“Tropicalising” Technologies: Cable and Wireless Ltd. and Making Broadcasting “Work”

As Chapter 3 shows, administrators in the 1930s believed radio had a unique role to play in ensuring the “welfare” of the black African majority. But administrators were forced to reckon with arrangements that had seen the government contract Cable and Wireless Ltd. (C&W) to service white settler listeners. This, in tandem with Kenya’s topographic, atmospheric, and financial conditions, ensured that radio arrived to rural areas not over the airwaves but over the roadways, broadcasts emanating from mobile information vans. Efforts to enact radio in this period both indexed the change in direction of colonial policies and exemplified colonialism on the cheap. This was colonial austerity in the age of social welfare. While administrators effaced the work that went into these visits, they depended on the practiced labor of African knowledge-workers and technological experts. The state tacitly acknowledged their importance during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s.