity. Anderson develops the importance of the novel and the newspaper in enabling the imagination of a community larger than the immediate

so-35 Arnheim, Rudolf. 1972 (1936). Radio: An Art of Sound, London, 238.

36 cf. Ibid. Some commenters advised the use of artificial "world languages" such as Esperanto or Ido. cf. Kümmel, Albert. 2004. Innere Stimmen – die deutsche Radiodebatte, in: Kümmel,

Albert/Leander Scholz and Eckhard Schumacher (ed.): Einführung in die Geschichte der Medien, Paderborn, 175-198, 185f.

37 "Das Deutschtum in Europa hat plötzlich wieder einen Mittelpunkt, eine Nährmutter: den

deutschen Rundfunk!" Kapeller, Ludwig. 1924. Die Weltsprache des Rundfunk, in: Funk 1:4, 61-2, cit. in: Kümmel 2004, 186.

38 cit. in Cardiff, David/Paddy Scannell. 1987. Broadcasting and National Unity, in: Curran, James/Anthony Smith and Pauline Wingate (ed.): Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, London/New York, 157-173, 157.

39 Pater, Monika. 1998. Rundfunkangebote, in: Marßolek, Inge/Adelheid von Saldern (eds.) 1998.

Radio im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Lenkung und Ablenkung (Zuhören und Gehörtwerden 1), Tübingen, 129-242; Cardiff/Scannell 1987; Hilmes, Michele. ³2010. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, Wadsworth Press; Hilmes 1997.

40 Hajkowski, Thomas. 2010. The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922-53, Manchester, 6.

41 Moorman, Marissa J. 2008. Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times, Athens, 140.

cial environment through their form. While radio broadcasting radicalizes the formal aspects of "homogeneous, empty time" in one way, it was often also consciously used to fill the form with programme content that embodied the specific national iden-tity. As Hilmes put it: "Radio, more than any other agency, possessed the power not only to assert actively the unifying power of simultaneous experience but to communi-cate meanings about the nature of that unifying experience."⁴² Especially in those countries where the broadcaster was a monopolist, close to the state if not directly controlled, this was a major task of politicians and broadcasters alike. In the case of the BBC, Cardiff and Scannell have shown that rather than being "limited to a pro-cess of diffusion", the monopolist created programmes that "promot[ed] national unity at a symbolic level."⁴³ Reith not only saw the potential the technical aspects of radio provided for "making the nation one man", but also actively worked towards it by pro-ducing programmes geared towards fostering national unity and a sense of "British-ness" rather than simply diffusing "sacred rituals"⁴⁴, experimenting with the technical possibilities and forming infrastructure and programme schedules after the image of a

"listening family" of national subjects.⁴⁵ Therefore, the radio not only lay the ground for imagining communities, but also played an active role in the process of imagining and giving meaning to the specific communities imagined.

Anderson's ideas about the role of media in European and US-American contexts are informed by a specific historical context. It was not the press and the novel alone that made the imagined community possible; instead they worked in confluence with other social and eceonomic processes, in particular the advancement of capitalism.

This is very different from the colonial context that lay the ground for the development of media in Africa. Colonial media were not the realm of a Habermasian "Public Sphere" which allowed for rational critical debate and developed in the course of modern mass media.⁴⁶ Rather, they can be understood as "a conscious effort to

42 Ibid., 11.

43 Cardiff/Scannell 1987, 158.

44 e.g. royal occasions or ceremonies of state, but also events that were only brought to prominence by the BBC itself, like the annual live broadcast of the Christmas nativity play from the Church of St. Hilary in Cornwall. cf. Ibid., 160.

45 Ibid. 163ff. The image of the family, according to the authors, was important in that broadcasters imagined listeners as families sitting together and listening, and connected this image to a larger one of "Mother Britain and her children in the empire."

46 Habermas, Jürgen. 1992 [1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge.

The Habermasian notion of the development of bourgeois publics in the 18^th century has also been challenged in the European context as too normative and too much separated from the State,.cf. for an overview of the critiques Bösch 2011, 83-88.

restructure the social and inner lives of Africans."⁴⁷ As Karin Barber has argued in a critical reappraisal of Habermas,

"the publics that were convened, first in print and then through the electronic media, need to be un-derstood not as half-way houses to 'true', European-style publics; but as specific historical forms which can shed unique light on the nature of sociality in colonial and post-colonial societies."

In nineteenth century Africa, Barber argues, missionaries used print media to re-structure previous social forms that embedded individuals in family, clan or religious relationships by "the imposition of disciplines of time, space and the person which were alien to cultures, but which were, partially and piecemeal, embraced, internal-ised and hybridinternal-ised by some sections of the population and not others."⁴⁸ This attitude towards media as an instrument of social change was inherited by colonial and post-colonial governments. Both sought to use the radio to 'develop' the subjects that made up audiences, producing 'modern' individuals, and, in the case of post-colonial governments, "make" Zambians or Namibians.

This thesis draws on the larger argument about radio inherent in Cardiff and Scannell's analysis, arguing that politicians, broadcasters and listeners were actively involved in constructing an imagined community through the medium. These three groups of actors play central roles in the different chapters of the thesis. However, while some of the chapters focus on one group in particular, they emphasise the in-teractions between them and the resulting negotiated reality in national radio pro-grammes. Also, it holds that the notion of radio constructing an imagined community that transcends social divisions such as race, class and gender is not without contra-dictions. Michele Hilmes argues that in a society as socially segmented as the US in the early Twentieth Century, radio, while connecting the whole nation and bridging class and race, was also seen as threatening and confronting a naïve and unsuspect-ing listener with social worlds outside his own.⁴⁹ The threat posed by radio to a segre-gated society can also be seen in colonial discussions about the introduction of chan-nels for Africans. As Chapter 2 shows, the solution was found by creating institutions that effectively segregated "White" from "Black" broadcasting. Radio in colonial socie-ty was not supposed to act as catalyst for national unisocie-ty; and in the case of Namibia, institutions and programmes were actually designed to effectively circumvent the

47 Brennan, James. Communications and Media in African History, unpublished manuscript, 3.

48 all quotes from Barber, Karin. 2007. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics, Cambridge, 144.

49 Hilmes 1997, 16.

formation of a national public. Therefore, while radio certainly has a potential for crea-ting a virtual community, it is in the conscious efforts of politicians, broadcasters and listeners that the actual creation takes place – or not. It is the process of negotiating the parameters of the communities imagined in and through radio that this thesis focuses on.