BROADCASTING IN THE BUSH.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 25 August 1922, Page 1

BROADCASTING IN THE BUSH.

(By F. S. Joelson, author of "The . Tanganyika Territory''). We think it wonderful that our advancing knowledge has made broadcasting possible. Yet every traveller insavage Africa has had evidence of the almost incredible swiftness with -which the natives can communicate with distant friends, this "bush wireless" operating more speedilv than our telegraph. The exact means employed vary with the tribe and circumstances. Drumbeats are the usual signals, smoke is often used, and in some parts of the Gold Coast even whistling is enlisted for the conveyance of news. More" mysterious Still is the so-called veld *or bush telegraph, a phenomenon which wise Europeans do not attempt to explain. They merely know that it does exist., and that messages are carried hundreds of miles in a day or two when neither drums, smoke, nor other visible or audible means have been utilised. Bush villages can call up one another very much as if they were on the telephone. Each has its collection of signalling drums, used for different purposes, and by them the chiefs can tell each other that there is a maneating -lion on the prowl, that the native commissioner has started his tax gathering tour, or that there will be a big beer-drink at such-and-such a village on the night of the full moon. 'The-European who has lived long in the bush and who hears the sound of far-away drums knows well that the to him unintelligible beats are far from meaningless for the natives. For instance, in August 1914 I was forty miles from the East African coast, hiit only four miles from a telegraph office. Immediately that etation learnt of the outbreak of ,the war a messenger jumped on a bicycle to bring us the news-. He need not have troubled. Four hours before the telegraph clerk had had the staggering news one of the plantation headmen had asked me mysteriously why the white men in Europe were at war. It was my first intimation that hostilities had started. The bush telegraph had beaten our own.