Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broadcasters in decolonizing countries, Radio Uganda struggled to secure space on the electromagnetic spectrum, challenge neo-colonial information monopolies, balance its internationalist ambitions with its reliance on foreign equipment and training agreements, and fill vacancies. In the same years, its technicians responded to hundreds of reception reports sent by amateur distant listeners – most from Western Europe. The labour of responding to these reports and their cosmopolitan pronouncements represents a hitherto unexplored window onto the exchanges that underscored the globalization of radio technology and its limits in the 1970s.