Ein langer, sehr schöner Text von Olu Oguibe: Radiohören im Biafrakrieg, die Sehnsucht nach Welt und frei fließenden Informationen, Postkolonialismus und westafrikanische Kunst und Götter mit Transistor-Radios. Zwei Teaser:

At the height of the Biafra war when a throttling economic blockade made it impossible to import items like electronics into the fledgling republic, my father began to deal in transistor radios. The odd hours at which he brought home his wares always left me with a disquieting feeling that there was something illicit about the trade, but I also saw and lived with some of the most beautiful transistor radio sets ever made: the Philipses, the PYEs, the Grundigs, some of them as old as radio technology itself, dug up by desperate, war ravaged families who pawned them for food. I inspected them, compared them, marveled at them and when no one was watching, touched and caressed them. I marveled at the magic behind the invisible, little people who were buried in those boxes, yet spoke and sang and made music like normal humans.

Other than the inevitable British Broadcasting Corporation from which my father and the rest of the Biafran citizenry gathered their news of the outside world and the progress of the war, and the local stations to which he turned every Sunday morning for songs by Jim Reeves and other American gospel singers, my father's favorite station was Radio Santa Isabel, a Spanish service which broadcast out of Santa Isabel, Fernando Poo in the tiny, newly independent African Republic of Equatorial Guinea. Although the strict Christian sect that my father ministered to forbade dancing, which he never engaged in, he and his friends nevertheless loved the fast, loopy Central and East African guitar music out of Santa Isabel which was far more exciting and danceable than the more sedate and philosophical war-time Biafran 'highlife' music.

In same way that they effortlessly switched between the war propaganda on the Voice of Biafra and the diplomatic propaganda on the BBC, so did they navigate with equal ease between patriotic fervor for homegrown music and the genuine desire for the uplifting guitar wizardry of music from far beyond the Bight of Biafra. As the war raged and the death-tolls rose, my father's friends would come around of an evening and request that I turn on the radio and tune them into Radio Santa Isabel, and they would sit around, occasionally dance, not understanding a word of the Spanish broadcast yet reveling in the window of freedom that the little box on the mantle opened to them. While they fought war and famine in that hinterland of Igbo country with neither electricity nor other basic utilities that are commonplace in the West, the transistor radio broke them through an otherwise impregnable blockade and the attrition that was waged on them daily, and reunited them with the rest of the world which was theirs by right.

[...]

The radio is a metaphor for innovation, communication, reception, exchange, dissemination and circulation, and though it is never entirely innocent or free, on the level of signs the radio is nevertheless symbolic of the free flow of elements and ideas between and across locations. The image of the young god with a radio tells us of a culture that is invested in this free flow, a culture that is eager to listen, to keep abreast, to tune into the wavelengths of human heritage and open its feelers to ethereal signals from other cultures and other lands, a culture with a ready handshake. Certainly, a culture that is willing to trust its gods with radios indicates to us that it is an open and receptive culture, a republican society where elements, viewpoints, inventions and innovations may circulate and flourish irrespective of their provenance; because curiosity is alive and healthy and curiosity is the sparkplug of culture.