Reading the radio-magazine: culture, decolonization and the PAIGC’s Rádio Libertação

This essay examines the history of the PAIGC radio station Rádio Libertação, broadcast from Conakry from 1967. The essay asks how to read the radio station today, and suggests we might see the radio station as a manifestation–albeit limited in scope and life span–of the commitment Amílcar Cabral sketched out in his theoretical writings to collapsing the dichotomy between the practical-utilitarian and the poetic-artistic. The essay reads the radio-magazine as a form that responded to the Portuguese colonial authorities’ information mania, but also as an heir to the journal cultures that sustained black internationalism in earlier decades. It takes the radio as a form in flux, emerging from and remediating the PAIGC’s print journal Libertação. The essay aims to show how the radio-magazine can help us understand the evolution of anticolonial debates about form, culture and society in the 1960s and 1970s.