Julie Cyzewski

On June 1, 1963, J. P. Clark’s poem “Agbor Dancer” was recorded for the London-based Transcription Centre’s program Africa Abroad, an English-language radio magazine program distributed for broadcast on multiple African stations. Africa Abroad producer Lewis Nkosi praised the poem and recorded it in its entirety in his review of the anthology Poems from Black Africa, edited by Langston Hughes. In “Agbor Dancer,” the speaker watches a woman dance to drums and juxtaposes the dancer’s connection to “communal” identity through music and dance with the isolating effects of language and print. The poem, first published in print and then broadcast, describes West African aural and kinetic traditions while also using and referencing European literary traditions. What does it mean to take this poem, often read as a reflection on the alienating effects of print culture, and record it for radio broadcast instead of distributing it through print? Christopher Okigbo’s poem “Lament of the Drums,” which Okigbo read selections from and discussed on Africa Abroad in 1965, also explores the relationship between oral and print cultures. These two Anglophone Nigerian poets’ engagements with orality and print are productive sites from which to explore the role of radio in mid-century African literary cultures more broadly. In the case of “Agbor Dancer,” the radio broadcast remediates the written description of music and dance and accentuates the poem’s existing aural elements, including meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Okigbo’s account of composing “Lament of the Drums” emphasizes his work’s synthesis of aurality and print and challenges cultural narratives that describe incommensurable differences between sound and print forms. Clark’s and Okigbo’s verse, read within the context of the Transcription Centre’s intermedial project of producing African literary programming, challenges media studies’ teleological account of a transition between the “primitive” and “typographic” that draws strict distinctions between orality and literacy. Drums, a common reference in postcolonial African verse, appear in each poem as a motif of indigenous cultural expression and communication through which Clark and Okigbo trace Africa’s changing mediascape in the mid-twentieth century. Radio technology, particularly in Africa, has been often compared to the drum, as both are used to communicate aurally across distance. The increasing affordability of radio sets in the mid-twentieth-century, the perception of Africa as “the oral continent par excellence,” and the development of programming from national, commercial, and overseas sources all contributed to the “overwhelming dominance” of radio as a medium. Radio broadcasting was established in Africa during the colonial period; by the 1960s, there was much interest within and outside of Africa in expanding radio access and programming in what Donald Browne terms a “postcolonial scramble for the ether.” Much of this programming was didactic and included political propaganda, religious proselytization, education, social reform, and anti-communism, but “radio was always far more multifaceted and slippery than was intended by the colonial powers.” Radio was taken up as an exciting tool to facilitate the distribution and discussion of literature in programs such as the BBC’s West African Voices and the Transcription Centre’s Africa Abroad; postcolonial writers’ voices were frequently on air through their literary pieces, interviews, and critical commentary. If, as Brian Larkin argues in Signal and Noise, “media technologies” such as radio played a key “role in producing what we call urban Africa,” radio also helped produce what we know as literary Africa. Clark’s and Okigbo’s poems draw from specific drum traditions (and in Okigbo’s case synthesize materials from multiple West African traditions); Africa Abroad programs, however, often return to the question of “the coherence and diversity of African identity.” In using Anglophone Nigerian poems to think about African literature and media studies, the goal of this paper is not to overgeneralize from these poets’ work, but instead to demonstrate how locally contextualized examples challenge certain mid-century claims about drums and orality while also acknowledging what oral literature scholars such as Isidore Okpewho have identified as “common features and customs” across the African continent. Clark’s and Okigbo’s poems do not directly theorize the role of radio in Africa, but “Agbor Dancer” and “Lament of the Drums” present the drum as a unique cultural form and sound communication technology with roots in the precolonial oral and musical traditions of West Africa. The poems and the paratextual material of the radio programs engage key questions of mid-century media studies while also resisting the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning the field’s cultural development narratives.