ever: J; Saucepan Special on Film

Lusaka Calling
(dir. Louis Nell), prod. Central African Film Unit, Zambia, 725 ft, colour, sound, 1949.

The Australian National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra is the only place I know outside Zimbabwe's archives which have a copy of the film.They have it on 16mm and DVD. Here are three of my efforts to snap stills from the DVD.

The content of these films gives a good overview of key aspects of the post war mass
education/community development programs and campaigns. Nyono Gets A Letter,
Nyono’s wife is about to give birth to her first child at a time when Nyono has to leave
the village and go to work on road construction for the Northern Rhodesian Public Works
Department. A mass literacy instructor arrives in the village and Agnes learns to read
Mutende (the government newspaper for Africans) to the other patients and to write to
her worried husband to announce the birth of their child. Husbands and Wives describes a community development project –the area school at Katete in Northern Rhodesia –
where residential schools are given in carpentry, road- building and mass literacy
supervision; the wives had classes in beadwork, knitting and home craft. Lusaka Calling
(1950?)is a promotional film for the “Saucepan Special”, ‘the people’s radio of Central
Africa’. This radio once celebrated in a Ripley’s ‘Believe it or Not cartoon’ in the
Sunday Express was designed to enable the Africans of Northern Rhodesia, Southern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland to listen to Lusaka’s Central African Broadcasting Station
(CABS), the first radio station in Africa designed exclusively for Africans. The scheme
came about as a result of the initiative of Harry Franklin, Northern Rhodesian
Information Officer who obtained financial assistance from Colonial Development and
Welfare funds, technical advice from the BBC and the cooperation of Ever Ready in
Britain to research and develop the idea of a cheap, short - wave, dry cell battery
receiver. [45]

The CABS staff (bothEuropean and African) put together a series of
experimental programs designed to encourage African music and drama, as well as
engage in adult education and the promotion of government policy.
Lusaka Callingshows a mobile recording van arriving in the Tongan village of Chief
Shiamundu. The engineer recorded some local songs and played the record back to the
people, telling them that the record would soon be played over the CABS. The Chief
buys a radio and the film shows the people listening incredulously at first, as their music
is played over the radio.The film also shows Chief Shiamundu being shown around the
broadcasting station in Lusaka.
In 1950, inspired by the greatly enlarged radio audiences the Northern Rhodesian
Information Department using all the media at its disposal: newspapers, posters,
pamphlets, film and broadcasting, launched a five - year mass education campaign. The
campaign concentrated on six areas which included improved hygiene, education for girls and better agriculture. The CABS launched a women’s program in 1950 with an African woman announcer. “Know Your Own People” was devised to explain one ethnic group to another. The station broadcast in four local languages and in English with the most popular program being devoted to musical requests; other programs included quizzes, health programs, language lessons and radio plays (some improvised by African announcers) and serials carrying a social message. John Grenfell Williams, head of the BBC’s Colonial Service and author of the UNESCO survey, Radio in Fundamental Education in Undeveloped Areas(Paris, 1950) visited the station as did noted British broadcaster, Cyril Ray who wrote that Northern Rhodesia had ‘made one of the biggest contributions to the whole field of mass communications’. [46]

45: H. Franklin, Report on ‘The Saucepan Special’: the Poor Man’s Radio for Rural Populations (Lusaka,
Government Printer, 1950).
46: Cyril Ray, ‘The Saucepan Set’, The Times Educational Supplement, 10 March 1950, 176.