In Tune with Changing Times: Radio’s Role in Colonisation and Decolonisation in British West Africa, 1935–1960

What is it about?

This article examines how Britain introduced radio to advance its imperial interests and promote Western-modelled modernisation in its West African colonies. It also analyses how the Communist Soviet Union and Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Egypt equally employed radio to propagate their own causes in the region even as West Africans themselves sought to use the same medium for their liberation campaigns. Radio became not just a tool of colonisation – and later decolonisation – but also an instrument of surveillance and subversion.

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