Colonial Powers Use of Radio To Spread Negative News
Colonial Powers had exaggerated and often racist ideas about how “exposure” to mass media, such as radio, movies, and newspapers, could be dangerous for Africans. These ideas came from the propaganda of World War II, and they were made stronger by the harsh anti-communist rhetoric of the early Cold War.
After World War II, African nationalists started to pose serious challenges to colonial rule. This set the stage for late colonial information management policies that were broad, harsh, and mostly ineffective. In South Africa and Namibia, these went on well into the 1980s. Colonial Britain was generally more trusting than France, Portugal, or Belgium.
It used its extensive experience with propaganda during World War II to create, use, and tightly control radio, newspapers, and films to make postwar information policies for its African territories. Radio was first seen as a way for European settlers and colonial civil servants to stay in touch with African cities and the rest of the world.
It also met the needs of a small group of highly educated Africans. During the 1930s, Britain and France set up state radio services in West Africa. Rhodesia got radio in 1932, and South Africa got it in 1924. The first broadcasts in African languages started during World War II, when Africans needed to be recruited and told about what was going on.
Britain used radio in Ghana and Nigeria before they were independent to tell Africans about the Second World War and explain why they should join it. France used colonial radio to rally Free French forces in West and Central Africa against pro-Vichy broadcasts from Dakar, Senegal.
Powerful transmitters that were put in during the war to spread propaganda were helpful in the development of colonial radio after the war. By 1945, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was suggesting that national radio networks in English-speaking parts of Africa be set up like a semipublic corporation in Great Britain.
For its African colonies, France used a model that was more centralized and called for direct state control. In Francophone Africa, African-language broadcasts didn’t start until the late 1950s and early 1960s.
As the number of nationalist problems grew, departments of information were set up to manage and control new official sources of information, like territorial film units, radio services, and newspapers, while keeping foreign mass media from contaminating them. Radio was set up in many parts of colonial Africa at the same time that the government thought it needed to set up services as part of its overall plan for managing information and to meet the news and entertainment needs of white settlers.
By providing money, technical know-how, and training, the BBC helped get national services up and running in every Anglophone African territory by the end of World War II. Radio is the only real mass medium in Africa. It reaches about 85% of Africans, which is more than any other medium.
Even though radio was first introduced in the 1920s, it was mostly only used in cities. However, the transatlantic revolution and the rise of African nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s made it possible for radio to reach even the most remote areas. Both the colonial government and liberation movements used radio broadcasting to advance political objectives, maintain a regime in power, or promote majority rule and independence.
As early as 1953, Radio Cairo made it possible for political leaders who were living abroad to send shortwave radio broadcasts back to their home countries. As independence spread from the west to the east and down to the south of the continent, more foreign radio transmission facilities became available to liberation movements so they could send out programs in local languages. This worried colonial and white minority regimes.
South Africa started an outside African service in 1958 and grew its own vernacular radio network, “Radio Bantu,” in the style of apartheid to fight this trend. Radio’s role in the propaganda war didn’t change much during the decades that Africa was free, up until the late 1980s. South Africa kept Namibia under its control until 1989 by keeping a tight grip on the radio and using broadcasts to spread false information.
From 1962 to 1979, white minority regimes in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, which came to power after 1948, used mass media as propaganda tools to try to shape or control public opinion. This was the lowest point in the use of mass media as propaganda tools. Racist governments in both countries also used propaganda to try to fix their bad reputations around the world.
Between 1972 and 1977, the South African Department of Information spent millions of dollars on covert propaganda to improve the world’s view of South Africa by buying influence with U.S. and European newspapers. After independence, the new states took over ownership and control. With the exception of a few religious radio stations, commercial radio and deregulated public service parastatal radio stations did not show up in Africa until the 1990s.
African leaders have seen radio as a powerful way to bring the country together, help it grow, and keep them in power. Highly centralized state monopolies on broadcasting could be justified indefinitely in this way. Colonial leaders were worried about the subversive effects of foreign radio broadcasts from communist services, especially Radio Moscow.
However, there isn’t much evidence that more than a few Africans had shortwave equipment or were interested in listening. After the war, a lot more people listened to the BBC, Radio France International, Radio RSA (South Africa), and other European services that were aimed at Africa. In a similar way, and starting in the 1920s, colonial film policy was closely tied to British, French, or Belgian efforts to build support for colonial rule, if not legitimacy for it.
Colonial Film Units were set up, and their job was to show both natives and people back home the best side of territory administration. During the war, from 1939 to 1945, colonial films were used to spread propaganda. After the war was over, the focus shifted to mass education and community development films that were made to help colonial governments get a stronger hold on their countries.
Africans were still often seen as weak and needy, while Europeans were seen as wise, powerful, and kind. People thought that film could help illiterate people understand Western civilization and the modern world and eventually join in. At times, especially when it came to film in British territories, it seemed like the Colonial Office saw film as a partial solution to major problems of communication and development in the far-flung, illiterate parts of its African empire.
At first, colonial leaders were afraid that showing Africans images of western life might corrupt them or make their subjects question colonial rule itself. In order to keep commercial films from getting messed up, the government started making documentaries and newsreels that weren’t for sale and put strict limits on the import and distribution of commercial films from Europe, the United States, and South Africa.
Colonial censorship boards worked with local missionaries to cut out scenes that could hurt the reputation of whites. Africans were never taught how to make movies by colonial filmmakers. Films were not seen very often, especially compared to radio, which became very popular in the 1950s. Because African audiences in most countries speak different languages and have different cultures, and because there aren’t many mobile film vans, it was hard to get and keep large audiences.
Many colonial films were based on an ideology that caused more confusion than cultural guidance or education. The colonial government’s overbearing desire to control movies was meant to keep the people they ruled over submissive and easy to control. Film was used because people thought they needed to “educate” Africans for citizenship and service and find new customers for European goods.
In the 1930s and 1940s, films with religious themes were made for African audiences in places like the Belgian Congo. These films used folktales, local languages, and African actors to help missionaries gain and teach new followers. Cinema was a modern way to reach a large number of people, but it was easy for colonial authorities to control. By the mid-1950s, Colonial Film Units were no longer needed because radio services were growing.
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