Toward a Study of Radio and Television in Africa. The Case of Nigeria

3 RADIO AND TELEVISION IN AFRICA There is something unnatural in the African States, hurriedly designed by the ancient colonisers. Within their boundaries a hundred languages, a hundred customs, a hundred cultures meet in the same juridical space and each day there arise difficulties, conflicts and struggles even bloodshed. One can grasp the importance which the radio and television can assume in the new African nations, as instruments of communication on a wide scale toward an agreement and a peaceful co-existence of different cultures. But one can grasp also how the cultural problem in program scheduling is immense and varied, both for the radio on account of linguistic pluralism and for the television on account of the multiplicity of customs and behaviours. It is not therefore possible to understand social communication without basing oneself on a rigorous sociological research, without pointing out the different statistical aspect end the different cultural requirements. For these reasons the survey made by Arnaldo Rigodanza is considerable: it concerns a particular area, the tormented Nigeria; but precisely in its geographical limits it becomes reliable and documented. A survey conducted with discretion and respect, but also with acumen, by questioning and comparing on the spot; and by proposing once again the serious problem of the neo-colonialism, which now and again re- emerges by selling among other things the productions of its own cultural industry to those countries where to produce locally is still difficult. The problems of the Third World present themselves in this way, in all their gravity, even though from a single Nation of the vast Continent, and from the definite perspective of social communication . But this limitation is, lastly, an example of scientific exactitude: the only way to begin a serious proposal; which goes beyond the rhetoric of the new nations. Virgilio Melchiorre