Subversive Sound - Transnational Radio Arabic Recordings and The Dangers of Listening in French Colonial Algeria

Subversive Sound: Transnational Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the Dangers of Listening in
French Colonial Algeria, 1934-1939

Author(s): REBECCA P. SCALES
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 52, No. 2 (APRIL 2010), pp. 384-
417
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Comparative Studies in Society and History 2010;52(2):384-417.
0010-4175/10 $15.00 © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010
doi:10.1017/S0010417510000083
Subversive Sound: Transnational

Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the
Dangers of Listening in French
Colonial Algeria, 1934-1939
REBECCA P. SCALES
George Mason University
In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked

Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the Fren
racy that "natives" in the Arab cafés {café maures) of the city were t
biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian r
that featured "commentaries unfavorable to France" and "openly
France's Muslim policy."1 As the governor of three oversea
départements, Carde had already received notification that the a
North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Je
the director of national security, or Sûreté, in France's Interior
warned regional prefects, "In a number of cities a large portion of
electric industry - sales and the construction of devices - is in th
foreigners." Berthoin feared that the dominance of France's radi
market by large, multinational firms would allow enemy agents to
transmitters beneath the cover of radio sales and report clandestin
maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefe
"discreet investigations" into the civil status, political affiliation, and
This article is excerpted from my book manuscript Sounding the Nation: Radio and
Auditory Culture in Interwar France. Generous support for this research was provid
Chateaubriand from the Government of France, an IDRF from the Social Science Re
and a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society. I thank Darcie Fon
Sessions, Bonnie Smith, and the anonymous reviewers of CSSH for their helpful su
revisions.
1 CAOM [Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence] 15H32, Note de M. Le Gouver-
neur Général d'Algérie à M. le Préfet du Département d'Alger, 22 Nov. 1934 (Copiée à M. le Direc-
teur des Affaires Indigènes après notre entretien, 17 Nov. 1934 and 22 Nov. 1934).
384
SUBVERSIVE SOUND 385
of radio merchants and their personnel.2 While ostensibly directed at metropoli-

tan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria - a strategic periphery of
"Greater France" and home to a sizeable European population of German and
Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France's indigenous-based African
Army (Armée d'Afrique). By 1935, rumors about radio espionage and subver-
sive auditory propaganda circulating through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy
compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web to
monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects
of radio propaganda on the "native mentality."3
During the 1930s, transnational radio broadcasting fueled fears within Algeria's
colonial administration, France's security services, and in metropolitan political
circles about the conjoined threats of foreign subversion and domestic political
instability in the colony. The rising fascist powers of Germany and Italy challenged
France's geopolitical status on the Continent and in its colonies with their newly
streamlined radio propaganda machines, hoping to sway the loyalties of French
subjects through sophisticated attacks on liberal democracy and French colonial
policies.4 When Mussolini openly declared Italy's expansionist aims in Tunisia,
Ethiopia, and the Middle East in 1934, the fascist Italian short-wave station Radio-
Bari began transmitting from the boot of the Italian peninsula, proclaiming daily in
Arabic Italy's support for emerging nationalist movements in Egypt, Syria,
Lebanon, and Palestine and their promotion of a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic
identity.5 After Franco's June 1936 coup opened the Spanish Civil War,
Arabic-language broadcasts from Spanish nationalist stations in Seville (retrans-
mitted through Tétouan) and Ceuta (a Spanish territory in northern Morocco)
reached Algeria, as did broadcasts from Cairo, Alexandria, Zagreb, Istanbul,
and occasionally even Moscow.6 The mere existence of the Moscow broadcasts
2 CAOM 15H32, J. Berthoin, le Directeur de la Sûreté Nationale pour M. le Ministre

de l'Intérieur, à M. les Préfets, 27 Sept. 1934. The Governor's office asked the three departmental
prefects to begin their investigation of radio merchants on 31 Dec. 1934.
J CAOM 15H32, Note de M. Le Gouverneur Général d'Algérie à M. le Prefect du Département
d'Alger, 22 Nov. 1934 (Copiée à M. le Directeur des Affaires Indigènes après notre entretien, 17
Nov. 1934 and 22 Nov. 1934).
CAC (Centre des archives contemporaines-Fontainbleau) 19870714-25, Marius Moutet, Min-
istre des Colonies à M. le Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, 13 Aug. 1936. Moutet responded
to a query from Foreign Affairs. German propaganda broadcasts directed at metropolitan France
began in the early 1930s, although Nazi propagandists turned their attention to France's overseas
colonies only in the mid- 1930s. The short-wave Zeesen station first targeted sub-Saharan Africa
and Indochina before beginning Arabic-language broadcasts in 1938. Radio-Berlin began trans-
mitting in Arabic in 1939.
For an analysis of German and Italian propaganda strategies, see Basheer M. Nanf, "The Arabs
and the Axis, 1933-1940," Arab Studies Quarterly 19, 2 (Spring 1997): 1 -24; Manuela Williams,
Mussolini's Propaganda Abroad: Subversion in the Mediterranean and Middle East (London
1996), 1-42.
CAOM 15H32, Ministère de la Défense Nationale et de Guerre. Etat-Major de l'Armée,
Section d'Outre-Mer, Bulletin des renseignements des questions musulmanes (SECRET), 1 July
1937.
386 REBECCA P. SCALES
provoked alarm among colonial civil servants due to the Comintern's history of
supporting anti-colonial nationalism. For much of the 1930s the North African
Star (Etoile Nord-Africaine), the sole interwar organization to demand Algeria's
complete separation from France, had maintained close ties with the French Com-
munist Party and left-wing militants in Paris. By 1937, French politicians across
the political spectrum deemed the surveillance of Algerian radio listeners and
control of the Mediterranean airwaves to be vital to the preservation of political
stability in the colony, and by consequence, to French national security as a whole.
In his 1959 essay A Dying Colonialism, Martinican psychiatrist and anti-
colonial theorist Frantz Fanon first alerted scholars to the pivotal role of radio in
shaping the politics of decolonization and Third World liberation struggles,
describing the Algerian War of Independence as a battle waged in the airwaves
over North Africa and the ears of Algerian radio listeners as much as in the
violent clashes between the French Army and Maghribi militants.7 Yet in recent
decades, historians of empire have portrayed Western imperialism as a preemi-
nently visual enterprise, emphasizing how the imperial epistemologies of anthro-
pology and ethnography exploited painting, photography, and film to reinforce
ideologies of European superiority. By furnishing Europeans with the discursive
and material tools to "enframe" and contain their African and Asian subject popu-
lations, these emerging disciplines shaped colonial policymaking and methods of
imperial rule.8 The role of the mass media in European empires, and auditory
culture in particular, has until recently sustained only limited scholarly attention.9
While this lacuna undoubtedly reflects the fragility of the audio-historical archive
(whether in the form of phonograph cylinders, gramophone records, or magnetic
tape), it also exposes a pervasive tendency among historians and contemporary
cultural theorists to privilege visuality as the defining feature of post-Enlighten-
ment rationality and modern governmentality.10 However, as national broad-
casting systems took root in Europe, colonial bureaucrats overseas began
7 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York 1967 [1959]).

Canonical texts responsible for this "visual" turn in colonial studies include: Edward Said,
Orientalism (New York 1978); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The
British in India (Princeton 1996); Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge 1998), esp.
ch. 2; and Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagin-
ation in Late Victorian and Early Edwardian England (New Haven 1997).
9 The majority of scholarly literature addressing European broadcasting in the colonies examines
the BBC's Empire service. See John MacKenzie, '"In Touch with the Infinite': The BBC and The
Empire, 1923-53," in J. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester 1986),
165-91; Alasdair Pinkerton, "Radio and the Raj: Broadcasting in British India, 1920-1940,"
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, 2 (2008): 167-91; Joselyn Ziven, "Bent: A Colonial Sub-
versive and Indian Broadcasting," Past and Present 162 (1999): 195-220; J. Ziven, "The Imagined
Reign of the Iron Lecturer," Modern Asian Studies 32, 3 (1998): 717-34. One notable exception is
Rudolf Mrazek's Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton
2002), which considers the relationship between radio, settler life, and Indonesian nationalism in
the interwar Netherlands Indies.
For a useful survey of the secondary literature on this subject, see Mark M. Smith, Sensing the
Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley 2007), 1-39.
experimenting with radio technology and broadcast sound as a novel method of

distance communication, a source of entertainment, and a weapon of propaganda,
making radios a technological centerpiece of colonial modernity. That Britain,
France, and the Netherlands all introduced imperial broadcasting schemes
during the early 1930s, at the precise moment when indigenous nationalist move-
ments gained momentum and began to demand not merely reforms to imperial
policy, but complete independence from European rule, should compel scholars
to reexamine auditory culture as a framework for understanding late colonialism.
In French colonial Algeria, radio and an emerging mass culture of broadcast
sound became a new site for contests of power between Algerians and the
French colonial state, metropolitan politicians and colonial "old hands," and ulti-
mately, between France and its diplomatic rivals. Radio sound, as a transgressive,
invisible, and distinctly modern medium that could transcend physical barriers and
traverse the divide between public and private life, appeared to Europeans to be
both a promising instrument of social control and a risky tool of social democra-
tization. Yet as Europeans in Algeria and France debated how to best exploit
radio in a colonial context, the emergence of a global market in Arabic records
threatened to further destabilize colonial politics, revealing troubling links
between auditory culture and political subversion. Historians of Algeria have
often portrayed the 1930s as a period of escalating French violence and repression
culminating the massacres of nationalist demonstrators in Guelma and Sétif in 1 945,
but investigating this decade through the lens of auditory culture instead exposes
the limits of colonial hegemony against the backdrop of rising French anxieties
about the nation's declining imperial fortunes and geopolitical status. Drawing on
state archives from both sides of the Mediterranean, this article reveals how
French authorities came to view radios and phonographs as dangerous and subver-
sive technologies because the sounds they produced so consistently evaded the dis-
ciplinary mechanisms of the colonial state. More important, as French authorities
struggled to devise new strategies for controlling broadcast sound and Algerian lis-
teners, they were forced to recognize Algerians as political subjects and acknowl-
edge the transnational dimensions of imperial policymaking, both factors that
would continue to complicate Franco- Algerian relations into the 1960s.
THE POLITICS OF RADIO BROADCASTING IN INTERWAR ALGERIA
Radio broadcasting debuted in Algeria against the back

scholar Jacques Berque termed the "false apogee"
decade when the triumphant imperial self-confidence o
tions in 1930 commemorating the centenary of Franc
barely masked the ethno-racial and class tensions tha
during the Constantine pogroms of 1934.11 The w
1 1 Jacques Berque, French North Africa: The Maghreb between the

1962).
{colons) who controlled Algerian agricultural production of wine and wheat on

their vast countryside estates felt outnumbered and threatened by an increas-
ingly discontented population of impoverished wage laborers. In Algeria's
cities, the multiethnic European population (of French, Italian, Maltese, and
Spanish descent) witnessed their dominance over urban politics challenged
by the rise of working-class solidarities and the emergence of a vocal Algerian
(and primarily Muslim) professional elite composed of naturalized "citizens"
and colonial "subjects" - civil servants, magistrates, public school teachers,
translators, physicians, and lawyers. When a coterie of European businessmen
pressured the Algerian colonial state to construct Radio-RT.T. -Alger as
France's first colonial broadcasting station, they hoped the "Voice of
Algeria" might combat economic stagnation and European depopulation by
promoting Algeria's agricultural products and tourist destinations in
France.12 At the same time, they understood the political utility of appealing
to metropolitan colonial enthusiasts by positioning Radio-Alger within
France's larger imperial project.
During the late 1920s, nearly five years before the creation of a national
(RT.T.) network of state radio stations, Parisian colonial lobbyists had begun
campaigning for an imperial broadcasting system to complement the
privately-owned amateur stations then transmitting in North Africa, Madagas-
car, and Indochina. As President of the Association Colonies-Sciences Maurice
Martelli told a Parisian audience in 1929, radio broadcasting held a natural
appeal for France's colonial subjects, who as "auditory beings" accustomed
to purely oral communication, would readily absorb the messages transmitted
to them via the airwaves.13 Lobbyists' repeated appeals eventually compelled
the French parliament to endorse the construction of the short-wave Poste
Colonial, which debuted to great fanfare at the 193 i Colonial Exposition at
Vincennes.14 At Radio-Alger's 1929 inauguration, Constantine lawyer and
12 On the Centenary festivities, see Jonathan K. Gosnell, The Politics ofFrenchness in Colonial
Alseria, 1930-1954 (Rochester, N.Y. 2002), 29-30.
13 Maurice Martelli, Actes & comptes-rendus de l'Association Colonies-Sciences, 5e Année,
N54. Dec. 1929. 241-42. Reoort oresented at the Congrès National de la Radiodiffusion of 1929.
Between 1928 and 1930, the colonial lobbying groups Radio-Agricole Française and Associ-
ation Colonies-Sciences, together with the Institut Colonial, petitioned the French parliament to
construct the Poste Colonial, which debuted in 1931 after numerous construction delays. French
settlers living abroad and metropolitan commentators criticized the station for failing to produce
programs in any non-European languages until after 1935 (and then only in Arabic). Although
French-language stations existed in Saigon and Hanoi, during the mid- 1930s they broadcast pro-
grams only several hours per day. See the Bulletin officiel du Radio-Club de l'Indochine du
Nord, 1935. Radio amateur clubs in French West Africa and in Madagascar transmitted short broad-
casts and entrepreneurs constructed small transmitters in Tunis and Rabat during the mid- 1930s,
although neither of these North African stations possessed the broadcast power or cultural influence
of Radio-Alger until after 1937. To this date, there is no comprehensive study of French imperial
broadcasting, though two studies illuminate the politics surrounding the construction of the Poste
Colonial: journalist Frédéric Brunnquell's Fréquence monde: Du poste colonial à RFI (Paris 1 992),
and Jean Charron 's doctoral thesis Les ondes courtes et la radiodiffusion française: Le services des
Centenary Commissioner Gustave Mercier paid lip service to Parisian debates,

describing how the voices of the new North African station would advance a
spiritual conquest of Arab hearts and minds by transgressing the public/
private divide to reach into the impenetrable spaces of Algerian domestic life
to advance the "civilizing mission." Radio-Alger, Mercier asserted, would
shore up consensus for Algérie française by joining "all the pioneers of the
countryside and all the isolated towns and farms of the interior . . . together
with the heart and mind of the Algerian capital ... to constitute the permanent
affirmation of the union of all of the Algerian population."15 Operating under
the joint control of the colonial state and Algeria's settler elite, Radio-Alger
became the first professionally run radio station in the French empire.
Despite colonial enthusiasts' elaborate schemes to promote indigenous radio
listening in French overseas colonies through the installation of central village
radios and loudspeakers in markets and public squares, colonial civil servants
in Algeria judged metropolitan fantasies for creating a mass of docile native lis-
teners to be woefully impractical and politically naïve. Jean Mirante, the director
of the Algerian Bureau of Native Affairs, feared radio broadcasting would only
open up another arena for dissent against French rule within an already heavily
censored public sphere at a moment fraught with political tension. In the wake of
the First World War, the French colonial administration sought to quell the rising
tide of Algerian discontent by peacefully co-opting Muslim elites into the politi-
cal process. However, the 1919 Jonnart reforms, which opened up civil service
positions to Muslims and expanded the Muslim electorate to allow more Alger-
ians limited participation in local government, instead galvanized Algerian
politics.16 By the mid-1930s, a diverse range of autonomous Algerian political
organizations, from the reformist Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama and
the liberal-minded Fédération des élus de Constantine to the openly nationalist
North African Star, aired their grievances against the colonial state in municipal
assemblies, at political demonstrations, and in the pages of numerous French-
and Arabic-language indigenous newspapers. Elected spokesmen from the Fran-
cophone, pro-assimilation Muslim elite declared their loyalty to France while
appropriating the language of republican universalism to expose the hypocrisies
of colonialism and demand the expansion of the suffrage and the suppression of
émissions vers l'étranger, période 1931-1974. Problèmes physiques, législatives, et politiques.

Thèse de 3e cycle, Université de Bordeaux, 1984. See also Cécile Méadel, "Les postes coloniaux,"
in Jean-Noël Jeanneny, ed., L 'Echo du siècle: Dictionnaire historique de la radio et de la télévision
en France (Paris 1999), 678-80.
Gustave Mercier, Commissaire Général du Centenaire, L 'Entreprise de la France en Afrique,
Vovage de M. le Président de la République, 4-12 Mai, 1930 (Algiers 1930).
16 Claude Collot, Les institutions d'Algérie durant la période coloniale, 1830-1962 (Alger
1972), 56-105. For a succinct discussion of Algerian Muslims' evolving citizenship status, see
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
(Ithaca 2006), 19-54.
the repressive native legal code (code de Vindigénat). Algerian politici

allied themselves with European opposition parties, such as the French
nist Party, in ways the right-leaning colonial government and settler po
found both troubling and confusing.17 Although the French administra
historically relied upon a tenuous balance between repression and the m
lation of indigenous elites to govern Algeria, by the mid- 1930s coloni
orities no longer knew who within Algerian society represented thei
allies. In such a contentious political climate, Mirante warned Governor
"Radio broadcasting is far too effective of a means of propaganda for the
istration not to oversee all communications directed toward the natives.
Between 1930 and 1936, Radio- Alger primarily transmitted French-la
programs for European audiences (local and Continental) that reflecte
largely conservative politics of Algiers' settler elites: radio dramas, c
"live" reportages of sports matches, talks on viticulture, literature and
and hours of recorded music. Because the large, cabinet-style radios
early 1930s still represented a luxury for many in North Africa, stati
eagerly backed radio manufacturers in their campaigns to sell receivers, s
ing glossy spreads in L 'Afrique du Nord illustré and Annales Africaines t
taposed Radio-Alger performers against advertisements portraying r
indispensable commodities for a modern colonial household.19 In a co
to dialogue with Algeria's expanding Muslim middle-class, the Gov
Office approved a few intermittent talks by politically "safe" Algerian
ities "who would receive without difficulty the counsels and direction
Bureau of Native Affairs," including Ahmed Ben Lakahal, the muezzi
Algiers mosque, and Chérif Benhabyles, a French-educated lawyer from
stantine.20 The majority of the "native broadcasts" consisted of "orien
certs" featuring Arabic-language recordings or live performances by A
musicians. Algerian "tenor" and Arabic theater pioneer Mahieddine Bac
and his El-Moutribia orchestra contributed frequently to these broad
Important works examining interwar Algerian politics include Charles- André Julie
algériens musulmans et la France, 1871-1919 (Paris 1968); Charles-André Julien, L'A
nord en marche: Nationalismes musulmans et souveraineté française (Paris 1 972); M
Kaddache, Histoire du nationalisme algérien. Question nationale et politique algérien
1951 (Alger 1981); Pascal Le Pautremat, La politique musulmane de la France aux XX
De l'Hexagone aux terres d'Islam. Espoirs, réussites, échecs (Paris 2003); Jacques Bou
Un parlement colonial? Les délégations financières algériennes, 1898-1945 (Rou
James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge 2006);
jamin Stora, Nationalistes algérienes et révolutionnaires français (Paris 1987).
CAOM 15H32, Jean Mirante, Secretaire des Affaires Indigènes à M. le Secretaire Gen
Gouvernement, 21 Feb. 1933.
19 Lucien Goetz, "Le salon algérien de la T.S.F. en 1935," Annales africaines, 20 Oct. 19
"Le Xe Salon Algérien de la T.S.F.," L'Afrique du nord illustrée, 1 Nov. 1935. Rudolf
makes a similar claim about colonial radio in the Dutch East Indies in Engineers of Happ
CAOM 15H-32, Note de Jean Mirante, le Directeur des Affaires Indigenes a M. Le Di
d'Intérieur et des Beaux- Arts, 17 Aug. 1933.
SUBVERSIVE SOUND 3ÇI
alongside Lili Labassi, Sassi, Mohammed El-Anka, and Cheika Tetma,

varied repertory of "classical" Arabo- Andalusian music and "popular"
songs {la chaabi), Arabic covers of French chansons, and hybrid
numbers that blended Arabic lyrics with fox-trots and rumbas.21 B
recalls in his memoirs how despite colonial censorship, these radio perf
offered him and fellow musicians the opportunity to make their voic
among a wider North African audience and promote a popular r
Arabic music.22
Still, Radio- Alger 's use of "literary" Arabic as the primary broad
language for these limited "native" programs (a mere tenth of the w
broadcast schedule) suggests that the colonial state never intended t
reach an audience outside the Muslim elite, a strategy further evide
the selection of the Arabic announcer: Omar Guendouz, an Arabic te
Algiers' Ecole Sarrouy and a contributor to the pro-assimilation new
La voix des humbles. Between 1933 and 1935, Guendouz became an in
ary between the state and the indigenous elite, proposing potential sta
tributors to the station director and introducing an array of Algerian
musical performers, and records in literary Arabic. However, the majorit
Algerian population spoke Algerian Arabic or Berber dialects, as colo
cational policies had for decades rendered classical Arabic the pr
Algerian men with a French school diploma or a private Qur'anic edu
a group that included many French speakers for whom Radio- Alger
broadcasts would have been readily accessible.23
Even so, Radio- Alger 's limited Arabic broadcasting initiatives tur
airwaves over Algeria into a symbolic battleground for the mounting
struggle between Algerians and French authorities over control of th
itself. Between 1933 and 1936, Algerian deputies to the Assemblé
cières (the closest equivalent to a colonial parliament) and Algerian jou
contested racist representations of Arabs in the station's radio plays, d
programs in dialectical Arabic, and insisted Radio-Alger devote greater
21 Ibid. See the program listings from 1933-1934 in Radio- Alger: Bulletin officiel m
l'Amicale de Radio P.T.T. Alger.
Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Mémoires, suivi d'une étude sur le théâtre dans les pays isla
vol. 1 (Alger 1968), 366-68. The caché of a radio performance, Bachetarzi recalls, com
Tunisian singer Fadila Khetemi to perform unpaid on Radio- Alger in 1930 after she refu
for free in a private concert. Bachetarzi used his own exposure via the airwaves to sign
deals for advertising films and radio jingles commissioned by metropolitan firms selli
to North Africans.
Alam Messaoudi, The Teaching or Arabic in rrench Algeria and Contemporary r ranee,
French History 20, 3 (2006): 297-317. Scholars remain divided over whether the colonial state
deliberately fostered illiteracy and de-Arabization by restricting the teaching of Arabic in public
schools and relegating it to the status of a "foreign" language. Recent historiography suggests
that frequent regime changes in nineteenth-century Algeria produced uneven Arabic education
policies. However, literacy in classical Arabic remained restricted to a relatively small sector
of the overall Algerian population.
to "native" programming. Responding to European charges that no A

listened to Radio- Alger, Dr. Bendjelloul, a leading spokesman f
Fédération des élus de Constantine, told a government representative
a 1936 session of the Assemblées, "The use of radio is widespread
Muslims; they exist in cafés maures, among individuals, in towns and
countryside" and "we ask that an effort be made to increase the [Arabic
casts."24 During its first six years of operation, Radio-Alger consequent
to produce the passive "native" audience imagined by colonial ideo
instead provoking Algerian élus to demand that Radio-Alger give
"voices" a larger place in the airwaves over North Africa. Their claims
side a rise in foreign propaganda broadcasting, convinced colonial aut
that radio and an emerging mass culture of broadcast sound posed a
to the stability and security of Algérie française.
When Governor Jules Carde constructed a surveillance web in December
1934 to investigate Algerian radio listening habits, he worried less about Radio-
Alger's broadcasts than the voices of foreign propagandists penetrating invis-
ibly across Algeria's borders. From the start, the French colonial administration
responded differently to the threat of foreign propaganda in North Africa than
Parisian politicians and the French security services of the métropole. Starting
in the 1920s, metropolitan radio audiences could tune in regularly to foreign
radio programs from across the Continent, and German and Italian propaganda
broadcasts bombarded French border regions as early as 1933. Although diplo-
matic tensions prompted the French state to construct a radio listening service
in 1935 to monitor the content of foreign broadcasts (primarily politicians'
radio speeches) and a Radio Police {Police de l'Air) patrolled the French
airwaves in search of clandestine and unlicensed amateur transmitters, the
national police seldom interfered with the listening practices of ordinary
French citizens.25 In contrast, colonial authorities virtually ignored the
content of Radio-Ban's early propaganda broadcasts. Rather than establish a
listening service, which would have required a significant outlay of funds
and personnel, Carde instead directed his staff to monitor Algerian radio listen-
ers themselves, a decision justified on the grounds that Algerian subjects did
not possess the same "rights" to listen in to the airwaves as freely as French
citizens.26 Carde clearly wanted to quickly quell any manifestation of
24 CARAN [Centre d'accueil et de recherches des Archives nationales] F60-739, Présidence du

Conseil. See the interventions of René Foudil, Abdelkader Smati, Sisbane, and Dr. Bendjelloul in
the Assemblées Financières. Procès- Verbal de l'Assemblée Algérienne, session ordinaire, 1933,
section arabe, 1933 (ca. May); Assemblées Financières Algériennes, Session ordinaire de 1935,
Délégation indigène, section arabe, 37; Assemblées Financières Algériennes, 7e séance, 23 Nov.
1936, 175-76.
CAC 19950218-2, Radio France, Service des Archives écrites, Report on the Functioning of
the Centre d'Ecoute, Direction Général de Radiodiffusion, n.d.
26 CAOM 9H50, Louis Millot, Directeur Général des Affaires Indigènes à M. le Secretaire
Général du Gouvernement, 21 Feb. 1938. The colonial administration in Algeria first proposed
anti-French unrest incited by radio propaganda, yet his fixation with w

people, rather than listening in to the airwaves, exposed longstanding
pations within the French security services and the particularities of t
war colony-metropole relationship.
Like many European colonial regimes, French Algeria was, in the w
of Ann Laura Stoler, a "taxonomic state." Since the mid-nineteenth c
the French Army and colonial civil servants had developed a wide ran
visual surveillance techniques to identify, categorize, subdue, and con
population. Physicians and ethnographers elaborated racial and ethno-r
typologies to classify Algerians, targeting the Arab-Muslim population
most resistant to the French "civilizing mission" vis-à-vis the more
able" Berbers.27 Beginning in the 1880s, and increasingly after Worl
French police tracked Muslim pilgrims en route to Middle Eastern ho
Colonial authorities feared Algerian Muslims' exposure to nationalist cu
in the French protectorates of Syria and Lebanon, particularly after th
cular rise in the mid- 1920s of the Lebanese pan- Arab propagandist
Arslan, whose Geneva-based newspaper La Nation Arabe attacked
interventions in Islamic societies across North Africa and the Levant.2
Police-state measures adopted during the First World War further
metropolitan and colonial bureaucrats' fantasies of maintaining intern
cal stability and securing France's external borders by rendering the a
of subject and foreign populations visible to the French state. Faced
onslaught of postwar immigration from Eastern Europe and the
metropolitan security services modernized older methods of visual sur
methods, using photographs, passports, and work permits to track imm
at border crossings, political demonstrations, and ports, strategies that
increasing importance in the Maghrib as the North African Star drew sig
financial and political support from Algerian workers living in France.
surveillance strategies were adopted by indigenous and French civil ser
the Bureau of Native Affairs, policemen, and eventually, the security
of the French Army, and all shaped the colonial state's investigation of
radio listening. However, if modern state power relies upon strategies
to render populations "legible," as James C. Scott has argued, French
creating a radio listening service within the Algerian P.T.T. in 1938, and then only afte
from metropolitan politicians.
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in
Rule (Berkeley 2002), 206-7; Patricia M. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, R
Prejudice in Colonial Algeria (New York 1995).
Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder aft
(Berkeley 2008), 204; see also William L. Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan
Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin 1985), 90-114.
Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control bet
Wars (Cornell 2006), 17-43.
surveillance relied upon no single, coherent logic, but rather a shifting

tactics driven by fear, racial prejudice, the desire to stabilize colonial p
and above all, a profound uncertainty about how an emerging mass m
sound would operate in a diverse, multiethnic society.30
When Radio-Bari first began transmitting in Arabic, the Governor's
had no idea how many Algerians even owned radios, and in keeping with
honored methods, Carde asked the Algerian Postal Administration to
lists of Algerian radio owners. The recent institution in 1933 of the annua
license fee aided this task by requiring radio owners to register their re
with their local Post Office branch. As in metropolitan France, colonial
registers recorded the owner's name and the radio's classification for p
private usage. However, colonial postal agents also recorded Algerians
status {état civil): their marital status, profession, and classification as
"subjects" or naturalized French "citizens," this latter category presum
less suspect from a political point of view. These early surveys of radio
ership revealed several important facts. The price of personal radio r
(ranging from 500 to 1500 francs in 1933-1934) prohibited many Alge
outside the educated Muslim elite from buying them. In Algeria'
départements, postal agents counted only 225 total radios in "native"
with 43 in Oran, 66 in Constantine, and 116 in Algiers. Algerian radio o
ship appeared concentrated in urban neighborhoods (for example, eight
the cities Constantine and Bòne, versus seven in Bougie), with the ma
of radio owners living in Algiers.31 Although the number of registere
in Algerian hands rose to an estimated two thousand out of sixty tho
total colonial radios by 1937, the Bureau of Native Affairs believ
figure remained well below the reality because "statistics do not perm
cisions on this point."32 Many Algerian radio owners, like their metrop
counterparts, likely avoided declaring their radios to escape paying th
tax. Moreover, colonial civil servants consistently doubted the validity
istics that relied upon self-reporting, believing that Algerians deliberat
30 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Co
Have Failed (New Haven 1998), 5-8.
CAOM 1 5H32, P.T.T. Direction de Constantine, Liste des indigenes ayant declare un p
radiodiffusion, 30 Nov. 1934. See also the list of radios owned by Algerians in the Dép
d'Alger (1934), and Oran (Dec. 1934).
32 CAOM 15H32, Ministère de la Défense Nationale et de Guerre, Etat-Major de l'A
Section d'Outre-Mer, Bulletin des renseignements des questions musulmanes, 1 July 1937
ing to this memo, the Algerian Bureau of Native Affairs questioned the veracity of the P.T.T.
ownership statistics, believing the real numbers to be much higher. Metropolitan France
four million registered radio receivers in 1937, but in both métropole and colony det
the precise number of radio listeners remains difficult since families listened to a singl
and individuals listened in public. Precise statistics on the number of public receivers ar
able. See Cécile Méadel, Histoire de la radio des années trente (Paris 1994), 92.
about information such as census data to escape the scrutiny of th

state in their private lives.33
Personal radio ownership statistics revealed little about broadcast
because of the many public radios in use. Early reports of Alg
usage stressed the growing numbers oî cafés maures, greasy spoon
{crémeries françaises), brothels, and "Muslim associations (cerc
Algerian men gathered in groups to listen to the radio and where f
paganda might reach a potentially unlimited number of listeners. Fo
nial state, collective radio listening promised to be a far more
phenomenon than domestic listening, for audiences could discuss a
the broadcasts, lending them a greater authority. In fact, French
long targeted the café maure, a traditional site of Muslim male so
and a gathering place for transient laborers, as a special target for s
and after the First World War, as a breeding ground for nationalist an
nist politics.34 Although memoirs testify that North African women
in wealthier families who could afford a home receiver) became av
enthusiasts during the interwar years, that French policemen focuse
veillance almost exclusively on public and collective listening betr
assumption that Algerian men alone represented significant politica
Colonial civil servants had for decades privileged the information
be gathered from cafés and public spaces - based on rumors, whis
hearsay - as the most reliable indicators of the "native" mentality
sometimes bribed café owners to serve as informants and report on po
sidence in their businesses.36 However, radio threatened to disrupt
honored method of information collection. Café owners who used radios to
attract a clientele to their businesses were less likely to volunteer details
about customers' listening habits or the stations their radios received. More-
over, Radio-Bari 's initial broadcasts were short and irregular (ranging from
five to fifteen minutes in length), making it difficult for colonial policemen
to catch Algerians in the act of listening.37 For European policemen and officers
Kamel Kateb, Européens, "indigenes',' et juifs en Algérie (1830-1962): Représentations et

réalités des populations (Paris 2001), 109-10, 197.
Omar Carlier, Le cate maure, sociabilité masculine et eirervescence citoyenne (Algerie
XVIIe-XXe siècles), Annales ESC, juillet-août 4 (1990): 975-1003.
Fátima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (New York 1995), esp. chs.
1,10, and 12. Mernissi describes the pivotal role that radio played in her early 1930s childhood in
Fez by inspiring women in her extended family to imagine alternative lifestyles for themselves
outside the family harem.
Thomas, Empires oj Intelligence, 27, 78.
Daniel Grange, "Structure et techniques d'une propagande: les émissions arabes de Radio-
Bari," Relations internationales 2 (1974): 165-85. In 1934, Radio-Bari transmitted short news bul-
letins ranging from five to fifteen minutes in length. In the French protectorate of Morocco, the
Service de la Direction des Affaires Politiques began transcribing and systematically analyzing
Radio-Bari 's broadcasts in 1937. French authorities in Algeria did not follow suit until early
1938. Radio-Bari 's broadcasts attacked the French code de V indigenati forced military
in the Bureau of Native Affairs accustomed to recording applause or cheers

during theatrical performances and film screenings or documenting the
shouts of political demonstrators, deciding precisely when radio listening
became a political act proved enormously challenging, in part because it
relied upon a visual register on a listener's face or a manifest physical reac-
tion.38 Colonial civil servants began to portray foreign radio broadcasts as a
technological manifestation of the téléphone arabe - what some Algerians
referred to as "Radio-Burnous" - the indigenous information (gossip)
network that the colonial state always sought to tap into, but consistently
feared.39 For this reason, colonial authorities rapidly turned their attention to
Arabic recordings, which appeared as dangerous as radio transmissions, but
at least initially, offered a means to capture the elusive and temporal qualities
of broadcast sound.
CAPTURED SOUND: FRENCH SURVEILLANCE AND ARABIC RECORDS
In their initial forays into the colony's cafés maures to

radio listening, colonial policemen and P.T.T. staff made
ery: record listening, perhaps even more than radio list
popular and widespread pastime. Edouard Estaudié, the dir
P.T.T, reported to the governor in December 1934, "no [f
casting in Arabic could be heard" in the Algiers cafés he
owners used their radios as "pick-up" devices for playin
receivers.40 Policemen deployed to investigate foreigne
conscription, and colonial policies in Syria and Lebanon. Radio-Bari oft

other Italian stations (Rome) sometimes retransmitted its broadcast
10APOM30 (C.H.E.A.M. [Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l'Afriqu
M. Delahaye, "Les émissions de langue arabe du poste Radio P.T.T
M. Delahaye au Cours de Perfectionnement des Affaires Indigènes en f
French surveillance of theatrical productions acquired a new intensit
Mahieddine Bachetarzi and several other Algerian actors pioneered c
sketches in the Algerian Arabic dialect. The Bureau of Native Affair
and song lyrics, but performers sometimes improvised on stage by twistin
tures to offer subtle and humorous critiques of the colonial administra
one of Radio- Alger 's regular performers, excelled at this strategy. See
en Algérie: Histoire et enjeux (Aix-en-Provence 2002), 23-29.
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 27. European colonial powers displ
est in indigenous communication networks. In his Empire and Informat
and Social Communication in India, 1 780-1870 (Cambridge 1996), C. A.
colonial civil servants constantly feared the political threat posed by go
particularly after the 1857 Indian Rebellion, when rumors circulate
secreted messages on "chapatis" between rebel groups. During the Alge
tinued to fear the role of the "téléphone arabe' in transmitting FLN co
Dying Colonialism, 78. Mahieddine Bachetarzi uses the term "Radio-Bur
phenomenon in his Mémoires, 324.
0 CAOM 15H32, Edouard Estaudié, Chef des Services Centrales au
Général des Affaires Indigènes, 18 Dec. 1934.
electric sales outlets turned up several suspicious persons, but simil

that radio merchants made higher profits from Arabic-language r
than radios. In part because phonographs required no electricity o
to work, they proved to be a more practical entertainment choice t
for those living in rural areas. Even electric gramophones remain
than wireless sets, rendering them accessible not only to the Mus
fessional class, but to the Algerian laborers who crowded Algiers
port cities in search of work.41 In fact, North Africa experienced a
in record sales during the interwar years, as multinational firms inclu
Columbia, and Gramophone recruited Maghribi artists to cater to th
European taste for "ethnographic" records and the expanding Arabi
market.42 Egyptian musical films playing in Algerian cities introdu
Eastern musical stars like the chanteuse Oum Kalthoum to a broad
while Algerian performers including Mahieddine Bachetarzi and L
recorded hundreds of songs, signed record contracts, and joined E
firms as talent agents. The music of this first generation of Maghrib
artists is seen today as the origin of contemporary Algiers-based la
Oranais rai' but interwar colonial observers typically viewed these
evidence of a dangerous Arabic-language auditory culture that had
escaped French surveillance.43
Staff in the Bureau of Native Affairs harbored longstanding sus
Algerian oral culture, for the satirical (and sometimes openly
songs and poems performed by itinerant musicians in souks a
orchestras in private homes too often escaped the colonial state's s
web. The new media of 78-rpm records, which could be easily tran
sold and resold, and played in a variety of environments, defied the
of these live performances by offering listeners the possibility of r
sonic experience again and again.44 Thanks in part to Radio-Alger'
41 CAOM 15H32, Le Ministre de l'Intérieur à M. les Préfets, 27 Sept. 1934. Interest

seems to have been little response from prefects within France to this memo. No referen
investigations appear in the central files of the Minister of the Interior, which suggests
colonial officials may have taken the request more seriously given the cosmopolit
ethnic population of the colony. In Algiers, policemen turned up a number of suspe
the German Hebert Kofahl, the Italian Ferruccio Menini, a reported member of
Fascists," and the Hungarian communist Nicolas Koves.
42 t»_1,1__ /"i
reluja 'jiuiiuw, 111c ivccuiu iiiuusuy munies lu me KJiicni, n, inno mus icoiogy zj, z yiyoi):
262-7 r4. Based on customs statistics, Gronow estimates that French companies alone export
half-million records to Algeria in 1930. For a broader look at international recording labels in
pean overseas colonies, see Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Moder
in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham 2001), esp. chs. 2 and 3.
Bouziane Daoudi and Hadj Miliani, L'aventure du rai" (Paris 1996), 37-84; Miliani,
étaires de l'émotion: Etudes sur les musiques et les chants d'Algerie d'hier et d'aujour
(Oran 2005); and Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Mémoires', Rabah Saadallah, El-Hadj M'h
El-Anka: Maître et rénovateur de la musique 'chaabi' (Algiers 1981).
44 Hadj Miliani, Sociétaires de l'émotion: Etudes sur les musiques et les chants d'Algérie d'hier
et d'aujourd'hui, 58-60. French policemen typically learned of these performances only after they
concerts" and the research of a few astute Sûreté staff, in 1934 French auth-
orities already possessed some knowledge of the growing vogue for recorded
sound in Algeria.45 Although French record companies dominated record
sales in North Africa, colonial police soon fixed their attention on the Baida-
phone Company, an Arabic-language film and recording company run by the
self-proclaimed "Doctor" Michel Baida and his brothers Pierre and Gabriel
from their joint headquarters in Beirut, Cairo, and Berlin. Between 1930 and
1935, Michel Baida attracted the attention of French police as a visible
"foreigner" traveling through France's three North African possessions with
his German sound engineer Max Printz, where he secured recording contracts
with local performers and established a network of distributors to sell Baida-
phone records.46 Citing Baida's relations with a host of unsavory characters,
the Algiers Police Prefecture warned regional bureaus in 1935 that he was a
likely German spy and that Printz had participated in "contraband sales of
weapons" in neighboring Morocco during the First World War.47
Arms trafficking paled in comparison to Baidaphone's current subversive
trade in Arabic records. In June of 1935, Tunisian authorities informed
Algiers of a local rumor that Pierre Baida was planning to smuggle records
across the Moroccan-Algerian border to avoid customs duties and inspections
at Algerian ports by "transporting them clandestinely by car" through the inter-
mediary of his nephew Theodor Khayat of Casablanca.48 Although no evidence
ended. See CAOM 21-48, Le Gouverneur Général, Direction de la Sécurité Générale à M. le Préfet
du Département d'Alger, 20 Dec. 1935. The Governor General submitted to the Prefect of Algiers
the text of a song performed by the singer Cheihk Mohammed El-Anka at a baptism ceremony in
August 1934, recommending that a staff member in the Bureau of Native Affairs be assigned to
analyze the text.
CAOM 15H32, Le Directeur de la Sécurité Générale à M. le Directeur des Affaires Indigènes
au Gouvernement Général, 26 Jan. 1931; Département de Constantine, Sûreté Départementale,
Commissariat Spéciale de Bòne, report dated 26 Oct. 1936. During the 1920s, the Bureau of
Native Affairs monitored the activities of Algerian artists who traveled to Europe to record for Con-
tinental labels and their North African subsidiaries. The more information police acquired about
North African recording labels, the more they paid attention to the musicians selected to record.
Policemen in Bòne noted the departure of Mohammed El Kourd and several other musicians for
Paris to record albums "on the account of Resaici Anouar [sic]." See also CAOM 9H37, "Note
sur la censure artistique," 1 July 1936. In December 1935, an agent called for the Bureau of
Native Affairs and its affiliates in the Territoires du Sud to establish an "artistic censorship commit-
tee." The Bureau of Native Affairs had drafted a proposed law requiring an entry visa for records
that remained in a file, only developing more concrete proposals for record censorship after record
sales became linked to foreign subversion.
CAOM 15H32, Renseignement Tunisie; Source: Très bonne, A/S du nommé Michel Baida,
suspect.
CAOM 15H32, Undated note, "Agents allemands Berlin;" and Chef du Département de
Sûreté d'Alger à M. les Préfets (Cabinet, Police Générale, Sécurité Générale), 28 Dec. 1937. Oper-
ating on similar suspicions, French authorities in Tunisia "invited" Michel Baida to leave the
Regency in January of 1936.
** CAOM 15H32, Renseignement A/S du Dr. Pierre Baida, 17 June 1935.
tied the Baida brothers directly to political agitation, Constantin

reported in January of 1936 that Dr. Bendjelloul, one of the leaders
Fédération des Elus de Constantine, had recently shared a drin
Baida.49 Another un-authored note insisted that the Baidas acted very
"in the service of German interests."50 Moreover, the Sûreté had at l
prior example of such subversive traffic in records. In 1917, the Mi
Interior had discovered German spies using phonograph cylind
records to smuggle communications concerning troop maneuv
munitions levels across the French border.51 This precedent, combin
Germany's wartime history of spreading pan-Islamic and pan- Arab pr
within France's colonial armies, convinced many within the security
that the expanding global trade in Arabic records, and particularly Ba
records, comprised a covert but sophisticated strategy to inflame A
nationalism and undermine French authority in North Africa.
Fears of imported Arabic records inciting political subversion i
Africa spread quickly through the French colonial bureaucracy duri
1936, when the Bachagha Smati, an Algerian agent working for the
of Native Affairs, produced a detailed study of Arabic-language reco
Algerian listening habits and distributed his findings in a training co
French officers. Echoing French tropes about Arabs' natural procliv
sound, Smati argued that the "traditional taste of Mediterranean pe
music" combined with the inexpensive price of phonographs made r
into a commodity so popular that they transcended masculine public
to reach into the "cloistered life" of Muslim women. As a result, "T
hardly a café maure or family - however modest their condition - t
not have a phonograph and a collection of popular songs."52 Wh
vogue for records began harmlessly enough, the popularity of local
artists soon dwindled in the face of a foreign invasion of Middle Easter
tal records" facilitated by the Baida brothers.
According to Smati, Middle Eastern records contained elaborate co
hidden meaning through which simple words became "declamations
beauty and charm of the oriental countries." Polemical phrases such
country" (biladi) or "homeland" (al watan) recurred in song lyri
Arabic spoken-word recordings featured hadith and phrases from th
49 CAOM 15H32, Préfecture de Constantine, Section des Affaires Indigènes et de

Générale, transmis à M. le Gouverneur Général d'Algérie, Direction Générale des Af
gènes et des Territoires du Sud, January 1936. Labeled "Secret."
CAOM 15H32, "Agents allemands Berlin," undated and unsigned note.
CAC 19940500-64, letters from the Minister of Finances to the Interior Minister
1917, and 24 Dec. 1918.
52 CAOM 15H32, Bachagha Smati, "Causerie faite par M. Bachagha Smati au Cours
tionnement des Affaires Indigènes. Le disque en langue arabe," Feb. 1937; CAOM 9H3
lance politique des indigènes. Bachaga Smati, "Note sur la censure artistique" from J
Smati 's first reports on records date to December 1935.
such as "y°u were the best people to appear on the surface of the e
Algerian musicologists confirm that the transnational Arabic-langua
industry offered Maghribi performers a new political vocabulary lif
Middle Eastern Arabic dialects and the Arab nationalist press, fost
emergence of hybrid musical genres that in their turn contributed to
gence of modern standard Arabic.54 However, Smati viewed the resul
formations to Maghribi music less as the product of benign cross-
mixing than as evidence of Algerians' suggestible mentality and in
superstitions, recapitulating a view of native psychology advanced
pean physicians since the turn of the century.55
To the audience Smati described, "whose dominant trait remains a
if unreasonable attachment to Islam," Baidaphone served up "the o
unofficial songs of the different Muslim countries: Cherifien hymns
Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. . . . [and] while this mig
anodyne, in fact they inculcate in the native the idea that there e
world peoples having his faith . . . who have kept more or less the
Arab states and who proclaim their desire for liberty in their materna
and not in that of a foreign Marseillaise."56
As evidence of the Baidas' subversive pan-Arabism, Smati claimed
tested "the reaction of the public authorities" to their propaganda r
only slowly introducing into North Africa songs with subtle nationa
gious themes. Once a performer acquired a loyal following, Baidapho
subsidiaries introduced records with more overtly political lyrics. A
of the latter included a recent recording by Elie Baida (the Baidas' c
featured the refrain "Awaken Oriental!" and worked to "captivate an
the spirit of the listeners" by nourishing "xenophobia" toward the F
The Bachagha Smati's analysis of the Arabic-language record enca
the mixture of paranoia and pragmatism that colonial bureaucrats
French security services displayed in the face of widespread Alger
listening. Citing Michel Baida's relations with German politicians fr
man to Goebbels, Smati portrayed the global distribution of Arabic
nothing less than an expansive German strategy for geopolitical d
Yet even as his report displayed a competent knowledge of the Arabi
recording industry, Smati's depiction of ostensibly Christian
53 Ibid.
54 Hadj Miliarii, "Variations linguistiques et formulations thématiques dans la chanson algérienne
au cours de XXe siècle. Un parcours," in Joceylne Dakhlia, ed., Trames de langues: usages et
métissages linguistiques dans l'histoire du Maghreb (Paris 2004), 427.
55 Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago 2007),
esp. chs. 2 and 3.
56 CAOM 15H32, Bachagha Smati, "Causerie faite par M. Bachagha Smati au Cours de Perfec-
tionnement des Affaires Indigènes. Le disque en langue arabe," Feb. 1937.
57 ibid.
SUBVERSIVE SOUND 4OI
businessmen serving as the vehicles of Nazi-sponsored pan-Islam

pan-Arab propaganda left logic wanting. Were the Baidas really
pawns, or just ambitious and successful businessmen eager to m
profit?58 If metropolitan security services found the distinction be
foreign espionage and internal social disorder relatively clean-cut
Thomas suggests that interwar colonial states struggled to "dist
between foreign subversion and indigenous resistance to Europe
because the loyalty of their colonial subject populations could n
assumed. Even after the leaders of the Muslim reformist Ulama movem
the mid- 1930s sought out exchanges with influential Middle Eastern
in their desire to reclaim a purer, pre-colonial Islamic past, the Alger
ernor's Office possessed little convincing evidence of a direct co
between foreign pan-Islamic propaganda and direct manifestations o
French dissent in Algeria. This did not stop some within the French a
tration from portraying Algeria's highly diverse population as a mo
mass.59 While Smati worried about Arabic records inciting nationali
tion, he disavowed Algerians' political agency by portraying A
passive, superstitious listeners who lacked the intellectual sophistica
resist the polemics of foreign agents. The Baidas' powers of seductio
extended to Radio-Alger performers Mahieddine Bachetarzi and
Mohammed El-Anka, who traveled to Berlin to record for Baidap
the promise of lavish dinners, automobiles, and untold financial rewa
For these reasons, the Bachagha Smati determined the auditory pole
Arabic records to be more dangerous than visual propaganda diss
through films or the printed press. Records also passed through
ports without examination by colonial censors. In one notorious exam
administrative failure, censors removed the nationalist song "Hymn
Green Flag" from the popular Egyptian musical film Tears of Love be
premiere in Algiers, while a Baidaphone record of the song passed t
customs to sell hundreds of copies across the colony.60 On Smati's u
58 Ibid. Smati's neglect of the Baidas' religious background and its potential influenc
politics is surprising given the ethno-religious clashes of the mid- 1930s, yet he also saw
diction in denouncing Jewish merchants for their complicity in this subversive pan-A
ganda. While ignoring the "moral side" of their business activity, Jewish mercha
methods of payment" (layaway) and "large knowledge of native language" facilitated
taste for recorded sound.
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 282. Michael Miller concurs that surveillance reports reveal
as much about the fears, prejudices, and incapacities of individual policemen as they do about the
objects of their surveillance. Michael B. Miller, Shanghai on the Metro: Spies, Intrigue, and the
French between the Wars (Berkeley 1994), 76-77, 83.
ou CAOM 9H37; see the "Note sur la censure artistique," 1 July 1936. Whereas film imports
required a visa, permitting those "containing spoken or sung passages that attacked French sover-
eignty" to be suppressed or edited, records underwent no examination. The Bureau of Native
Affairs had drafted proposed legislation requiring a visa for records several years earlier, but the
project lapsed and the proposal remained in a file.
policemen and agents in the Bureau of Native Affairs began combing A

shops and cafés for subversive, anti-French recordings, compiling deep
Baidaphone and its local subsidiary labels and following cartons of re
they traveled from Algiers to Tlemcen or Constantine to Bone.61 In
police interrogated an Algerian named Boulbina after he tried to sell a
of records to Radio- Alger produced by the little-known Diamphone
After Boulbina revealed that Diamophone's owner, the Constantine-bas
chant named Taieb ben Amor, was "in contact with Dr. Baida," they pl
merchant and the shop under surveillance.62 The staff of the Bureau o
Affairs then began to transcribe and translate the lyrics of hundreds o
phone records (and those of other labels), underlining particularly sub
passages with red ink. If radio broadcasts evaded the scrutiny of
censors, records appeared to translate invisible sound waves into
script that could be lifted off the surface of the shellac, transcribed
analyzed.
However, producing definitive interpretations of song lyrics remained chal-
lenging given the social and political turmoil of the mid- 1930s. After Messali
Hadj generated mass support for the once-banned North African Star under the
banner of the Algerian People's Party (Parti du Peuple Algérien) in 1938,
colonial politics remained highly fragmented with Algerians and Europeans
competing for influence within the French administration and for support
from diverse Algerian constituencies. The very definitions of the terms
"nation," "religion," and "community" depended largely upon the identity of
the speaker and the precise context in which they were uttered, factors that
only a few of the savviest colonial agents understood.63 As colonial bureaucrats
struggled to determine precisely what constituted "nationalist" activity, and
contain it, they consistently sought to tie anti-French behavior to specific
political organizations (typically the "militant" Muslim Ulama or the North
African Star and its later incarnation as the Algerian People's Party) though
Algerians confounded their efforts by modifying their political rhetoric or shift-
ing their political allegiances. This changeable political atmosphere compli-
cated the work of record translators, particularly when they possessed little
knowledge of Arabic dialects spoken outside the Maghrib or lacked the cultural
capital to understand local slang.64 A 1939 evaluation of a stack of Baidaphone
61 CAOM 15H32, note labeled "Gouvernement Général, Direction des Affaires Indigènes et des
Territoires du Sud. Centre d'Informations et d'Etudes," 14 Dec. 1936. The Bureau of Native Affairs
compiled a detailed file on Baida 's nephew Theodore Khayat, who ran the family business from
Tunisia through his associates in Constantine.
62 CAOM 5154, Centre d'Information et d'Etudes, Renseignement A/S des Etablissement Taieb
ben Amor de Constantine, 29 Dec. 1937. See also CAOM 15H32, Lettre de Louis Millot, Directeur
Général des Affaires Indigènes et des Territoires du Sud, 14 Jan. 1938.
McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria.
64 CAOM 15H32, un-authored note dated 1 Apr. 1938. This evaluation of a collection of
Diamophone record translations suggested the translator(s), whether French or Algerian, made
SUBVERSIVE SOUND 4O3
record translations in the files of the Bureau of Native Affairs highlig

numerous errors in the transcriptions, noting that the songs' "esoteric lang
and the use of parables to convey messages made it "difficult to under
Arab songs word-for-word and often impossible to get a hold of their
hidden meaning."65
Alongside the wave of strikes, political demonstrations, and street vio
in Algeria's largest cities that accompanied the Popular Front's arrival int
itical power in the summer of 1936, colonial officials continued to rely
time-honored methods of visual surveillance to contain Algeria's burge
auditory culture, with civil servants seeking to link dangerous records to
cally suspect individuals. Such was the case with an infamous record pro
by the local North African label Rsaissi. In December of 1937, the head o
Sûreté in Algiers warned police prefects across the colony that the Algier
Algeriaphone had sold an estimated forty Rsaissi records bearing the fals
"Piano solo 65075 A/65075B." However, the record did not contain a
selection but instead featured an unknown vocalist singing the l
"Muslims, listen to me, join the Association; get rid of this mentality
which you are afflicted [and] unite together so that we might chase awa
enemies and make religion live again." The song enjoined Algerians to p
chase El Ouma, the newspaper of the Algerian People's Party.66 This disc
which came just a few months after Messali Hadj created the Algerian P
Party, confirmed policemen's fears that record listening fostered politica
dence in Algeria. In an attempt to slow the diffusion of the "piano solo"
across the colony, police interrogated its primary distributor, a Swiss-G
national named Jean Zupiger, who reportedly employed an Algerian na
Bechir with ties to the leading ahm Tawfiq al-Madani.67 That An
Rsaissi - owner of the local Rsaissi label - was known to be an ea
abundant errors in the "purely phonetic" transliterations of the songs. The translator(s) inc
attached syllables to words and failed to acknowledge the informal structure of the work
songs, which employed simple rhyming phrases rather than full stanzas to convey m
and thus misinterpreted the meanings of several songs. Algerian tenor Mahieddine Ba
used this same argument of mistranslation in his own defense when the Governor's
accused him of singing "tendentious" songs in Algerian theaters. See Mahieddine Bach
Mémoires, 173.
65 CARAN F60-707, Présidence du Conseil, Note pour M. le Secrétaire Général de la Présidence
du Conseil, stamped 25 July 1939. Variations in transliterations complicated police efforts to track
musicians. Singer El-Hadj Mohammed El-Anka appeared in police files as El-Onkla and Al-Onka.
CAOM 4166, Alger, Service des liaisons Nord-africaines. Alger, Chef du Département de la
Sûreté d'Alger à MM les Préfets (Cabinet, Police Générale, Direction de la Sûreté Générale), 28
Dec. 1937.
67 CAOM 15H32, Préfecture d'Alger, Centre d'Information et d'Etudes, 16 Nov. 1939. Colonial
police detained Zupiger repeatedly but never arrested him even after they placed him on the notor-
ious Carnet B (the Sûreté's list of foreigners to be deported in case of war) in 1937 for distributing
Nazi propaganda.
Baidaphone distributor and a reputed "Lothario" with an avowe

Destourian (Tunisian nationalist) brother further substantiated the s
intent of the "Piano solo" record.68
Over the next year, French police fanned out across the colony in an
to track the distribution of the "Piano solo" record from Algiers to merc
regional cities and then on to individual cafés maures, restaurants, marke
and brothels in the tiniest villages.69 The fact that a "clientele in the c
side" now listened to records posed new challenges for the coloni
which had thus far targeted urban areas for surveillance.70 As if to co
French authorities' worst fears, the "Piano solo" record turned u
Algeria and police searches uncovered additional Rsaissi records b
false labels, included one song misattributed to the popular malouf s
Mohammed El Kourd entitled "I Weep Alone for My Country"
biladid). The song demanded the suppression of the code de l'indigéna
included "seditious" phrases such as "If God grants us our wishe
will be delivered from our enemies and all of our sorrows," and "Oh
Muslims, awaken yourselves from your slumber."71 The "care with which
these labels were forged proves the criminal intent of the editors," the chief
of the Special Police in Constantine wrote to the Algiers Police Prefecture in
1938. 72 Backed by the 1935 Régnier decree, which criminalized "anti-French"
activity or "civil disorder" incited by Algerians and "foreigners," colonial
police seized records in cafés across Algeria and demanded that café proprie-
tors inform on their clientele. In 1938, police in Constantine, Phillipeville,
and Bone closed three cafés for a month after discovering "Piano solo" and
other political records inside.73 Record listening, once a benign evening
68 CAOM 1 5H32, Gouvernement Général d'Algérie, Cabinet du Gouvernement Général, Centre

d'Information et d'Etudes, Algiers, 11 Nov. 1940. Rsaissi built up a two million-franc business for
Baidaphone in Tunis, Constantine, and Bòne during the 1 920s, earning the reward of a Mercedes
automobile. However, Rsaissi's relationship with Baida soured in 1930, resulting in Rsaissi's break
from the company.
69 CAOM 2148, see letters from the Sous-Préfet, Commissaire de Police de Médea to the
Sous-Préfet des Affaires Indigènes, Alger, 29 Oct. 1938; the Rapport de Commissaire de Police,
Ville de Tizi-Ouzou, 29 Oct. 1938. See also CAOM 15H32, Le Préfet de Constantine à M. le
Gouverneur Général d'Algérie, Direction de la Sécurité Générale, 1 Sept. 1938.
CAOM 5154, Algérie, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Département d'Oran, response to
questionnaire, Alger, July 1937.
71 CAOM 15H32. Police d'Etat d'Alger, Raooort, 30 Dec. 1937.
72 CAOM 15H32, Rapport du Chef de la Police Spéciale de Constantine, Surveillance politique
des indigènes, 8 Sept. 1938.
John Ruedy, Modem Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington, Ind.
1992), 140; CAOM 2148, Algérie, Administration des indigènes, Département d'Alger. M. le
Sous-Préfet de Médea à M. le Préfet d'Alger, 22 Mar. 1938; and 15H32, Préfecture de Constantine
à M. le Gouverneur Général d'Algérie, Direction de la Sécurité Générale, Alger, 1 Sept. 1938;
Département de Constantine, Sûreté Départementale, Commissaire Spéciale de Bòne, 26 Oct.
1936. El Kourd did not perform the song on the "Piano solo" record but had already attracted
police attention. In October 1 936, police in Bòne reported that El Kourd and several other musicians
pleasure for Algerian café habitues and families, now placed Algerian
greater scrutiny from the French colonial state.
FUGITIVE SOUND! TRACKING "NATIVE" LISTENERS
The French administration's obsession with tracking and confiscating politi-

cally "subversive" Arabic records betrayed civil servants' persistent fear
about the nefarious influence of auditory propaganda, and particularly transna
tional radio broadcasting, on Algerian minds. Records appeared to provide a
means to capture and render legible the intangible qualities of broadcast
sound, even as colonial authorities failed to capture Algerians listening t
foreign radio broadcasts. During a training course for officers in the Burea
of Native Affairs in February of 1937, the French agent Delahaye reminded
his audience about the "essentially fugitive" character of radio sound: "The
radio broadcast has liberated itself from the ties that bind the written word . . .
crossing the most protected borders, the most firmly closed doors, and the thick
est walls" to the point that "nothing can stop it except jamming."74 By 1937 th
Algerian Governor's Office had also amassed considerably more data about the
schedules of foreign propaganda broadcasts, the technical capacity of foreign
transmitters, and the structure and content of the programs themselves, thanks
in part to summaries of the programs transmitted by the Listening Center in
Paris and the Army information service's Bulletin des renseignements musul-
mans (Bulletin of Muslim Information).75 Colonial authorities now knew tha
the fascist Italian transmitter Radio-Bari, Franco's nationalist Radio-Seville,
and even Radio-Cairo introduced their news reports with "oriental music" t
attract listeners, which suggested a direct correlation between Algerian
growing record consumption and increased radio listening.
In September of that year, after the Gazette de la Maritime reported that
Italian spies had begun distributing fixed-frequency receivers in Algeria and
Morocco tuned to Radio-Bari 's frequency (a strategy already employed t
great effect in Germany by the Nazi Party), colonial police began recording
the manufacturer, model number, and provenance of the radio receivers they
found in Algerian hands.76 Simply owning an Italian- or German-made radi
became enough to implicate an Algerian in nationalist politics. As a policeman
known to be "ardent nationalists" and "Communist sympathizers" had recently boarded a steame
for Paris, where they planned to record for the Rsaissi label.
7 CAOM 10APOM30, M. Delahaye, "Les émissions de langue arabe du poste Radi
P. T. T. -Alger," Exposé fait par M. Delahaye au Cours de Perfectionnement des Affaires Indigènes
Feb. 1937.
75 SHAT [Service historique de l'Armée de Terre] 7N4095, Revue de la presse arabe et des
questions musulmanes, Dec. 1937; see also SHAT 7N4093, Bulletin des renseignements musul-
manes, Mar. 1938.
/ö CAOM 15H31, "Note dans la partie du sans-filisme," Blida, 31 July 1938; CAOM 15H32,
"Les véritables ennuis de la France africaine," Gazette de la Maritime, 15 Sept. 1937.
4O6 REBECCA P. SCALES
in Aumale wrote to his inspector, "During our operations we found in the café
of Mohammed El Imam ... a radio of a German label, purchased from an agent
of the merchant Meyzoret and Zupiger in Algiers . . . [and] it is well know that
this establishment is one of the preferred meeting places for sympathizers of the
Algerian People's Party." The Maison Zupiger, of course, had first sold the
seditious "Piano solo" record. These attempts to tie radio listening to record
consumption reveal French authorities' continued uncertainty about how to
precisely measure the effects of an invisible, sonic medium on Algerian
politics.
In fact, the files of the Bureau of Native Affairs and the Governor's Office
between 1935 and 1938 are filled with contradictory reports about Algerian
radio listening as policemen, civil servants, and municipal authorities disagreed
over the degree to which foreign propaganda influenced their local populations
and which social groups it affected. Policemen who visited a café at the
appointed hour of a Radio-Bari broadcast might hear no Arabic playing
through a radio loudspeaker, but later hear rumors of people tuning in to the
news bulletins. One anonymous report to the Oran Police Prefecture in 1937
described how "In the different sales outlets for radios in Oran nearly all the
natives coming in to purchase a radio ask for one capable of picking up the
Cairo station. Some even demand BOMBAY." These requests, together with
the public's growing taste for "oriental" records, signaled Algerians' desire
to participate in a wider world outside the sphere of French control, a dangerous
prospect for France's civilizing mission and the political stability of the colony.
Yet the very same report concluded that foreign broadcasts had not as yet
exerted a "profoundly harmful influence" on the native mentality, for "it is
undeniable that the local broadcasts of Radio-Alger are followed with
interest."77
Disagreements between French staff in the various branches of the colonial
administration over foreign radio broadcasting centered upon two key pro-
blems: first, the number and type of radios in Algerian hands and initially
the class base of the radio audience; and second, whether Algerians could
understand the "literary" Arabic employed by the announcers of foreign
radio stations. Algerian radio ownership jumped dramatically from 2,000 in
July of 1937 to 2,966 in March of 1938, a startling increase matched by a
growing number of public radios, which continued to outnumber those pur-
chased by individuals for private, domestic listening.78 In Bòne, forty-seven
radios operated in cafés, whereas only thirty-six Algerians owned home
77 CAOM 5154, Algérie, Service des liaisons nord-africaines, Département d'Oran, "Emissions
radiophoniques," 10 July 1937.
CAOM 1 5H3 1 , Algérie, Gouvernement Général, Affaires Indigènes, Report on "Emissions
radiophoniques," 1 July 1937; and Déclarations d'appareils récepteurs de radiodiffusion. Relevé,
par bureau de poste, des auditeurs indigènes et européens, 31 Mar. 1938.
receivers.79 In the city of Constantine, thirty-five public radios trans

broadcasts to listeners in café maures and restaurants.80 A report from
noted that radio sales would be even higher "if merchants did not de
the full price of a radio upon its delivery." Still, other bureaucrats fou
the "all-wave radios (necessary to receive the short-wave broadcasts of
Bari) are found only among native notables and several well-off functio
thus diffusing the dangers posed by the short-wave broadcasts.81
Some policemen also claimed that the working-class Algerian popul
(who spoke local Arabic or Berber dialects) could not understand the "l
Arabic employed by the Cairo announcer, nor that of the speakers o
Ban and Radio-Seville (often of Middle-Eastern descent).82 According
Sub-Prefect of Tizi-Ouzou, few people in his Berber-speaking region
comprehend the polemics of Radio-Seville, for a "broadcast in Arabic
erally speaking, for the Kabyle listeners, less interesting than listen
French."83 Historians continue to disagree about whether French colon
orities deliberately fostered illiteracy in Arabic to promote Algerian a
tion to French values, though the fact the multiple interwar "nation
parties promoted the Arabization of Algeria's populations in their polit
forms aroused suspicions within the colonial administration. In 1933,
Hadj had reclaimed Arabic as the "official" language of Algeria in the
African Star's manifesto, while the reformist Ulama made reviv
Qur'anic language a centerpiece of their desired religious renewal by o
Arabic courses to Algerians in private schools.84 Yet as a report f
79 CAOM 15H31, Relevé numérique des postes récepteurs de radiodiffusion existan

Département de Constantine, 5 Oct. 1938.
g0 CAOM 15H31, Rapport de Guilhermet, Police Spéciale Départementale de Constan
le Directeur des Affaires Indigènes, 14 Apr. 1938.
81 CAOM 15H31, Algérie, Gouvernement Général, Affaires Indigènes, report on "E
radiophoniques," 1 Jury 1937.
82 CAOM 10APOM30, M. Delahaye, "Les émissions de langue arabe du poste Radio
P.T.T.-Alger," Feb. 1937. Radio-Bari's Syrian announcer Lababidi reportedly spent over a year
in Algeria before moving to Italy to work for Radio-Bari, suggesting he may have picked up the
Algerian Arabic dialect during this period. Several security reports claimed Lababidi sojourned
in Constantine, while others highlighted his visits to Biskra and the Touggout regions. CARAN
F60-710, Le Ministre des Affaires Etrangères à M. Le Ministre des P.T.T., Controle de la Radiodif-
fusion. By late 1936, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had gathered more information on Lababidi
and possessed transcripts of a series of talks given on the Rome station in December of 1936.
^ CAOM 2148, Le Sous-Préfet de Tizi-Ouzou à M. le Préfet d'Alger, 18 Nov. 1938. Policemen
reported similar incidents involving records. See CAOM 15H-32, Algérie, Ville de Tlemcen, Police
municipale, Romatet, le Commissaire Général à Monsieur le Préfet, 13 Jan. 1938. A Tlemcen
policeman reported that listeners displayed particular enthusiasm for a record of the "Egyptian
National Anthem," though their ardor could be explained by the fact that the "majority of the
natives in the region, who only know imperfectly the language in which it is performed, mistake
it for the 'Algerian National Anthem.'"
Alain Messaoudi, "The Teaching of Arabic in French Algeria and Contemporary France,"
French History 20, 3 (2006): 297-317. Note the Ulama's slogan, "Islam is our religion, Arabic
is our language, Algeria is our country."
4O8 REBECCA P. SCALES
French Army General Staff concluded in 1937, literacy in classical Arabic was
irrelevant when so many Algerian men gathered to listen in cafés maures where
a single individual could translate a foreign program to a crowd gathered
around a loudspeaker. Moreover, members of the educated elite might prove
the most susceptible to the entreaties of foreign announcers. "The current listen-
ers who belong to the most evolved classes are very sensitive," the report noted,
and "lacking a critical mind, they are often considerably taken with adverse
propaganda and in turn reproduce these harmful ideas among the popular
classes, who are very easily influenced."85
In ensemble, these reports reveal more about the fears and suspicions of colo-
nial civil servants and the incomplete and ever-shifting nature of colonial hege-
mony than they do about Algerian listening habits or the effects of foreign radio
propaganda on Algerian politics. Both Claude Collot and Charles-Robert
Ageron have pointed to the general disorganization of the colonial civil
service (police, Native Affairs, and municipal governance) during the interwar
years and the relatively poor educational level of French administrators and
their indigenous reinforcements.86 Although the colonial state offered annual
salary subsidies for Arabic proficiency, in 1938 only seventy individuals
(excluding interpreters and Arabic teachers) received the bonus for their
ability to write in Arabic, alongside another three hundred for conversational
skills in dialectical Arabic or Kabyle.87 These statistics reveal how a modern,
oral medium challenged the capacities of civil servants, and illuminate the colo-
nial state's alternating reliance on visual observation and rumor to generate
knowledge, or direct surveillance and mediated queries through native infor-
mants, none of which proved to be entirely effective. However, if the Bureau
of Native Affairs consistently sought out direct physical evidence of radio's
impact on Algerian politics, members of the Army's radio-goniometry services
who listened in to the airwaves required no such proof.
By the autumn of 1937, staff in the Army's information and intelligence ser-
vices began to worry about the effects of foreign propaganda on the morale of
North African troops in the African Army, and demanded that the colonial
administration and metropolitan politicians adopt proactive counterpropaganda
measures. Radio-Bari redoubled its attacks on France's presence in North
Africa following the 1935 Laval-Mussolini Accords in Rome, Radio Seville
85 CARAN F60-710, Etat-Major de l'Armée, Section d'Outre-Mer, "Note sur la radiodiffusion

en pays musulmanes," 1937. See similar extracts in CAOM 15H32, Ministère de la Défense Natio-
nale et de la Guerre, "Bulletin des renseignements des questions musulmanes," 14 Oct. 1937.
Charles-Robert Ageron, Les algériens musulmans et la France, 1871-1919, esp. 612-43;
and Claude Collot, Les institutions d'Algérie durant la période coloniale, 50-129.
CARAN F60-702, Gouverneur General d Algerie, Direction des Affaires Indigenes et des
Territoires du Sud, Deuxième bureau, Administration générale, Note sur l'extension de la connais-
sance des langues indigènes parmi les fonctionnaires et même parmi les divers éléments de la popu-
lation européenne, 1 Mar. 1938.
and Radio-Tétouan urged North Africans to rally behind Franco, a

Iberian Anarchist Federation, which seized control of a Barcelona stati
September of 1936, called upon Muslim troops to rise up against their co
oppressors in a jihad.88 Invoking the cliché of the téléphone arabe, a res
Army captain in Algiers mailed a quasi-hysterical letter to the headquar
the National Radio Broadcasting Services in the autumn of 1937, descri
how "rumors spread within Islam that France is afraid of Mussolini."89 E
bating European fears, the indigenous French- and Arabic-language pre
began printing summaries and discussions of foreign propaganda broad
By the end of the year, the Army General Staff would acknowledge that
casting constituted a novel form of psychological warfare that worked subt
the minds of listeners and transcended traditional measures of visual surveil-
lance. "In periods of political tension or in case of a European war, a campaign
of false news unleashed by enemy powers could have grave consequences if we
have no means of protection," the anonymous author of one Army report noted,
making it "necessary to put into place an organization permitting us not only to
protect the natives under our guardianship, and even more to exert a positive
action over them."90 Despite the vast scope of the colonial state's surveillance
web, which stretched from the cities of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran to tiny
communes such as Bou-Sâada, radio listening revealed itself to be a highly indi-
vidualized and subjective act and therefore difficult to measure and control. Yet in
challenging the loyalties of indigenous troops, broadcast sound appeared to threa-
ten not only domestic political stability in Algeria but also the territorial security
of France, demonstrating the need to shore up the peripheral borders of the nation
in the airwaves over North Africa.
REMAKING THE VOICE OF FRANCE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
The summer of 1936 - bracketed by the May elect

left-leaning Popular Front coalition into political pow
coup that ignited the Spanish Civil War - transformed
makers' attitudes towards foreign radio propaganda in
term psychological effects of foreign propaganda on
notwithstanding, the Ministry of Defense worried
might spread into Morocco and engulf the entire region
88 SHAT 7N4093, "La Radiodiffusion en Afrique du Nord," Bulle

questions musulmanes, 14 Oct. 1937; Martin Thomas, The French
Imperialism, Politics, and Society (Manchester 2005), 316-19.
89 CARAN F60-710, Le Directeur du Service de la Radiodiffusion à
27 Nov. 1937.
90 CARAN F60-710, Note sur la radiodiffusion en pays musulmanes from the Etat-Major de
l'Armée, Section d'Outre-Mer, 1937. See similar extracts in the document CAOM 15H32,
Algérie, Gouvernement Général, Affaires Indigènes, Ministère de la Défense Nationale et de la
Guerre, "Bulletin des renseignements des questions musulmanes," 14 Oct. 1937.
politicians in the Ministries of Defense and Colonies first called for a

nated "Muslim policy" during the First World War to respond to the G
sponsored pan-Islamic print propaganda in North Africa and the Midd
but only after transnational radio broadcasting exposed the concomitan
of indigenous nationalism, pan-Arabism, and fascism did Parisian po
take definitive steps to coordinate counterpropaganda, political surve
and defense policy in the Maghrib.91 In late 1936, the newly elected
Léon Blum recalled to life the dormant Haut Comité Méditerrané
Mediterranean Committee/HCM) - an ad-hoc advisory group that inc
the reform-minded Maghribi sociologist Charles- André Julien, former
governors Maurice Violette and Albert Sarrault, and representatives fr
relevant Cabinet ministries - to formulate strategies to "shore up secu
the Maghrib" by "seeking out the most efficacious means of defense
the Muslim peril that exalts Communism, espionage . . . pan-Islamic
ganda, [and] nationalist dreams."92 Radio "broadcasting and the means
trolling it" featured prominently in the HCM's agenda, since the spr
Arabic broadcasting had exposed the linguistic incompetency of Fren
nial civil servants in North Africa and the failures of the colonial state's surveil-
lance mechanisms. Both factors contributed to the restructuring of the Bureau
of Native Affairs in 1937.93
The debates between the members of the HCM and its various subcommit-
tees over radio broadcasting in the Maghrib, which continued from the first
Blum government in the fall of 1936 through the radical Daladier adminis-
tration of April 1938, led to a fierce turf battle between Parisian politicians
and colonial authorities over the right to direct Arabic-language counterpropa-
ganda initiatives. The socialist journalist Marceau Pivert, charged with formu-
lating Popular Front media policy, condemned the "fascist" politics of
Radio-Alger's European staff and the "excessive privilege" enjoyed by Eur-
opeans in shaping the broadcasts, declaring that Radio-Alger had failed in its
mission "as an educator of the Muslim population."94 The Inspector General
of National Radio Broadcasting Marcel Pellenc, dispatched to North Africa
91 Pascal Le Pautremat. La volitiaue musulmane de la France aux XXe siècle, 354.

92 William A. Hoisington, Jr., "France and Islam: The Haut Comité Méditerranéen and French
North Africa," in George Joffe, ed., North Africa: Nation, State, and Region (London 1993), 80-
82. CAOM 3CAB-35, Présidence du Conseil, Haut Comité Méditerranéen et de l'Afrique du Nord,
Session de mars 1937. The HCM became a permanent secrétariat attached to the French premier's
office in December 1937.
93 F60-710, Réunion du Sous-Commission des Affaires Musulmanes, 16 Dec. 1937. This com-
mittee predated the HCM but was subsumed into it in 1937. Charles- Andre Julien complained that
the linguistic incapacities of French colonial civil servants in North Africa exacerbated the new
security challenges posed by transnational broadcasting.
CARAN F60-739, "La Radiodiffusion en Algérie," undated report likely drafted by Marceau
Pivert (ca. Dec. 1936). Pivert complained that Radio-Alger announcers read news bulletins
excerpted entirely from right-wing newspapers {La Dépêche algérienne) and repeated the pro-
Franco communiqués of Radio-Seville over the air.
SUBVERSIVE SOUND 4II
in late 1936 to investigate the transmitting power and "reach" of

and metropolitan stations, concurred with Pivert. Reporting
Cabinet, Pellenc described an economically distraught North Afr
lation who clustered around radios at the "hour of the Arabic br
any Arab town," always ready to be "guided by its instincts, its r
sions, [and] its beliefs" and "cleverly exploited by foreign agent
"France still has with radio perhaps the sole means to peacefully
the Arab mind and maintain its influence, already unfortunately c
Pellenc determined, the solution lay not in appealing to a ci
Muslim elite, but rather in putting radio receivers "in the h
masses."95
In 1937, the French parliament authorized the construction of a powerful
new radio transmitter in Tunisia (to be inaugurated in 1938 as Radio Tunis)
to cover much of the Maghrib, and the conversion of the outdated short-wave
Poste Colonial into Paris-Mondial.96 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose
staff directed Paris-Mondial's broadcasts from its debut in March 1938,
intended for the station to provide a distinctly French perspective on global
affairs in multiple European languages and a synthetic daily news report in
Arabic to clarify French diplomatic policies in the Muslim world, rather than
leaving the task to Radio-Alger or the small, amateur radio stations transmitting
in Morocco.97 Despite the paternalism of these counterpropaganda proposals
designed to "protect France's North African subjects," the Mediterranean
radio crisis forced metropolitan colonial advocates to rethink their earlier pre-
conceptions of radio sound as a malleable tool of social control, and perhaps
more significantly, to acknowledge North African listeners as political subjects
whose sensibilities required careful tending. When the Under-Secretary of State
François de Tessan pressed his colleagues to "re-baptize" the Poste Colonial in
1938, he argued that its current name, which was too reminiscent of colonial
oppression, would never attract Muslim listeners, whereas Paris-Mondial
would communicate France's distinctly republican and "universal values."98
95 CARAN F60-710, Marcel Pellenc, "Etude sur la radiodiffusion nord-africaine," 7 Dec. 1936.
Pellenc 's report, the product of a radio-electrician rather than an experienced ethnographer, called
for the construction of a North African radio network (with new stations in Oran and Tunis) linked
by telephone lines to metropolitan transmitters.
Frederic Brunnquell, Fréquence monde: Du poste colonial à RFI, 34-42. Electoral turmoil in
metropolitan France placed Paris-Mondial at the center of a partisan political battle and slowed con-
struction of the station.
CARAN F60-710, Présidence du Conseil, Secretariat General, Note sur la propagande par
radio en Afrique du Nord, 20 Oct. 1936.
98 CARAN F60-702, Haut-Comité Méditerranéen, Session de mars 1938; Compte-rendu de la
séance du samedi matin le 12 mars 1938. Tessan also proposed the name "Radio-universel." See
also F60-710, Procès- Verbal de la Commission du Travail de la Radiodiffusion en langue arabe,
22 Feb. 1938. Tessan noted, "We should profit from the construction of the new station to
change the name of the Poste Colonial. The name alone suffices to awaken the suspicions of
Arabic-language speakers and renders a great part of our efforts sterile before they have begun."
Even the Army General Staff, charged with experimental jamming in Alg
Radio-Seville in 1936 and Radio-Berlin in 1939, worried about producin
"unfavorable reaction" among Muslim listeners by giving them the imp
that France deliberately sought to restrict their transnational listening h
In the face of the new political realities created by international radio broa
ing, cultivating a Maghribi audience for French radio stations became
political priority.
Metropolitan politicians' efforts to centralize Arabic-language counter
ganda in Paris did not please Algerian Governor Georges LeBeau or the B
of Native Affairs, who argued that Parisian politicians and diplomats
sufficient knowledge of the "local" Algerian context to produce politic
"safe" broadcasts. LeBeau believed any Maghribis recruited from P
student or worker circles to serve as Arabic announcers would alre
"won over by the ideals of nationalism and xenophobic sentiments" ho
to France.100 Moreover, cultivating a mass Algerian audience rema
dangerous prospect given the difficulty of monitoring radio listeners
with the growing popularity of the Algerian People's Party and the ref
Ulama, staff in the Bureau of Native Affairs warned against any prop
that might unwittingly "re-Arabize" the population and foster Algeri
to pan- Arab political currents.101 When LeBeau eventually capitulated t
isian demands to restructure and increase Radio-Alger's volume of "na
broadcasts, he provoked the ire of European listeners in the colony. A
the fierce debates over the Blum- Violette bill to extend French citizen
an estimated 21,000 Muslim men, many Europeans interpreted the appr
tion of Radio-Alger's air time for Arabic broadcasting as tantamount to
Algerian nationalists access to radio microphones.102 Even worse, the jo
ist Edmond Esquirol speculated in Alger-Radio Magazine, the incr
Arabic broadcasting might "promote the resurrection of Arabic and . .
the predominance of French culture and by consequence, the much-de
'assimilation' of the native population."103
99 SHAT 2N243, Procès-Verbal de la Conférence des Services Généraux d'Information de

gouverneurs Nord-africains, tenue au Quartier General de l'Armée, 16 and 17 Oct. 1939.
100 CARAN F60-710, Albert LeBeau, Gouverneur Général d'Algérie à M. le Ministre des
8 Dec. 1936.
101 CAOM 10APOM30, M. Delahaye, "Les émissions de langue arabe du poste Radio
P.T.T.-Alger," Feb. 1937.
102 CAOM 4166. The right-wing press in Algeria attacked the Popular Front radio association
Radio-Liberté for including Algerians as members and inviting Algerian political leaders to
speak at their meetings. In December 1937, the anti-Semitic Algiers daily La Défense reported
on a recent meeting in which president Leon Weinmann introduced (in Arabic) Cheikh El-Okbi
and Ben-Badis (leader of the reformist Ulama), along with Amar Ouzegane, the regional secretary
of the French Communist Party.
Edmond Esquirol, "Opinions et propos sur la radio en Afrique du Nord, Alger-Radio, 12
Sept. 1937. Esquirol responded to the critique of Louis Grosard in Annales Africaines.
When Radio-Alger's new "native" broadcasts debuted in the winter o

they exposed colonial authorities' persistent uncertainties about how t
radio for counterpropaganda purposes. The new Arabic announc
Arzour translated news broadcasts from the national radio network
Radio-Journal de France into both literary and dialectical Arab
Abed offered talks on child-rearing and hygiene for women, and th
diplomé Ahmed Lahbib spoke on such illuminating subjects as t
Wheat Office" and "The History of the Microscope," the latter becom
target of persistent jokes in the indigenous press.104 Station staff tr
Governor LeBeau's speeches into the Kabyle dialect intermittently in
and 1937. 105 Yet Radio-Alger's native programming remained domi
concerts of recorded music and live performances, including artists
records previously appeared on police censorship lists. Mahieddine B
whose popular theatrical tours attracted a significant police presence th
a ban on sales of his song lyrics in 1937, continued to perform over
Alger's microphones.106 If the Bureau of Native Affairs now took g
care in censoring which "oriental records" would be played over the a
Radio-Alger's appeals to popular Algerian cultural figures, regardless
political sympathies, exposes the colonial state's growing desperation t
tain an indigenous radio audience as the prospect of another glo
neared.107
During 1938 and 1939, colonial police continued their forays into cafés
maures around Algeria to assess Algerians' reception of Radio-Alger's latest
programs and the Arabic news broadcasts of Paris-Mondial. Policemen
found that Algerians could indeed hear Paris-Mondial and tuned in regularly
to Radio-Alger, but they failed to determine whether the French broadcasts
swayed Algerians from tuning in to foreign stations. However, in 1938 the
Chief of Police in Blida observed worrying behavior, writing to Algiers how,
"Yesterday evening . . . one of my native inspectors surprised the owner of a
café maure in the process of playing several records of nationalist propaganda."
Although the agent immediately seized the records, the policeman remained
troubled by the fact that the "consumers picked up the refrains of the
chorus," confirming definitively that broadcast sound, whether surfacing
from phonograph or radio speakers, had become the soundtrack to anti-colonial
104 See Radio-Alger's program listings in La presse libre, 25 Feb. 1937: 6; and 11 Mar. 1937.
CAOM 15H32, Département d'Alger, L'Administrateur Principal de la Commune Mixte de
Fort-National à M. le Gouverneur Général d'Algérie, Direction des Affaires Indigènes, Objet: T. S. F.
Emission en langue kabyle, 4 Nov. 1936.
1UÕ Mahieddine Bachetarzi, Mémoires, 332-34.
1U/ CAOM 51-54, Notes du Centre d'Information et d'Etudes, 11 Oct. 1938, and 24 Nov. 1938.
Paris-Mondial hired musicians suspected of nationalist activity by colonial authorities and the mili-
tary intelligence services, to perform during its Arabic-language broadcasts, including Mohammed
El-Kamal. On this point, see also SHAT 7N4093, Bulletin des renseignements des questions musul-
mans, 16 Nov. 1938:438.
resistance. By singing along to the song on the record, these café custom
become political activists rather than passive listeners. Similar reports
inciting political disorder continued into 1939, when the French admin
of Nedroma, a commune mixte in the département of Oran, informed
Prefect that Radio-Berlin had caused uproar in his tiny community,
rumors about France's mistreatment of Messali Hadj and several
Muslim officials.108
In response to these reports, the colonial state adopted new measures
down Algeria's burgeoning auditory culture by further censoring the
public sphere and restricting Algerian listening. A 1938 decree forba
import of records in any "foreign" language (including Arabic) other
French,109 while the Army banned all Baidaphone records from the
maures used to entertain native troops in the Maghrib and in metro
France.110 That same year police in the town of Laarba restricted ra
in public cafés after 8:00 p.m. to prevent Algerians from receiving br
from "Nationalist Spain."111 Similar attempts to restrict radio listenin
only be adopted in metropolitan France after the start of the Second
War, revealing how the colonial periphery of France became its first
ground in the impending guerre des ondes (war of the airwaves).
BROADCAST SOUND AND COLONIAL HEGEMONY
In conclusion, I wish to consider how the previous an

interwar radio in colonial Algeria complicates Fran
account of radio during the Algerian War of Indepen
nialism, Fanon argued that French imperial broadcast
transmissions of Radio-Alger, perpetrated a sonic psy
a prostrate Algerian population. For decades Algerians
the airwaves, Fanon claimed, for they viewed radio o
Europeanization in progress, of vulnerability." Only a
make the radical decision to embrace radio, a modern
viously identified as an emblem of Western corruption
108 CAOM 9H50, L'Administrateur de la Commune mixte de Ned

Tlemcen. 24 Mav 1939.
109 CAOM 2141. The Governor General issued a 1938 decree banning the import of "disques
phonographiques en langue autre qu'en langue française." Record merchants had three months
to submit their existing stock for review by the Direction de la Sécurité Général.
11U CARAN F60-707, Note pour Monsieur le Secrétaire Général du Présidence du Conseil, 25
July 1938; and SHAT 7N4133, Ministère de la Defense Nationale et de la Guerre, Section d'Outre-
Mer, Le Président du Conseil à MM le Gouverneurs Militaires de Paris, Metz, et Lyon; le Comman-
dant Général de la région de Paris; les Généraux Commandants de 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15,
16, 17, 18, 19, 20; le Général Commandant en Chef des Troupes du Maroc; le Général Commandant
le Corps 19e d'Armée; Généraux Commandants des Troupes de Tunisie et le Levant. Paris, 3 1 Mar.
1939.
1 x ' CAOM 2141 , Le Commissaire de Police de la ville d'Arba à M. Le Chef du Bureau du service
des Affaires indigènes et de police générale de Préfecture d'Alger, 17 Jan. 1939.
As Algerians tinkered with their radio dials, searching through stat

French jamming to detect the Cairo-based broadcasts of the National L
Front (FLN), broadcast sound became the "Voice of Algeria," implantin
teners the sensation of participating in a living, breathing, and fighting
nation.112 Fanon's ideological fervor clearly informed this dialectical
of Algerian militants transforming the "foreign technique" of radio
once an exclusive tool of a repressive colonial state, into a wea
anti-colonial resistance. However, what Fanon interpreted as Alg
sudden embrace of radio following the creation of independent nation
casting systems in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon during the early 1950s r
much from the global democratization of battery-powered and portabl
tor radio receivers and their decades-long exposure (often through t
waves) to Arab cultures of the Middle East as from the start of t
broadcasts.113
If Fanon viewed French imperialism, and its outgrowth in the airw
through the bifurcated lens of the colonizer and colonized, a careful h
reading of the politics of interwar radio complicates our understandin
colonialism by revealing the multiplicity of competing parties both wit
nial Algeria and outside its borders seeking to dominate the airwaves an
ulate Algerian radio listeners. During the early 1930s, Parisian policy
competed with European businessmen and settlers in Algeria to determ
content of Radio- Alger 's broadcasts. After 1936, right-leaning civil se
the Governor's Office and the Bureau of Native Affairs only reluctantly
the orders of a left-wing Popular Front government to transform th
African station into a weapon of counterpropaganda against the broa
fascist powers, in part because radio listening proved so difficult to d
and control. Algerians clearly tuned in to the airwaves during th
though determining the precise number of listeners and surveying their
to what they heard challenged the competencies of colonial civil serva
from becoming an oppressive instrument of colonial domination, ra
recorded sound, particularly when traveling from outside Algerian borde
sistently eluded the grasp of the colonial state. Instead, broadcast soun
the weaknesses of the state's surveillance web and the incomplete an
shifting nature of the colonial power nexus at a moment when local
foreign threats to the stability of the French empire became intertwined i
waves over North Africa. That French policemen and civilian authorit
Bureau of Native Affairs suddenly had to grapple with echoes of na
unrest in France's Levant possessions and the diplomatic maneuvers
112 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 92-94.

Benjamin Stora, "Comment la FLN écoutait la radio," in Michèle de Bussière
Méadel, and Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat, eds., Radios et télévisions au temps des "évé
d'Algérie" 1954-1962 (Paris 1999), 109-13.
4l6 REBECCA P. SCALES
Italy, Francoist Spain, and eventually Nazi Germany, reveals how radio broad-
casting transformed the conflict between colonizer and colonized into a multifa-
ceted global struggle long before the Algerian War of Independence.
Despite Fanon 's Manichean vision of French imperialism, his analysis of
listening-as-resistance does provide a useful theoretical framework for evaluat-
ing listening in a colonial setting. By the start of the Algerian War, the French
army had perfected jamming techniques that began, not as Fanon described, on
the battlefields of the Second World War, but rather in France's North African
colonies during the late 1930s. After "The Voice of Free Algeria" reached
Algeria in 1953-1954, French authorities reinstated restrictions on Algerian
listening first imposed in 1938-1939, including monitoring lists of radio own-
ership and controlling sales of transistor and other mobile radio receivers. By
1960, the colonial state had banned public listening and battery sales and
began jamming the Arabic-speaking voices that reached Algeria, after stations
in Tunis, Rabat, Damascus, and Cairo alternated hosting the FLN's broad-
casts.114 Although French tactics kept Algerian militants from receiving the
FLN's transmissions, as Fanon described, radio still served the revolution by
encouraging listeners to retell, embellish, and even invent the news they
"heard" during their listening sessions.115 "Every morning the Algerian
would communicate the result of his hours of listening in," compensating for
the "fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of infor-
mation." At these moments, the voices of Arabic radio announcers welled up
inside listeners to "recount new things, tell of more and more glorious
battles, [and] picture vividly the collapse of the occupying power."116
Scholars of colonial independence movements and postcolonial disaporic
populations have highlighted this power of radio to give voice to "imagined
communities" of listeners from within and outside the boundaries of the nation-
state.117 Did the expansion of transnational radio broadcasting (albeit spon-
sored by European propagandists) and Arabic-language recordings (sometimes
home grown) fuel the growth of Algerian nationalism during the interwar
decades? The answer to this question lies outside the scope of the current
essay. If this article has primarily examined the shifting perspectives of
French colonial and metropolitan authorities about radio broadcasting in the
Mediterranean, Algerian accounts of broadcasting must likewise be deeply
114 Antoine Sabbagh, "La propagande à Radio- Alger," in Michèle de Bussière, Cécile Méadel,
and Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat, eds., Radios et télévisions au temps des ''événements d'Algérie"
1954-1962 (Paris 1999), 27-40.
115 My reading of Fanon is indebted to Ian Baucom, "Frantz Fanon's Radio: Solidarity,
Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening," Contemporary Literature 42, 1 (2001): 15-49.
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 86-87.
117 See Laurence A. Breiner, "Caribbean Voices on the Air: Radio, Poetry, and Nationalism in
the Anglophone Caribbean," in Susan Merill Squier, ed., Communities of the Air: Radio Century,
Radio Culture (Durham 2003), 93-108.
contextualized within the nation's tumultuous political history. Indig

French- and Arabic-language newspapers commented on Algerians' ra
tening habits beginning in the 1930s, yet the succession of governing
in Algeria - from the Third Republic through the Vichy period and th
occupation of North Africa to the Fourth Republic - all politicized radi
ing in different ways, suggesting that newspaper accounts might be pr
understood as a form of dialogue with a particular government or oc
power. Recollections about interwar radio listening written amid the A
War of Independence and during the post-independence period must
interpreted through the violence of the post- 1945 era, when an Alg
personal history could be used by political enemies to label them as a
"collaborator," or alternatively, to claim participation as a "nationalist
revolution. Indeed, Fanon's own refusal to acknowledge that an A
could listen to European radio voices without accepting colonial domi
masks myriad opportunities for quotidian resistance. It is reason
suggest that for Algerian listeners of the 1930s, placing a record on a
phone turntable or navigating their radio dials through an ocean of
nous static offered them small opportunities to resist the confines o
colonial state. Though French and foreign propaganda continued to d
the airwaves over the Mediterranean, Algerians could use their
however few in number, to gain access to the world outside the sph
French control or find a little quotidian pleasure in the Arabic musi
escaped colonial censors. Radio's potential to serve as a tool of both d
tion and resistance should provoke historians to reconsider the pivotal
sound in constructing colonial encounters. More important, the polit
broadcast sound in interwar Algeria reveal how colonialism cannot b
stood solely through the conventional framework of the imperial natio
but must be examined in a transnational or international context, whi
broadcasts and recorded sound were particularly well-suited to navigat

Subversive Sound - Transnational Radio Arabic Recordings and The Dangers of Listening in French Colonial Algeria

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Subversive Sound: Transnational Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the Dangers of Listening in

French Colonial Algeria, 1934-1939

Subversive Sound: Transnational

George Mason University

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked

of radio merchants and their personnel.2 While ostensibly directed at metropoli-

2 CAOM 15H32, J. Berthoin, le Directeur de la Sûreté Nationale pour M. le Ministre

7 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York 1967 [1959]).

experimenting with radio technology and broadcast sound as a novel method of

THE POLITICS OF RADIO BROADCASTING IN INTERWAR ALGERIA

Radio broadcasting debuted in Algeria against the back

1 1 Jacques Berque, French North Africa: The Maghreb between the

{colons) who controlled Algerian agricultural production of wine and wheat on

Centenary Commissioner Gustave Mercier paid lip service to Parisian debates,

émissions vers l'étranger, période 1931-1974. Problèmes physiques, législatives, et politiques.

the repressive native legal code (code de Vindigénat). Algerian politici

alongside Lili Labassi, Sassi, Mohammed El-Anka, and Cheika Tetma,

to "native" programming. Responding to European charges that no A

24 CARAN [Centre d'accueil et de recherches des Archives nationales] F60-739, Présidence du

anti-French unrest incited by radio propaganda, yet his fixation with w

surveillance relied upon no single, coherent logic, but rather a shifting

about information such as census data to escape the scrutiny of th

Kamel Kateb, Européens, "indigenes',' et juifs en Algérie (1830-1962): Représentations et

in the Bureau of Native Affairs accustomed to recording applause or cheers

CAPTURED SOUND: FRENCH SURVEILLANCE AND ARABIC RECORDS

In their initial forays into the colony's cafés maures to

conscription, and colonial policies in Syria and Lebanon. Radio-Bari oft

electric sales outlets turned up several suspicious persons, but simil

41 CAOM 15H32, Le Ministre de l'Intérieur à M. les Préfets, 27 Sept. 1934. Interest

tied the Baida brothers directly to political agitation, Constantin

49 CAOM 15H32, Préfecture de Constantine, Section des Affaires Indigènes et de

businessmen serving as the vehicles of Nazi-sponsored pan-Islam

policemen and agents in the Bureau of Native Affairs began combing A

record translations in the files of the Bureau of Native Affairs highlig

Baidaphone distributor and a reputed "Lothario" with an avowe

68 CAOM 1 5H32, Gouvernement Général d'Algérie, Cabinet du Gouvernement Général, Centre

FUGITIVE SOUND! TRACKING "NATIVE" LISTENERS

The French administration's obsession with tracking and confiscating politi-

receivers.79 In the city of Constantine, thirty-five public radios trans

79 CAOM 15H31, Relevé numérique des postes récepteurs de radiodiffusion existan

85 CARAN F60-710, Etat-Major de l'Armée, Section d'Outre-Mer, "Note sur la radiodiffusion

and Radio-Tétouan urged North Africans to rally behind Franco, a

REMAKING THE VOICE OF FRANCE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

The summer of 1936 - bracketed by the May elect

88 SHAT 7N4093, "La Radiodiffusion en Afrique du Nord," Bulle

politicians in the Ministries of Defense and Colonies first called for a

91 Pascal Le Pautremat. La volitiaue musulmane de la France aux XXe siècle, 354.

in late 1936 to investigate the transmitting power and "reach" of

99 SHAT 2N243, Procès-Verbal de la Conférence des Services Généraux d'Information de

When Radio-Alger's new "native" broadcasts debuted in the winter o

BROADCAST SOUND AND COLONIAL HEGEMONY

In conclusion, I wish to consider how the previous an

108 CAOM 9H50, L'Administrateur de la Commune mixte de Ned

As Algerians tinkered with their radio dials, searching through stat

112 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 92-94.

contextualized within the nation's tumultuous political history. Indig

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