The radio weapon was perhaps the most important, for its influence was out of all proportion to the number of listeners, perhaps ten to each radio set. Its voice carried the stamp of authority and a reputation for veracity. Its emotional appeal, interspersed with popular music, had a special attraction for the still large numbers of illiterate people.
—Randal Sadleir, Information Officer, Tanganyika Public Relations Office, 1955-19611
SHORTWAVE-RADIO BROADCASTING PROVIDED the most effective medium for spreading a generic anticolonial nationalism throughout Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. The radio battles for informational authority and editorial persuasion popularized cold war vocabularies and anticolonial bromides that satisfied colonial subjects’ growing hunger for polemics. Of these shortwave broadcasts, the most politically important for Africa came from Cairo. Writing in 1957 about the influence of shortwave radio broadcasts in the Tanganyikan capital of Dar es Salaam, an astute colonial officer wrote:
Delhi, with its strong anti-colonial slant, has its listeners, but much the most popular of the foreign radios is that of Cairo: not only because it is anti-colonial and anti-British and anti-Western, but because its presentation is hard-hitting, unequivocal and makes no attempt to be fair.2
Between 1953 and 1960, the rhetoric of improvement fully yielded to that of confrontation to British colonial rule in East Africa. Radio broadcasts from Cairo offered a powerful vision of an emerging Afro-Asian world that would assist Britain’s East African colonies to throw off the chains of Western colonialism. But this vision of Afro-Asian solidarity also raised into stark relief the political and economic disparities among the “Afro-Asians” residing in East Africa. Like the ideals espoused at Bandung, shortwave-radio propaganda claimed to erode political boundaries but paradoxically strengthened them. To the same extent that Gamal Abdel Nasser revealed his primary consideration to be Egypt’s place in the Middle East rather than in an imagined “Afro-Asia,” the primary considerations of East Africans proved to be an anticolonialism that would first extinguish local racial hierarchies through victory of an African racial nationalism. Only after this initial process at the nation-state level could the region, if politically expedient, embrace a more broadly conceived “Afro-Asian” identity. Radio Cairo was located amid these local, regional, and intercontinental tensions. Its broadcasts popularized an effective anticolonial invective, but also accelerated regional conflicts, particularly in Zanzibar where violent rhetoric gave way to horrific violence. This chapter seeks to address the regional and global political opportunities provided by shortwave radio—as well as the constraints and tensions between various political movements and regional interests—raised by this rapidly spreading technology.
Nasser, Bandung, and Radio Cairo in East Africa
Although the political programming of Egyptian radio had grown anti-British in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the history of its regional and global ambitions began with the Egyptian Free Officers in the coup of July 1952. Nasser soon emerged as the new regime’s leader, and had formed rough ideas about Africa and “Afro-Asian” liberation—most of which centered on expelling the British and Israelis from the Middle East and “restoring” the unity of the Nile Valley under Egyptian leadership. Securing Egyptian influence over the Middle East was always Nasser’s top foreign policy priority. It was only after efforts to form a pan-Arab defensive pact to oppose the Baghdad Pact had failed that Nasser opted to expand his political horizons by attending the Bandung Conference in April 1955. Bandung was Nasser’s first major appearance on the international stage, and his anti-West inclinations were well-received and encouraged by China, India, and Indonesia. (See Bier’s chapter in this volume for another case study of Egypt’s role in early postcolonial politics.) In words of the state newspaper Al-Goumhouryah, Egypt’s “inferiority complex disappeared at Bandung.”3 Nasser’s foreign policy of “positive neutralism”—a term coined at Bandung—served as the malleable rubric for Egypt to fight colonialism on the grounds that deterrent wars could be necessary and passivity could not be justified.4 Bandung inspired Nasser to turn toward Sub-Saharan Africa. Carrying the banner of “anti-imperialism,” Nasser offered many African leaders diplomatic protection and support in Cairo. By 1962, no fewer than fifteen African countries had taken up the offer, with various bureau officers taking in an Egyptian government stipend of one-hundred pounds per month and free air travel, all supported by the African Section of the Egyptian Ministry of Information.5
After Bandung, Nasser launched a vigorous propaganda campaign for Africa, identifying Egypt as an ancient civilization African in its origin. Alleged racial difference between Africans north and south of the Sahara, Egyptian propagandists claimed, was merely an imperialist tool to create rifts and division. Nasser solidified his Afro-Asian credentials with the tremendous propaganda victory at Suez in November 1956.6 Suez shook colonial administrators throughout East Africa. Randal Sadleir commented:
I certainly felt at the time that things could never be quite the same again, and one could sense a definite change in the mood of people in Dar es Salaam. They had begun to realize that their erstwhile imperial masters had feet of clay.7
No less a figure than the Kenyan nationalist Oginga Odinga stated that “Africa was never the same after Suez and the coming into play on the continent and in the world of the forces of Pan-Africanism.”8
Radio proved to be Nasser’s most effective propaganda weapon. Voice of the Arabs, an Arabic-language broadcast that began on the first anniversary of the July Revolution in 1953, was the “pulpit for revolution” that enabled Egypt to “create a public opinion where none had existed before, among the illiterate and semiliterate masses of the Arab world.”9 Moreover, “Voice of the Arabs” ended Britain’s postwar monopoly on propaganda in the Middle East.10 From the beginning, these broadcasts reached East Africa, and had the effect of radicalizing demands of Arabs living on the Kenyan Coast. British military operations in Suez incensed Kenyan Arabs—funds were raised and special prayers were held for Egypt in mosques throughout the country.11 British bombers destroyed Radio Cairo’s transmitter in the early morning of November 2, but Voice of the Arabs listeners in East Africa picked up the signal again three days later.12 Kenya’s intelligence officers considered Arab hostility “unlikely to go beyond words,” but that things could change if “a call for holy war is sent out by Egypt.”13 The colony’s Intelligence Committee concluded:
Cairo radio is listened to eagerly by Arabs and preferred to the B.B.C., Nairobi, and Mombasa (Sauti ya Mvita) radios. It is the most potent force for the encouragement of nationalism and subversive tendencies. The broadcasts from this station are sometimes virulent and nearly always anti-British in tone. It seizes on any local issue that might embarrass the British, or offers an opportunity to proclaim the cause of Arab nationalism; a recent example is the broadcasts on the sovereignty of the coastal strip following Mackawi’s statements on the need for a revision of the 1895 Treaty.14
The treaty in question was a reference to the mwambao movement, which sought to exploit the legal fiction of the Sultan of Zanzibar’s “ownership” of the ten-mile strip along Kenya’s coastline, expressed in the 1895 treaty, to pursue demands for local autonomy from “mainland” Kenya. Ahmad Said, the principal Voice of the Arabs announcer, celebrated the cause as an appropriate anticolonial struggle. The following broadcast reveals the power as well as obvious limitations for such broadcasting in East Africa:
O! Arabs. News has reached us that an Arab Islamic Nation is being established in Zanzibar and the Coastal Strip of East Africa…. It is our duty then, to assist this blessed movement, so as to glorify it, support it and bring it up to join our Arab Procession…. Arab Nationalism is penetrating the East African Jungle and Central Africa. The Arab League of Nationals on the one hand, and the Arab Nations extending from the Atlantic to the Arabian Gulf, on the other hand should help our Brothers in Kenya and Zanzibar…. We shall help this Nationalism emitting from the heart of the African Continent.15
Subsequent political initiatives by Zanzibari politicians to reclaim the coastal strip for the Sultan were enthusiastically received by Arabs and, to a lesser extent, by Swahili inhabitants along the coast into the early 1960s.16
Yet only a small minority of East Africans understood Arabic. The seminal development of Egyptian propaganda for East Africa was the launch of the Swahili-language broadcast Sauti ya Cairo (Voice of Cairo) on July 3, 1954.17 Initially thirty minutes in length, the program started at 19.00 local East African time with the Egyptian national anthem, followed by a five-minute recitation of the Koran, ten minutes of daily news, and either two weekly political commentaries or a cultural program that emphasized the history, culture, economics, and politics of Egypt. Each section was linked by short intervals of music.18 In July 1955 the program was increased to forty-five minutes, in 1958 to a full hour, and in 1961 to an hour-and-a-half. Radio Cairo’s first Swahili broadcast encapsulated the radicalism and paternalism of Egypt’s African policy, announcing that “Egypt’s geographical situation requires her to work for the liberation of the African continent, in which the Nile flows, from all forms of imperialism … [t]he transmission aims at linking the fighting peoples of Africa with the Arab peoples, who are also struggling for freedom, peace, and prosperity.”19 Generously funded by the state, Radio Cairo raided broadcast talent throughout East Africa, offering announcers and technicians larger salaries to tempt them away from colonial information service positions.20 In addition to Sauti ya Cairo, Radio Cairo also launched a pseudo-clandestine station known as the Voice of Free Africa (Sauti ya Uhuru wa Africa) in April 1957, broadcasting in Swahili for East and Central Africa during the hour before Sauti ya Cairo began, and on a frequency very close to that of Cairo’s acknowledged broadcasts. Unlike Sauti ya Cairo, which began with qur’anic recitation, the Voice of Free Africa began with drumbeats and horn music, followed by political talk. The Voice of Free Africa claimed to be located “in the heart of Africa”—indeed at one point white Kenyan officials feared that its claims to be broadcasting from the White Highlands might be true. Despite Egyptian denials that the station was within their territory, British radio technicians eventually obtained a fix on the signal and confirmed that it was broadcasting from Cairo.21
Although Nasser played a central role in launching this full-scale propaganda campaign against European colonial powers in Sub-Saharan Africa, a remarkable feature of Radio Cairo broadcasts was the light editorial influence that Nasser or any other Egyptian official exercised over program content. Suleiman Malik, an announcer on Sauti ya Cairo and later Voice of Free Africa, remembered that Major Mohamed Faiq, Nasser’s adviser on African affairs, had no influence over his activities at the Zanzibar National Party’s (ZNP) Cairo office, and that people in the ZNP office enjoyed “complete independence.”22 Although this was certainly less true for Radio Cairo’s central program, “Voice of the Arabs,” it does seem that vernacular broadcasts to Sub-Saharan Africa were surprisingly independent of state controls, even despite the generous state salaries the announcers received. At times, the right hand of Egypt’s vernacular propaganda did not know what the left hand was doing. Nasser appeared “surprised and sympathetic” in 1963 at the request of Kenyan Government officials to rein in Cairo’s Somali broadcasts, which inflamed Somali irredentism toward Kenya’s Northern Frontier District.23 Free to choose their editorial content, Cairo’s African radio announcers nonetheless borrowed liberally from Nasserite tradition of framing broadcasts around the identification of allies and enemies.
Art, Orthodoxy, and Zanzibari Politics in Radio Cairo’s Anticolonial Invective
Zanzibar nationalists, who would identify themselves as “Zanzibaris” yet be identified by mainlanders as “Arabs,” dominated the early years of Radio Cairo’s Swahili-language broadcasts. Sharifa Lemke, the first broadcaster of Sauti ya Cairo, came from a prestigious Zanzibari family with close historical ties to the Sultan. She was also sister to Ahmed Lemke, who had studied in Egypt, joined a communist movement opposed to King Farouk, and later spent two years in an Egyptian prison. When he returned to Zanzibar in 1953, Lemke organized Zanzibari workers and students into a politically oriented multiracial club called the Zanzibari Association, which protested Britain’s reliance on racial institutions.24 Through these connections, the politics of the Zanzibari Association and later the ZNP informed the politics of Radio Cairo’s early Swahili broadcasts—antiracialist, anticolonialist, and vaguely pan-Islamist. Sharifa Lemke was joined at Sauti ya Cairo in February 1955 by Ahmed Rashad Ali, before she finally left the job in November that year.25
Ahmed Rashad Ali became the major on-air personality of Sauti ya Cairo broadcasts during his long tenure from 1955 to 1964. Also from a family with close ties to the Sultan of Zanzibar, Rashad had been a sanitary inspector in Zanzibar town in the 1930s and then traveled to Oman in 1937. The following year he arrived in Bombay and remained there until 1947, where he became a professional football player and great admirer of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League. On his return to Zanzibar, he took up a job as an announcer with Sauti ya Unguja, the radio station of the government Information Office, as well as captain of the Malindi Sports Club football team. He joined Ahmed Said Kharusi, later editor of the radical newspaper Mwongozi, to produce anticolonial documents for the Zanzibar Human Rights Party, for which he was arrested, tried but not convicted for sedition, and ultimately dismissed from his government position. He was selected as a Radio Cairo announcer following an interview with Ali Muhsin al Barwani at the Arab Association premises in late 1954. Following a brief return visit to India as a broadcaster on All-India Radio, he began broadcasting from Cairo on February 27, 1955, reading news in Swahili as well as making a weekend political propaganda broadcast.26
Cairo broadcasts were particularly popular in Zanzibar, where an American diplomat reckoned there were more listeners “than in all the rest of East Africa combined.”27 A Times journalist visiting the island reported, “[i]n every other shop hang portraits of Nasser, and Arab radios seem permanently tuned in to Cairo.”28 Ali Sultan Issa, nephew to Ahmed Rashad, recalled that “[e]verybody in East Africa who spoke Swahili tuned in to that program, and in Zanzibar, we listened to [Ahmed Rashad’s] programs in all the cafes. My uncle was a radical in those days, wanting to get rid of the sultan. His broadcasts infuriated the British, but they gave us inspiration.”29 Editorial connections between Zanzibar and Radio Cairo were tight in these early years—on the second anniversary of the Free Officers’ Revolution, Zanzibar’s Arab Association sent two telegrams to Cairo, the first praising Neguib and Nasser, the second to Radio Cairo informing them that Arab representatives had withdrawn from the Legislative Council in protest of the sedition case against editors of the radical newspaper Al Falaq.30 Ahmad Rashad’s “East African Newsletter,” the broadcast’s weekly political commentary, was part of a “machine for feeding material from Zanzibar to their compatriots in Cairo” that had developed, since late 1955, an “alarming effectiveness” to lay stinging attacks on the British in Zanzibar.31 “It is clear,” the acting British Resident in Zanzibar informed a visiting American diplomat, “from [Rashad’s] news comments that he is being kept well-informed of local happenings by informants here.”32 The popularity of Sauti ya Cairo tended to fade as one moved away from the coast, in part because it employed a Zanzibari dialect (KiUnguja) not well understood “upcountry,” as a Belgian survey of Congolese radio listeners discovered.33
British complaints centered on fears that Radio Cairo broadcasts might lead to violence in East Africa. The personal abuse of European officers in the Zanzibar government, as well as attacks on Zanzibari “traitors” who worked with the British, moved the British Resident to register a series of complaints.34 Other broadcasts from Cairo already proved to be remarkably powerful in stirring people to action. In 1955, a Voice of the Arabs broadcast criticizing a British General’s mission to Jordan led directly to riots in the streets of Amman.35 Although there appears no analogous East African violence resulting directly from Sauti ya Cairo broadcasts, the program did usher in a new rhetorical era of sharp personal abuse on public figures. The broadcasts that most tightly grabbed British attention in East Africa concerned Mau Mau. Ahmad Rashad gave a wide range of anti-imperialist talks that labeled Mau Mau figures as “freedom fighters.”36 One broadcast explained that:
There is no greater injustice than that which has been and still is endured by the people of Kenya. The fertile land of the people of the country is seized from them, and they are put in reserves, segregated from the settlers and without any reasonable relations with them. They are made to wear identity labels round their necks like dogs—and they are even forbidden to go to some places where dogs are allowed. If this is not injustice, what is it? Surely no one can call it democracy. Although the native of Kenya has no weapon but the panga which he uses to cut his way through the forest, he is labelled an enemy of freedom and security—while the imperialist troops, machine-guns in hands, are labelled soldiers of security and freedom! Whose security? Against whose security is the nationalist fighting? From whom are they afraid that he will steal his freedom?37
Radio Cairo’s Swahili broadcast on New Year’s Day 1956 wished, “God willing, may the remaining people of Kenya continue with their jihad for freedom, and we pray that He will grant them their freedom in the shortest possible time. Amen.”38
Egypt’s two Swahili-language programs, Sauti ya Cairo and Voice of Free Africa, collectively popularized a new political vocabulary that had an enormous impact in spreading anti-Western polemics throughout East Africa. The vivid language of invective directed against British colonial interests was the most striking aspect of Radio Cairo’s Swahili broadcasts. The revelation of using the words “dogs” and “pigs” to describe British officials was the most powerful and memorable aspect of Radio Cairo invective. Resuscitating a tradition in Swahili poetry of the competitive insult,39 this invective assimilated contemporary world events into a consistent and powerful anticolonial message. A broadcast from ‘Voice of Free Africa’ proclaimed:
Africans, Indians and Arabs are brothers, as shown by the Bandung Conference…. Brothers, my African national compatriots, I appeal to you to work together with the Arabs and Indians, to fight those white pigs side by side until freedom is attained. Disregard the venomous honeyed words of these white colonialist pigs—words which are intended to cause quarrels between you and to separate you and thus make you humble forever.40
Radio Cairo’s early days were dominated by events and views concerning the Sultan’s realm of Zanzibar and the Kenyan coast. In an early survey on the influence of Radio Cairo’s Swahili broadcasting in January 1956, the governments of Uganda and Tanganyika stated that neither broadcast had much effect, but Zanzibar reported that it was “widely listened to” as the announcer was a Zanzibari, though there were as yet “no signs that public opinion has been much infected.”41 By August 1956, Radio Cairo broadcasts were reckoned to be “making a particular impact in Zanzibar and on the coastal region of Kenya where there are large Moslem communities,” having the effect in Zanzibar of “intimidating the people who would otherwise be prepared to co-operate with the Government.”42
The idea of a Zanzibari nationalism founded on allegiance to the Sultan and nonracialism—opposing both the colonial government’s various racial laws on the one hand, and more significantly the African racial nationalism represented by the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) on the other—was the keystone of early Sauti ya Cairo broadcasts. Ahmad Rashad criticized the racial hiring and salary practices of new companies coming to Zanzibar, saying that “[t]he Zanzibaris cannot get accustomed to the subjugation of their famed ‘Uzanzibari’ (Zanzibarism).”43 These early broadcasts reflected one side of the newspaper wars fought in Zanzibar between supporters of ZNP and ASP.44 The ASP newspaper Afrika Kwetu attacked Sauti ya Cairo in early 1956 for not understanding who a real Zanzibari was. The announcer, presumably Ahmad Rashad, countered that “the difference between the words and birthright of the writer of ‘Afrika Kwetu’ and the announcer of the ‘Voice of Cairo’ is really a big one.” He elaborated that “[t]he editor of ‘Afrika Kwetu,’ his ancestors and he himself are people of the mainland, whereas the speaker of the ‘Voice of Cairo’ and his ancestors before him were born in Zanzibar. Who is more a native of the country, the editor of ‘Afrika Kwetu’ or the announcer of the ‘Voice of Cairo’?” The announcer finally concluded by comparing Egypt favorably to the East African mindset of Afrika Kwetu, arguing that eleven different racial groups living in Egypt were “all working for their freedom and the freedom of their own country.”45 Both Sauti ya Cairo and Voice of Free Africa took free aim at ASP leader Abeid Karume. A Voice of Free Africa broadcast derisively referred to Karume as a “boatman” (he had earlier been a sailor) to emphasize his poor educational qualifications. Rather disingenuously, the broadcast asked:
This boatman brother of ours who is President of the African Association of Zanzibar and an honourable member of the Legislative council must understand that times have changed and progress demands from us Africans to co-operate and be all united for the sake of the freedom of our countries…. Why does not our brother the boatman of Zanzibar, who leads a group of nationals, follow the example of Mr. Julius Nyerere, the leader of the nationals of Tanganyika, and of Mr. Tom Mboya, the leader of the nationals of Kenya? I have forgotten the name of this gentleman, but that is of no account.46
Tuning in to Radio Cairo thus also would broadcast one’s political identity. As the public soundscape of coastal towns became increasingly fraught with racial tension, such declarations could lead to violence. In 1958, a riot broke out in Dar es Salaam after Arab shop owners refused African demands to change their publicly amplified radios from Cairo to Dar es Salaam to hear Nyerere speak in Legislative Council. Police arrested 120 people and “took action to control the volume of radios in all Dar es Salaam shops and streets and they removed some of the public address amplifiers in the Arab quarter of the city.”47 As late as January 1961, Sauti ya Cairo broadcasts supported ZNP in elections, attacking the ASP for not fighting for Zanzibar on the world stage at various solidarity conferences, as well as for advocating the continuation of British rule in Zanzibar.48
After this point, Egypt’s Swahili-language radio broadcasts became remarkably agnostic on Zanzibari politics. Walking on eggshells following Zanzibar’s election riots in June 1961, the Voice of Free Africa avoided assigning any partisan blame, and instead wished only that “the people of Zanzibar would soon be reconciled and would stop bloodshed.”49 Two weeks later, it hesitantly criticized the ASP for its historic “stubbornness.”50 Said Khalifah Muhammad, the second major personality after Ahmad Rashad on Sauti ya Cairo, lightly took up the ZNP cause by countering claims in the British “Intelligence Digest” that the ZNP was not party of the African people.51 It was around this time that Ahmad Rashad Ali formally broke with ZNP and began to support, albeit tentatively, the Afro-Shirazi Party, but exactly when remains unclear—Ali Muhsin states was “[a] few years before the tragedy of 1964.”52 Direct commentaries on events in Zanzibar after June 1961 became sparse. As early as 1959, Sauti ya Cairo broadcasts had begun to stress pan-Africanism over Nasserite pan-Arabism—to the point where, according to Kenya Coast Provincial Commissioner, the program had “lost influence with the very sizeable Arab community in Mombasa”53—but June 1961 seems to mark the real turning point. After Abdulrahman Babu’s break with ZNP to form the socialist Umma Party in 1963, very few broadcasts from Radio Cairo openly supported ZNP activities.
Presumably to authenticate its popular African sensibilities, the Voice of Free Africa indulged itself in attacks on the South Asian communities of East and Central Africa for “covertly collaborating with the British against the Arabs and Africans.”54 But the gist of Egyptian radio broadcasts on race and racial mixing were, even on its more conscientiously “African” Voice of Free Africa program, overwhelmingly optimistic, and strikingly out of step with its allocation of support for political parties. One broadcast attempted to unravel the history of slavery to make sense of Afro-Asian relations. Here the broadcaster offers a Manichean overview, wherein the Afro-Asian world of Bandung on the one hand was one of true nonracialism, struggling against the hard racial categories of Western imperialism on the other. Responding to ASP and other African nationalist propaganda that emphasized the Arab role in the slave trade, and the often marginalized status of mixed-race children of Arab fathers,55 the broadcaster states:
In ancient times slavery prevailed all over the world, including Africa. Africans used to enslave other Africans and used to sell them to the Arabs, whom they used to transport to their own countries; even today Africans are selling Africans. In short, there are at present Arab kings reigning in Arab countries who have in their veins African blood. Africans marry Arabs and Arabs marry Africans, and Indians marry Africans and Africans marry Indians, and their children are [word indistinct]. But in Britain and America there are several millions of Africans with White blood who are not accepted among the White people…. So, my traitorous and shameless brothers, hirelings of the white dogs, stop your dangerous game and adopt the spirit of the Bandung conference and let it bring the Africans, Asians and Arabs in East Africa together.56
This view of racial harmony was credible depending on the perspective of the listener. To ZNP supporters and its sympathizers, it confirmed the nonracial, anticolonial bona fides of a pan-Islamic nationalism.57 To many African nationalists, it was a disingenuous description that attempted to obscure racial hierarchies and sexual exploitation that had long buttressed coastal social structures.
The Waning of Radio Cairo and Rise of National Broadcasting, 1961–64
In 1961, the United Arab Republic broke apart with the withdrawal of Syria from the union, and Egypt reappraised its foreign policy toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The country shifted away from its earlier explicit goal of political leadership and toward a new goal of cooperation, particularly within the economic sphere.58 This followed severe setbacks in Egypt’s African policy, most dramatically in Congo, where Egypt proved unable to influence events. Nasser found himself badly embarrassed after vainly sending arms and aid to support Patrice Lumumba; and again after recognizing Antoine Gizenga as head of state without support from other African states or the Soviet Union; and still again after supporting the failed Stanleyville government of Christophe Gbenye in 1964, until Egypt pulled out completely in April 1965.59 The Congo issue polarized all pan-Africanists, and the subsequent formation of the UAR-friendly radical Casablanca group and the UAR-hostile conservative Monrovia group displayed the sharp limits to Egyptian leadership for all to see.
Generic anticolonialism was reaching its limits. Reflecting this shift in Egypt, as well as the political changes within East Africa, Radio Cairo propaganda had become somewhat stale by 1961. Swahili broadcasts were increasingly disinclined to discuss deeply polarizing issues such as race in Zanzibar or the future of the Kabaka and Bugandan exceptionalism in Uganda. Particularly problematic was Nyerere—his unchallenged leadership of PAFMECA and open support of ASP deeply frustrated ZNP supporters. Nyerere, who abandoned the ZNP to firmly support Abeid Karume’s Afro-Shirazi Party in 1959, permitted the ASP to use the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation for political advertisements on its radio broadcasts in early 1963.60 Kenya’s white settlers and British colonial officials served evermore monotonously as the chief targets of propaganda after 1961, despite their increasing irrelevance. The politically unassailable demand to free the imprisoned martyr Jomo Kenyatta was pronounced over and over on both Cairo stations, with almost mind-numbing repetition. The creation of this new, careful, even apprehensive political orthodoxy was driven in part by the one unambiguous position taken by Radio Cairo on matters of significant internal division—the support for the Kenya African National Union and a strong central state over the objections of the Kenya African Democratic Union demands for regional autonomy. Unrelenting attacks on KADU and its leader Ronald Ngala dominated Sauti ya Cairo broadcasts after 1960.61 Ngala was relentlessly portrayed as an imperialist stooge who sought to divide Kenya, making it “a second Congo,” and its autonomous regions into “a second Katanga.”62 On Voice of Free Africa, the idea of mwambao separatism was already anathema by 1961.63 Abdillahi Nasir, the unofficial “Swahili” leader of the mwambao movement, came in for torrential personal criticism from the Voice of Free Africa as someone conspiring to create “a second Katanga in Kenya by serving your masters the imperialists and the Boer dogs.”64
After 1964, an angry sense of nationalist proprietorship over the airwaves had plainly asserted itself. An African observer admonished the radio-listening habits of Indians, Somalis, and Arabs in Dar es Salaam, demanding that they stop listening to shortwave broadcasts in other languages, and instead to listen only to the nation-building advice offered by Radio Tanganyika. He also observed that many who do happen to be tuned to Radio Tanganyika simply carry on with their business without understanding or even caring about the new orders of Tanzanian government officials.65 The imperative of nation-building could ill-afford such indulgences as listening to external radio broadcasts.
Egypt retreated from its earlier role in East Africa as agent provocateur and political manipulator, and entered the business of religious proselytization. By 1964, Al-Azhar had placed over two-hundred religious scholars throughout the world, most concentrated in Africa including Tanzania and Zanzibar. These many missions from Al-Azhar sought to protect Islam “from the distortions of its enemies” and to fight Zionist propaganda. Arabic lessons for Swahili listeners of Radio Cairo began in 1962. Broadcasts paid significant attention to alleged Jewish spy rings in East African countries and devoted time to theological lessons that described Jewish treachery in the days of the Prophet.66 Nasser himself gave the impression in a speech at the Addis Ababa Conference in May 1963 that he was more interested in strengthening pan-Arab and pan-Islamic ties than in staying atop African political events.67
In late 1964, Cairo launched the Voice of Islam, Al-Azhar’s daily, thirteen-hour radio program of qur’anic recitation, on shortwave to Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. The following year the Voice of Islam initiated vernacular broadcasts for sub-Saharan Africa.68 Egypt’s investment in radio programming continued to expand rapidly, keeping pace with the growing number of shortwave vernacular programs beamed to Africa by other world powers. By 1964, Egypt transmitted 766 hours per week, second in the world only to the United States, and in March 1965 opened the world’s largest and most powerful broadcasting station.69 But by then, Cairo had lost its monopoly of anticolonial, Afro-Asian nationalism in African vernacular languages. Propaganda investment shifted to pan-Islamic projects. As early as October 1960, ZNP officials had met with Major Saleh Salim of the UAR to discuss the relations between the Arab world and black nationalism. Salim stated that the Arab world could not at present interfere with African nationalism, but that this did not mean that “the Arab world should allow themselves to be placed in a position where they were completely subjugated, a particular danger as many of the African Leaders were Christians.” Salim concluded that the only way to ensure Arab representation was “through the Muslim religion,” and he urged the ZNP and all other Arab states to “secretly point out the possible dangers of African nationalism to followers of Islam, and to attempt to band all Muslims together into one single political unit capable of demanding safeguards.” The ZNP delegation agreed to secretly contact East African Muslims to gain their cooperation.70
National radio policies of East Africa’s newly independent states offered little support for the “Afro-Asian” ambitions of Radio Cairo. Tanganyika’s vocal pan-Africanism represented the crest of a wave of xenophobia as hostile to Egyptian intrusion as it was to Western or communist propaganda encroachments. The new head of the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) issued a staff memo insisting upon loyalty to African nationalist ideals, and rejecting “foreign” propaganda from the West, East, and Cairo. Staffmembers were instructed to approach all programming material with the following questions:
Let us ask ourselves “What does this item mean in Tanganyika to an African? Is it African in thought, feeling and style? Or is it just a secondhand rehash of an alien idea?”…. In short, we have all got to think as Africans, and if we are non-Africans, to make a conscious effort to do so. It is no part of the TBC’s job to act directly or indirectly as a propaganda agent for any nation or organisation that is seeking, or will seek, to enter into our lives—and they are many.71
The disavowal of TBC’s colonial past, both in the contemporary newspapers and later reflections, involved proposing a dualism between a colonial source of oppressive propaganda and a now-liberated source of “truth” propaganda to provide real development to the new nation.72 In Kenya, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation dramatically canceled its relay of the BBC news a few days after independence in December 1963, on grounds that the BBC had used the word terrorists instead of fighters to describe Mau Mau guerrillas—a fitting if sudden dismissal of a decade of British colonial propaganda and counterpropaganda.73
After independence, the inherited radio services first erected by colonial regimes jealously retained their local broadcasting monopolies. The Kenyan Government took over the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in July 1964, and the Tanzanian Government took over the Tanganyika Broadcasting Services in July 1965, renaming it Radio Tanzania.74 Thereafter, Radio Tanzania became famous as the regional home of ongoing liberation movements, which would use its facilities as their international voice. It served as the “one strong alternative voice” for Central and Southern Africa into the 1970s.75 The logic of subsequent Radio Tanzania shortwave broadcasts to the colonized people of Africa was that, whereas Afro-Asian solidarity held esteem on a global stage, national liberation had to be achieved first. Indeed, the Organization of African States’ Liberation Committee itself was headquartered in Dar es Salaam.
Conclusion
Radio Cairo’s reputation was a casualty of the Six Days’ War with Israel in 1967. Wildly optimistic reports of Egyptian victories on Voice of the Arabs broadcasts gave way to realization of a profound, humiliating defeat. Ahmed Said and the radio station were seen “not just as deceivers, but as the agents of Egyptian humiliation,” and Said was imprisoned, kept under house arrest, and then condemned to lead “a furtive existence in a still hostile Cairo.”76 By this point, Radio Cairo transmissions to East Africa no longer played a significant role in East African politics. Afro-Asian ideals instead came to be realized increasingly through a series of bilateral relationships, in East African most notably between Tanzania and China (see chapters of Monson and Burgess in this volume). Particularly as an economic proposition, the promises of Bandung proved disappointing, and as a rule were largely superseded by such bilateral agreements.77
Bandung’s ultimate significance for East Africa was the contingent form of ideological communitas (see the introduction), which it momentarily created, most forcefully in the generic anticolonialism that Egypt facilitated and amplified into the area’s coastal regions. The nationalist orthodoxies that dominated the media of postcolonial East Africa had drunk deeply from the wells of anticolonial invective on offer from Radio Cairo during the 1950s. Transregional anticolonial propaganda of this period was domesticated and nationalized in the 1960s and 1970s as the defensive intellectual armaments of Africa’s postcolonial states, whose very fragility fueled the aggressive assertion of nation-state sovereignty at the expense of transregional political movements. The initial thrust of intercontinental political solidarity as proposed at the Bandung meeting faded rapidly with the end of empire, and proved little match for the pressing needs to defend the fragile sovereignties of postcolonial Africa. Paradoxically, East Africa’s postcolonial rhetoric of enemies, saboteurs, and parasites reflected both a quest for national independence from external interference in the hostile context of the cold war, as well as a heavy debt to one country’s peculiar but powerful campaign of external interference in the name of Afro-Asian liberation.
Notes
1. Randal Sadleir, Tanzania: Journey to Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 215.
2. J.A.K. Leslie, A Survey of Dar es Salaam (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 199.
3. Jacques Baulin, The Arab Role in Africa (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962), 69.
4. Said K. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 102; Baulin, The Arab Role, 73–75.
5. Tareq Y. Ismael, The U.A.R. in Africa: Egypt’s Policy under Nasser (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 36, 134; Baulin, The Arab Role, 46.
6. Ismael, The U.A.R., 36, 103.
7. Sadleir, Tanzania, 185.
8. Ajuma Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: The Autobiography of Oginga Odinga (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 175.
9. Winston Burdett, Encounter with the Middle East (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 23, quoted in Julian Hale, Radio Power: Propaganda and International Broadcasting (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975), 72.
10. Aburish, Nasser, 80.
11. Baring to Lennox-Boyd, August 18, 1956, Colonial Office, UK National Archives, Kew [hereafter CO] 822/825/2; Governor’s Deputy Kenya to Lennox-Boyd, November 12, 1956, CO 822/804/7.
12. See note on Foreign Office 371/11925/JE1433/93, UK National Archives, Kew [hereafter FO]. Swahili broadcasts resumed regular schedules by February 1957. Circular of Lennox-Boyd to Administering Officers, Africa, February 26, 1957, Dominions Office, UK National Archives, Kew [hereafter DO] 35/9645/15.
13. Governor’s Deputy Kenya to Lennox-Boyd, November 12, 1956, CO 822/804/7.
14. Kenya Intelligence Committee: Appreciation of the Arab Situation at the Coast, October 1956, CO 822/804/2.
15. Saut el Arab broadcast, June 30, 1956, FO 371/119222/E1433/76.
16. On mwambao, see A. I. Salim, Swahili-speaking Peoples of Kenya’s Coast (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), 220–46; idem, “The Movement for ‘Mwambao’ or Coast Autonomy in Kenya, 1956–1963,” Hadith 2 (1970): 212–28; Richard Stren, Housing the Urban Poor in Africa: Policy, Politics and Bureaucracy in Mombasa (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978), 74–87; Hyder Kindy, Life and Politics in Mombasa (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1972), 184–91; and, more recently, James R. Brennan, “Lowering the Sultan’s Flag: Sovereignty and Decolonization in Coastal Kenya,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 4 (2008): 831–61.
17. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, part 4 (Middle East), First Series, Volume 687 [hereafter cited in the form BBC SWB I ME/687], July 6, 1956. Egypt also initiated a half-hour program in Amharic in December 1955, a broadcast in Somali in March 1957, and broadcasts in Lingala and Nyanji in 1961. Egypt initiated broadcasts to West Africa in English, French, and Hausa in December 1959, and broadcasts in Fulani in July 1961. Programs were assembled on the basis of requests received from listeners. See Ismael, The U.A.R., 155–56.
18. Mathieson to Shepherd, July 3, 1956, FO 371/119222/E1433/73.
19. BBC SWB I ME/481, July 9, 1954.
20. British Embassy Khartoum to Africa Department, March 9, 1956, FO 371/119219/E1433/17.
21. Minute of Hopson, February 15, 1961, FO 1110/1370; Beith to Crowe, February 11, 1960, FO 1110/1347/PR136/1; Rothnie to Crowe, March 25, 1960, FO 1110/1347/PR136/1.
22. Sauda Barwani et al., eds., Unser Leben vor der Revolution und danach (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2003), 50–52. This was unlike the quid pro quo arrangements of Russian contacts in Cairo, who offered Malik E£30 in exchange for publishing Russian-penned stories in the ZNP propaganda paper Dawn in Zanzibar.
23. Korry to Department of State [hereafter DOS], July 15, 1963, File 320, Dar es Salaam Embassy Classified General Records 1956–63, RG 84, United States National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland [hereafter NARA].
24. See Michael Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 140ff.
25. Trevelyan to Foreign Office, April 10, 1956, FO 371/119220/E1433/44; BBC SWB I ME/624/2, November 25, 1955; MacKinnon to DOS, January 7, 1956, File 350, Dar es Salaam General Records 1956–62, RG 84, NARA.
26. M. W. Kanyama Chiume, “Hii ni Sauti ya Cairo: The Story of Ahmed Rashaad Ali,” Sunday Observer (Tanzania), July 8, 2001; author’s interview with Ahmad Rashad Ali in Dar es Salaam, August 9, 1999; Evans to Stewart, February 9, 1956, FO 371/119219/E1433/5; Horgan to DOS, February 12, 1964, Pol 17 Zan-UAR, RG 59, NARA.
27. McKinnon to DOS, January 7, 1956, 745T.00/1-756, RG 59, NARA. A 1959 study stated 8,000 of Zanzibar’s 34,000 Arab population listen to Cairo’s Arabic broadcasts, whereas the “entire Arab population of Zanzibar and a large proportion of the Arabs in the coastal regions of Kenya and Tanganyika” listen to the Swahili broadcasts; it also estimates that some 17,500 Africans in Kenya listen to it, “plus about 50,000 by word of mouth.” “UAR Activities—British East Africa,” n.a., March 24, 1959, File RN-55-59, RG 306.
28. John Henderson, “Shadow of Nasser over Zanzibar,” Sunday Times (London), June 23, 1957.
29. G. Thomas Burgess, Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 63.
30. Extract from Zanzibar Protectorate Intelligence report July 1954, CO 822/840/27.
31. Mathieson to Watson, February 25, 1956, FO 371/119219/E1433/7. See also Annex, “The Activities of Cairo Radio and Their Impact on Territories towards which They Are Directed,” enclosed in Ellingworth to Waterfield, August 30, 1956, BBC Written Archives Collection, Caversham, Berkshire [hereafter BBC WAC] E1/1848/1.
32. Maddox to DOS, July 30, 1958, 745T.00/7-3058, RG 59, USNA.
33. “Belgian Study of Egyptian, Soviet and Indian Broadcasts Reaching the Congo,” n a., n.d. [ca. September 1957], Miscellaneous Domestic Correspondence Near East and Africa 1955–61, Office of Research, RG 306, NARA.
34. Mathieson to Watson, February, 20, 1956, FO 371/119219/E1433/6.
35. Rais Ahmad Khan, “Radio Cairo and Egyptian Foreign Policy 1956–1959,” PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1967, 32.
36. See BBC SWB I ME/690, July 17, 1956; O’Hagan to Governor [Kenya], September 29, 1956, CO 822/804/1/E2; Ali Muhsin Al Barwani, Conflicts and Harmony in Zanzibar (Dubai: self-published, 2000), 99; Mohamed Said, The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924–1968): The Untold Story of the Muslim Struggle against British Colonialism in Tanganyika (London: Minerva, 1998), 179–80; and Ismael, The U.A.R., 155, 156.
37. “Cairo’s Swahili Newsletter on East Africa,” BBC SWB I ME/638, January 17, 1956.
38. “Cairo’s Swahili Newsletter on East Africa,” BBC SWB I ME/640, January 24, 1956.
39. See Ann Biersteker, The Significance of the Swahili Literary Tradition to Interpretation of Early Twentieth Century Political Poetry, African Humanities Discussion Paper 6 (Boston, 1990); for more recent developments, see Nathalie Arnold, “Placing the Shameless: Approaching Poetry and the Politics of Pemba-ness in Zanzibar, 1995–2001,” Research in African Literatures, 33 (2002): 140–66.
40. BBC SWB I ME/365/L1, October 3, 1957.
41. Summary of replies to enquiry about effect of Cairo Broadcasts. Colonial Office, January 31, 1956, FO 371/119219/E1433/4.
42. Annex, “The Activities of Cairo Radio and Their Impact on Territories towards which They Are Directed,” enclosed in Ellingworth to Waterfield, 30 August 1956, BBC WAC E1/1848/1.
43. Monitoring Report of Sauti ya Cairo talk given by Ahmad Rashad Ali, Sunday May 6, 1956, FO 371/119221/E1433/69.
44. See Jonathon Glassman, “Sorting out the Tribes: The Creation of Racial Identities in Colonial Zanzibar’s Newspaper Wars,” Journal of African History, 41 (2000): 395–428.
45. BBC SWB I ME/643/37, February 3, 1956.
46. BBC SWB I ME/607/M/3, July 22, 1958.
47. Duggan to DOS, October 27, 1958, 778.00/10-2758, RG 59, NARA.
48. BBC SWB II [i.e., second series] ME/546/B/2 January 23, 1961.
49. BBC SWB II ME/657/B/5 June 6, 1961; see also the pleas before the election in BBC SWB II ME/654/B/7 June 2, 1961.
50. BBC SWB II ME/768/B/5, October 14, 1961.
51. BBC SWB II ME/657/B/1-3 June 6, 1961; and BBC SWB ME/663/B/1, June 13, 1961. As early as March 1960, Ali Muhsin and others in ZNP were distancing themselves from the mwambao cause. See Extracts from “Zanzibar Intelligence Report” March 1960, CO 822/2134/6.
52. Barwani, Conflicts and Harmony, 110. As early as 1957, Ahmad Rashad turned down Ali Muhsin’s request that he represent the ZNP at the first Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference held in Cairo—Rashad having already begun to distance himself somewhat from the ZNP. Barwani et al., Unser Leben, 30. ASP held Rashad in sufficient esteem to appoint him head of the Zanzibar embassy in Cairo following the revolution. Horgan to DOS, February 12, 1964, Pol 17 Zan-UAR, RG 59, NARA. In the author’s interviews with Ahmad Rashad Ali before his death, he refused to discuss this question or much of anything of detail relating to his years in Cairo.
53. LaMacchia to DOS, October 8, 1959, 745R.00/10-859, RG 59, NARA.
54. BBC SWB I ME/432/3 December 20, 1957.
55. For a discussion of this, see Glassman, op. cit., and James R. Brennan, “Realizing Civilization through Patrilineal Descent: African Intellectuals and the Making of an African Racial Nationalism in Tanzania, 1920–1950,” Social Identities, 12, no. 4 (2006): 405–23.
56. BBC SWB ME/353/L/5, September 19, 1957.
57. The project of vindicating the history of Arab slavery from Christian-missionary attacks became a major part of Arab and pan-Islamic political activism in East Africa during the 1950s. For one such counterattack, used to justify the rights of Radio Cairo to criticize the British, see “Who Will Cast the First Stone?”, Mwongozi, March 30, 1956.
58. Ismael, The U.A.R., 72.
59. Ibid., 229.
60. Summary Intelligence Report for December, 1962, in Mooring to Maudling, January 3, 1963, CO 822/3058/1; Woods to Wool-Lewis, February 18, 1963, CO 822/3058/3; Wool-Lewis to Woods, March 11, 1963, CO 822/3058/5.
61. BBC SWB II ME/643/B/7 May 19, 1961.
62. BBC SWB II ME/786/B/3-4 October 14, 1961.
63. See, inter alia, BBC SWB II ME/82/B/1 December 23, 1961.
64. BBC SWB II ME/742/B/1 September 13, 1961.
65. Letter of M.J.D. Kwanoga, Ngurumo (Dar es Salaam), October 2, 1964.
66. BBC SWB II ME/913/B/6 April 5, 1962; BBC SWB II ME/822/B/6 December 16. 1961; BBC SWB II ME/1095/B/2 November 9, 1962; BBC SWB II ME 1112/B/2 November 23, 1962.
67. The United Arab Republic’s Policy in Africa (LR 6/17), F.O.R.D., December 11, 1964, in DO 206/14/1. BBC SWB I ME/618/A/9 August 4, 1958.
68. FBIS Station and Program Notes no. 397, August 4, 1964, BBC WAC E8/41; Ismael, The U.A.R., 151, 152.
69. Ismael, The U.A.R., 156.
70. Extract from Political Intelligence Report Zanzibar, October 24, 1960, in FO 371/150939/VG1051/210.
71. Tanganyika Broadcasting Internal Memorandum from Director General [M.B. Mdoe] to all program staff, February 12, 1962, BBC WAC E1/1510/1; emphases in the original.
72. See Uhuru, January 27, 1962, in BBC WAC E1/1510/2; and David Wakati, “Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam,” in Making Broadcasting Useful: The African Experience, ed. George Wedell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 212.
73. “Notes on Cancellation of BBC News by KBC,” n.a., December 14, 1963, BBC WAC E1/1448/1.
74. Wakati, “Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam,” 212; Dawson Marami, “Broadcasting in Kenya,” in Making Broadcasting Useful: The African Experience, ed. George Wedell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 187.
75. Hale, Radio Power, 85. See also Steve Davis, “Unomathotholo woGxotho: The African National Congress, Its Allies, Its Radio and Exile,” MA thesis, University of Florida, 2005.
76. Hale, Radio Power, 75.
77. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 104.