The Red Radio

The luxury of owning a television in Samoa in the early 80's was only reserved for those families with money. Not particularly wealthy families but those who could muster up a few luxuries in life. We had a TV but both my parents were public servants so our family was never at any point characterized by wealth.

Radio was a big part of Samoan life. Our only radio station 2AP, served the entertainment needs of much of the country. There was a wide variety of programming from children's classroom lessons, stories, music dedications (a favorite of the teenage youth), weather, funeral announcements and government notices. Everything a public radio should be. I always remembered during cyclones how everyone would cling to the radio hoping for good news while the incessant winds tore up our surroundings. Also thinking back, and I was too young to realize it, whether there was any government propaganda? Not sure if Samoan politics then was as insidious as it is today.

Ofo's family owned a radio. It was a red box-shaped radio with one round speaker on the right, tuner and volume dials on the left, analog frequency display on the top-front, and a red handle. It was about the size of a child's shoe box. The red radio was the only item of luxury in the entire fale. It constituted a major purchase in their family's economic situation. Often Ofo's mother and younger siblings would huddle around the radio and take in the moment's programming and chuckle at the antics of Samoa's most prominent radio personality, Pat Mamaia.

Strangely the state of the red radio often revealed the state of Ofo's family dynamics. There were days when it was loud and proud and the mood was jubilant. There were days when it was turned off completely because batteries could not be afforded. Then as time wore on the red radio was partly decimated and pieced together in a sloppy manner with pieces of string and rubberbands. Those were the bad times. Ofo's father had a proneness to throwing the radio out in front of the fale onto the stoned yard during his fits of anger. It was almost as if it was a lesson in humanity. In stressful times, the father who is the head of the family, will take away or deny the family of a certain thing, and the mother will quietly and methodically patch it up and add reassurance that everything will be okay.

However, after a few trips to the front yard of the fale the red radio ended up burning with all of the other insignificant rubbish one evening. Nothing replaced the red radio. Ofo's family had no electricity so I often wondered what they did in the evenings. He showed up every Tuesday night at my house to watch the A-Team. Not long after the red radio disappeared Ofo's family were evicted and disappeared to.