Broadcasting with one single voice? the Radio Clube of Mozambique and its outsourced private colonial production companies

The Radio Club of Mozambique (RCM) was one of the first and most successful radio stations set up across the territories of the former Portuguese colonial empire. Although it resulted from a private enterprise in the early 1930s, the RCM was closely aligned with the Portuguese colonial regime (Barbosa, 1997; Ribeiro, 2017). Its success and endurance did not, however, rely on public financial support, but mostly on its own ability to attract advertising revenues both from South Africa and from inside the colony, hence boosting the colonial station’s commercial vocation. Between the 1950s and the 1960s, the RCM invested in the most up-to-date and powerful broadcasting equipment and transmitters and hired experienced radio announcers and musicians both from the metropole and abroad. Moreover, it trained many professionals and created artists in order to craft its production team and to produce its radio contents (Sopa, 2014).Still, the RCM’s productions were not enough to fill in airtime. To do so, it needed to outsource a wide range of programs from a few independent producers/ communication agencies operating in colonial Mozambique, namely in the city of Lourenço Marques. These production companies included Produções GOLO, Produções ELMO, DELTA Publicidade, and Excelsior. Finding in the RCM’s airtime a vital work opportunity and source of income, these agencies/ producers would compete over broadcasting time and popularity. Each managed to build a distinct identity according to the type of programs, music, and events covered, produced, and sold to the RCM. Some of the questions yet to be answered relate nevertheless to the strategies which the agencies found to build up a reputation and continuously provide RCM with radio programs. Moreover, their practices of negotiation of alternative proposals and airtime with the RCM; as well as whether they held any wiggle room to propose their own production to the RCM still require a focused inquiry.In this paper, we address these private companies’ political, economic, and programming strategies to succeed in selling their contents to the RCM and to maintain their business model until the end of the colonial rule in 1974. We also discuss some of the tactics which a few of these independent producers have attempted/ managed to put in place to allign and/or subvert hegemonic practices. Our goal is to understand whether and how broadcasting production companies in colonial Mozambique complied and/or transgressed colonial regulations and expectations while moving according to the market. This approach will enable us to re-analyze both the scope and the limits of hegemonic colonial power in the field of broadcasting in Mozambique, and its essential articulations with the international market, following Domingos and Pereira’s (2010) epistemological interrogations. We draw on primary and secondary sources on the history of the RCM, as well as on in-depth interviews conducted with formerly privileged radio announcers, producers, and sound technicians of the period, currently based both in Maputo (Mozambique) and in Lisbon (Portugal).