This thesis examines the influence of international broadcasting in late colonial East Africa, focusing on the audiences to radical anti-colonial broadcasters including Radio Cairo, All India Radio, Radio Moscow and Radio Peking. By examining broadcast transcripts, colonial reports and personal memoir, it seeks to reconstruct not just who listened to these services but how they imagined their participation in a wider media ecosystem. It also examines how colonial administrators monitored, interpreted and responded to broadcasts. By tracing debates about the effects of ‘subversive broadcasts’ from the Second World War to the transfer of power in East Africa, it argues that the colonial state was deeply affected by the fear that anti-colonial broadcasting would destabilise British rule and lead to revolt in East Africa. These fears, in turn, encouraged the British Government to invest unprecedented resources in an emerging ‘information war’ between colonial and anti-colonial broadcasters.

This thesis begins by examining Axis broadcasting to East Africa in the Second World War, which produced the first significant propaganda anxieties within the colonial state but may also have attracted more active and critical audiences than British officials realised. It then traces the development of Radio Cairo and All India Radio’s broadcasts to East Africa, which contributed to complex and pluralistic listening cultures but encouraged the colonial government to turn to increasingly authoritarian measures of suppression. Finally, it examines the changing nature of the audiences in the final years of colonial rule, suggesting that oncoming political independence allowed some anti-colonial audiences to take on the form of a nationalist public sphere. Ultimately, this thesis argues that a bifurcated view of the audience as an imagined community and a community-in-being offers new opportunities to understand the influence of transnational media in the late colonial world.