The Radio as the Master’s Tool: How the Algerian Revolution Repurposed a Colonial Technology into One of Resistance
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
Audre Lorde famously stated in a 1979 speech that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
In this speech, she argued that using the tools of racist patriarchy to examine the fruits of that very same racist patriarchy would only allow the narrowest parameters of change, if any.
And she was correct. Make no mistake; despite the title of this article, it contains no effort to disprove her statement within the context it is situated: as a powerful call to oppressed groups to build their own systems, faculties, communities in which to situate and conduct resistance.
But if we take this phrase in its most literal sense: with the ‘tool’ as a technology, and the ‘masters house’ as a colonised space; encompassing all from the occupied land, to the biological, cultural and mental subjugation experienced by a colonised subject, we can see how, during the Algerian revolution, the master’s tool of the radio became that of the revolutionary, and finally, was no longer simply a tool, but a weapon and symbol of resistance.
This demonstrates how the sociotechnical imaginary of a technology is entirely dependant on the sociopolitical context of the society it is introduced into, and how these are ever-shifting.
Sociotechnical Imaginaries
The concept of a socio-technical imaginary is used to understand the relationship between state technology projects and national identity. They are defined as “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfilment of nation-specific technological projects.”
Crucially, these imaginaries go beyond just technology; they embed ideas about societal values and what a citizen believes is a “good life.” They paint a picture of the society that technological innovation can create and the societal conditions necessary for such innovation. They embody shared visions of an ideal society, meaning that technoscientific imaginaries are simultaneously also “social imaginaries”: how technology can meet public needs.
The use of this framework to explore the role of the radio in the Algerian Revolution is clear: sociotechnical imaginaries are more than a single individual’s vision or dream; they only gain power with collective force, drawing on material and symbolic resources, and culminating in a change in the entire national identity of a population.
The Radio as the Master’s Tool
Before 1945, 95% of all radio receivers in Algeria were in the hands of European settlers. They listened to Radio-Algier, an offset of the French National Broadcasting System, operating from Paris.
“Without wine and the radio, we would have already become Arabized”
For these Europeans, the radio was viewed as a civilising tool, a link to the so called ‘developed’ world. Similarly, among Algerians, the radio existed as a symbol of European colonisation, as “a transmission belt of the colonialist power”.
“Before 1954, a radio in an Algerian house was the mark of Europeanisation in progress, of vulnerability… It was the decision to give voice to the occupier. Having a radio meant being besieged from within by the coloniser… It meant, beyond any doubt, surrendering to the occupier.”
And yet, there was no organised resistance against the radio, simply a shared agreement that it served no purpose: less neutral and more apathetic. As a communication tool, Algerians favoured word of mouth, resulting in the French colloquialism: ‘The Arab telephone’.
At this point, the radio barely existed in the Algerian imaginary, existing primarily in the framework of the coloniser.
A major shift came with the advent of the Algerian Revolution in 1954, and the accompanying press censorship. By the mid-1950s, local newspapers carried little to no coverage of the war, creating a vacuum of sorts: the creation of a need for the average Algerian to be able to receive reliable information beyond the existing word of mouth system.
The Radio as a Revolutionary Tool
To fill this vaccuum, the National Liberation Front (the FLN) established a radio station in Cairo in 1956 and began broadcasting The Voice of Fighting Algeria.
To announce the creation of this radio station, pamphlets were distributed, and in less than 20 days, the country’s entire stock of radio sets had been bought up.
Even in the face of a lack of an essential prerequisite: electricity, in immense regions of Algeria, citizens searched for battery-operated receivers, successfully circumventing that issue. Such was the evolution of the radio from a dismissed tool to a vital source of information in the Algerian imaginary of the radio.
And this change was due to the simple fact that the acquisition of a radio set in 1955 represented the sole means of obtaining news of the Revolution from a non-French source. But that was far from its only purpose.
Fanon states:
“The radio set was no longer a part of the occupier’s arsenal of cultural oppression. In making the radio a primary means of resisting the increasingly overwhelming psychological and military pressures of the occupant” .
This change indicates a reconfiguration of the collective vision, where the radio becomes a tool for liberation, meeting the public’s need for independent and authentic information in a society reshaped by the revolution.
Find an example of a FLN radio broadcast here.
The Radio as a Weapon
If there were any doubts about the evolution of the radio, from the tool of the coloniser, to the tool of the colonised, and finally to a weapon against the oppressors, the French response eliminated any doubt, creating a further twist in its sociotechnical imaginary.
In May 1956, the sale of radios was prohibited, except on presentation of a voucher issued by military, police or security services. Not only that, but the sale of battery sets were also prohibited, and batteries were practically withdrawn from the market.
After 1957, French troops formed the habit of confiscating all the radios in the course of a raid:
“At the time we lived right next to the road and he was worried that we would be heard listening to the radio. He told us, ‘Be careful, we don’t know who is behind the door, the military might be passing.’ If the French had found the radio they would have burnt it.”
Not only was the radio a weapon in the imaginary of the Algerians, but increasingly, in that of the French: a dialectical progression from the radio as a coefficient of hostility to a fighting instrument for the people.
And yet the radio was so important, the need for it so great among the general populous, that radios began to be smuggled in from neighbouring Morocco and Tunisia
“Establishing contact with the official voice of the Revolution became as important for the people as acquiring weapons or munitions for the National Army”
The term “weapon” here encapsulates the strategic reappropriation of the radio by the Algerian populace, a deliberate contestation of imposed narratives by the colonial forces. The act of smuggling radios -like the act of buying battery powered transistors- is a manifestation of the new sociotechnical imaginary of the radio, with the Algerian public now actively subverting state restrictions to maintain access to a technology now integral to their resistance efforts.
Luis Zaragoza points out that
“Until 1954 the Algerian natives had been totally disinterested in radio”
And only three years later, in the words of Frantz Fanon:
“Having a radio meant going to war”.
On July 5, 1962, the Master’s house was dismantled: with Algeria declaring its independence, and the radio was unrecognisable as the Master’s tool; its sociotechnical imaginary irreversibly altered.
