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.