Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (review)

Media theory, from Benjamin to McLuhan to Kittler, in one way or another rests on the assumption that media technologies work in the way they are supposed to. Function, so to speak, follows form: radios always transmit signals and reproduce sound; motion picture cameras always capture light and reproduce the illusion of life. In Brian Larkin's provocative Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, the case is more complicated. On the surface, Larkin's study examines the ways in which the development of technologies like radio and cinema worked to produce the "skeleton of urban life" in modern Nigeria (5). At the same time, the book offers up a theory of media that begins from the perspective of the developing world, where radio and film first emerged out of colonial efforts to strengthen city infrastructures. Here, media technologies do not always work in the way that they are supposed to: they develop in fits and starts; they break down; their uses are ultimately defined by the aims, and the limits, of empire.

According to Larkin, nowhere in Nigeria was this more the case than in Kano, a Hausa city in the predominantly Muslim northern region of the country. It was in Kano that British colonial authorities began experimenting with radio broadcast networks and mobile cinema units during the late 1930s and early 1940s. From the outset, radio and film were part of an official state program of "indirect rule" in place throughout Nigeria's northern states. On one hand, media technologies-like the railroads and highways that were built throughout the country around the same time-promised to serve as a "connective tissue" (8) linking together the Nigerian territory and facilitating centralized colonial governance. On the other hand, technologies like radio and cinema had utility in and of themselves. As "sublime" spectacles of technological achievement (9), broadcasts and films seemed to reinforce the superiority of Western civilization and its wider mastery over the natural world. However, as Larkin emphasizes throughout the book's excellent opening chapters, on-the-ground experiences of Nigeria's media infrastructure often contradicted the colonial agenda.

Radio, for instance, emerged in cities like Kano around the time of the second World War. Although the British initially intended broadcasting technology to help disseminate state propaganda, Nigerian radio's overall "signal" (to adopt one of Larkin's controlling metaphors) was never clear. Prone to power failures and unstable frequency transmissions, the colonial broadcasting network was fragile at best. More importantly, the programming that did end up "working" gave urban Nigerians new opportunities to experience culture beyond the local. In stark contrast to Europe and the United States, where radio sets had been entrenched in the space of the middle-class home for almost two decades, broadcasting in Kano was a public affair. Colonial authorities installed radio loudspeakers throughout the city's streets-on the walls of libraries, post offices, markets, and other prominent communal spaces-literally wiring the urban environment to global currents of information. The new urban experience of radio ended up dividing the Hausa listening public. Kano's elites were generally in favor of the medium's ability to open up the space of the city to the influence of modern communications. By contrast, more conservative factions regarded radio technology itself with suspicion. Fascinatingly, well into the 1950s and 1960s Kano's religious leaders argued about the extent to which the disembodied sounds heard on-air were "reproductions" or "extensions" of their original sound sources (55). Those who believed the latter insisted that the male radio voice's ability to "reach" the private female ear was a violation of traditional Islamic codes of sexual conduct. Moreover, the visibility of the radio loudspeakers themselves seemed to underscore the extent to which "Christian" noises had begun to pollute the sacred spaces of the city. Here, as elsewhere, Larkin's account suggests that mass media in northern Nigeria were shaped both by the aims of colonial rule and by...