In Abderrahmane Sissako's ‘Timbuktu’, a movie exploring life in Timbuktu occupied by Islamists, there is a nightly scene in which a group of young musicians in an apartment defy a ban on non-religious music. The song escapes through the open window and hovers in the air over the city centre, bridging private and public space, while groups of guards frantically search for its source. The scene can be read as a visual and auditory reflection on the relationship between states and sound, and the nervousness its qualities – its source difficult to locate, its reception uncontrollable – engender in states, especially colonial ones which were already nervous about their ability to control their subjects. In her history of radio in Angola, Marissa Moorman explores this relationship between the (post-)colonial state and sound by merging political and cultural history with the history of media and technology.
One of the aspects of Angolan radio history that stands out in the region is the birth of radio through ‘radio clubs’, stations operated privately by Portuguese settlers, rather than a state-controlled broadcaster. The first chapter focuses on radio clubs as an intricate part of the ‘sonic colony’, the colonial space delineated by sounds (and silences). Radio formed part of a techno-cultural settler identity centred around modernity, technology and whiteness. But the Angolan state was at the same time obsessed with the threat of ‘foreign voices’ (38) – international propaganda radio and guerrilla radio broadcast from Brazzaville.
Following Mhoze Chikowero and Nancy Rose Hunt, Moorman uses the colonial archive to ‘destabilize the solidity of the state's story about its own project’ (53). Through reports of the ‘Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado’ (PIDE), the Salazar dictatorship's secret police, she engages deeply with the colonial archive, making the documents reveal, in Chikowero's words, ‘the nervous condition of colonial authority’. Radio, in a Fanonian reading, becomes visible in its ‘immateriality, intimacy and transduction’: what unnerves the state is ‘the specificity of radio, how transduction can act on the body, and audience listening techniques’ (71).
Colonial radio, in reaction, became one of several ‘technopolitical solutions to the problem of […] anticolonialism’ (73). Moorman combines state practices of development, modernity and repression through an exploration of the brutalist state radio building in Luanda, and by contrasting the different stations and their sounds – from ‘dull’ and officious to ‘local’ and ‘dynamic’ – trying to keep the colony's listeners in front of the radio.
Radio Nacional de Angola (RNA) became an important site for the restructuring of the post-colonial Angolan state and society. Controlled directly by the party, it remained ‘pulled taut across a series of contradictions’ (104).
RNA's regional presence provides an example for the ‘affective impact’ of radio (121). Referring to Clapperton Mavhunga, Moorman reads radio as a technological and a propaganda weapon. Radio kept the war present in listeners' minds, but also situated it in larger geopolitical struggles – regional against Apartheid South Africa, continental and global against imperialism.
As powerful as RNA was supposed to be, the MPLA state was, like the colonial one, ‘unnerved’ by the clandestine UNITA radio. It adds another, ‘sometimes calm, statelike’ (164), voice to the concert (at times, the cacophony) of sounds collected in this book. It carried ‘messages of encouragement to soldiers on the front’ and provided ‘contact with the world outside’ Jamba (157), while the MPLA described it as a ‘laboratory of hate’ (160).
At times, the book is too concerned with context, when the reader expects radio itself to play a more pivotal role from the start. Some of the arguments could be fleshed out more, and some reader expectations of an engagement with classic literature are thwarted – it is not clear for example, in a chapter titled ‘Sounding like a State’, how Moorman's reflections resonate with James Scott's work. Her conceptualisation of propaganda as ‘true lies’ could profit from more robust conceptualisation and deeper engagement with the actual reception of radio content beyond listening practices.
These are small criticisms for a work that manages to significantly advance our understanding of radio and its use by (post-)colonial states. Moorman weaves the history of radio as a thread into a larger Angolan and regional history, emphasising the specific qualities of the medium and its central role in relationships between a state and its subjects, its local enemies, its international alliances. She notes the centrality of radio for our understanding of the political history of decolonisation, its transcending qualities situating states in larger concerts of voices and relations.
More importantly, the book also conceptualises radio history in a fresh way by taking seriously radio's entanglements in the projects of colonial rule and modernisation while deeply embedding this entanglement in the insecurities, the ‘nervous conditions’ this embeddedness engendered. The book complicates our understanding of modernisation processes by focusing on the faultlines of a ‘colonial sublime’ that only barely covered the colonial state's ‘unnervedness’, the use of technology by Africans as ‘political engineers’ (125), and by turning the state archive against its own narrative.
