Speaking as a Colonial State: Mass Broadcasting and the Language of Development in Northern Rhodesia, 1941–1963

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the production and circulation of a discourse of development via a new medium – African-language radio broadcasting – to a mass listening public by the British colonial state in Northern Rhodesia. During a period of intense urbanisation, social change, and labour organising on the Copperbelt, broadcasting furnished the means and development provided the ideological basis for a state communications strategy that sought to legitimate the colonial order. The state's attempt to exert ideological hegemony over the public sphere relied on its articulation of a particular conception of African development, one which held out the promise of progress, but not equality, for Africans. Through an examination of the programming and activities of the Central African Broadcasting Station (CABS) from 1941 to 1963, this article shows how colonial broadcasting worked to portray the state as a necessary agent of progress while, at the same time, rhetorically placing the burden of creating development on Africans, particularly the educated urban elite. While the CABS benefited, for a time, from its positioning as a progressive institution, its support for the white settler demand for the creation of the Central African Federation in 1953 put the limits of its gradualist politics into stark relief.