West Africa: vintage hotel radios with email indicators
I have encountered these handsome, clunky old analog radios in hotel rooms throughout Benin.
Each of those numbered buttons is supposed to give you a different radio station (usually only one or two kinda work, if you're lucky). The slider thing (often missing) is volume. I do not know what that input jack is for, presumably headphones.
But the best part of this is the little envelope icon, with an associated red light.
I like to imagine that this is an email indicator.
My red email status light hasn't lit up yet, but perhaps that's just because nobody in Africa wants to send email to my hotel room radio.
The devices were present in very cheap hotels in smaller towns ($10-40/night, and they often double as brothels), but I also saw them in the most expensive hotel in the country ($200-400 a night, and for all I know, there may be sex work happening there too -- but more discreetly).
I have been listening to local radio stations a lot throughout the trip, on these devices, but also in cars. Some of the people I've met here have shared insight on the role of local, indigenous-language radio in popular culture. I'm told that the talk show hosts who speak Fon, Twi, Ga, Yoruba, Hausa -- whatever the predominant local language is -- are often more influential and have more dedicated fan bases than hosts who deliver in English or French.
Someone I met from the World Bank shared information with me about the importance of radio is as a communications medium in a number of African countries -- specifically, a case study in Mali -- and the internet ties into this in an interesting way you might not expect. More on that soon.
I don't speak any West African languages well enough to grok an entire radio broadcast, but I can understand some tiny bits and pieces. Mostly, I've just been trying to absorb as much as I can of the cultures here, and listening to lots of different radio helps. Even if some of it ends up just being sound, not intelligible words, to my still-uneducated ears.
7 Comments:
The light is for letting you know if the front desk has a message for you. That's all. It's almost email!
Just the sight of that radio brought back sense memories of old, cheap motel rooms; the smell of sagging mattresses that have borne too many bodies, dingy wood veneer that's absorbed too much smoke over the years, and an overall feeling of "beige."
(The 'email indicator' is, of course, just a light that tells you there's a message for you at the reception desk.)
The red light is kinda like an answering machine light; when it's on it means that somebody's left a message for you at the concierge desk :)
On a vaguely related note, similar ''fixed line radios'' were also prevalent in hotel rooms, student dormitories, and all other sorts of public buildings in many of the former Eastern Bloc countries, particularly Czechoslovakia, except those devices only had a single combined on/off/volume button... no radio station choice for you, comrade!
no radio station choice for you, comrade!
er... In Soviet Russia, the Station broadcasts YOU?
The jack is for an old style analogue telephone.
The jack is for the maid and hotel staff, it allows 2-way conversations with the front desk. Units w/0 the jack may have the microphone built-in, makes bugging rooms in Rumania that much easier.
These things were standard issue in Western Europe in the 70-80's.
They had one nice feature: if the jerk in the next room was playing his too loud you could unscrew the panel and short out the wires that supplied the program to all the rooms - It was 70V PA system wiring with a transformer in the box, short out the primary.
I don't think it's a radio (I can't see the trade name); it looks very much like what was abandoned in Switzerland in 1997 and still exists in Italy as Filodiffusione - radio broadcast down a phone line. It was introduced in Switzerland 1931 and ensured clear sound in mountainous areas for long wave broadcasting.
In German it was called 'Telefonrundspruch' and it was very popular in hotels and restaurants until the end of its life. The most popular make of TR received was the Biennophone.
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