How international radio opened the world for a young Libyan growing up under Gaddafi. Told by Ghazi Gheblawi (EP 5).
Growing up in Tripoli between ages 11 and 13, Gheblawi had a wide internal life but understood that what was available to him was limited. Books existed but felt curated or constrained. State TV was frozen in a deliberate 1980s aesthetic (see: The Propaganda Machine). The information environment was controlled.
International radio — especially BBC Arabic — opened a different door. Where state media showed Gheblawi only what the regime wanted him to see, radio showed him what existed beyond it. Music, culture, news, perspectives from outside the bubble.
He described hearing Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" as a significant cultural moment — Western culture seeping in through a radio signal that Gaddafi couldn't fully block.
Radio was not just entertainment. It was evidence that another world existed. For a future writer and publisher, it planted the idea that there were audiences, conversations, and ideas that Libya's borders were designed to keep out.
Gheblawi would later create the Emtidad (امتداد) cultural podcast — described as possibly the first Arabic-language podcast. The line from a boy listening to BBC Arabic in Tripoli to an adult making one of the first Arabic podcasts in London is direct.