From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Five Cowries (Audio Serial)
This article documents the Ghana-based audio dramatisation. For other Ghanaian adaptations, see Ghana. For divination and narrative structure, see Archive (concept in Beach Surgery).
The Five Cowries was a listener-participatory radio serial broadcast on Radio Kassan (Accra, Ghana) and retransmitted via community radio networks across West Africa. Each episode opened with diviner Ama Mensah throwing five cowrie shells and interpreting their fall as a narrative key: how many shells landed "mouth up" (truth), how many "mouth down" (mystery), and the two "fallen away" shells became the week's unresolved questions. The dramatisation followed, performed live by a rotating ensemble in the station, with listeners calling in to vote on which interpretation of the glitch would resolve that episode's crisis.
The serial recast Leif as a man whose five senses are each severed (reversing the novel's three injuries into five partial deaths). Katita becomes a griot-healer who must navigate five different family lineages, each with competing claims on his cure. The cowrie-shell mechanic means each episode is genuinely unpredictable—the script adapts to the shells' fall, making every broadcast different even when re-aired. [1] This breaks the glitch not through narrative coherence but through acceptance of aleatory: the shells have spoken, and the story must follow them into contradiction.
The archive, largely ephemeral (radio broadcasts were rarely recorded), survives in listener tapes and a 2019 bootleg compilation circulated at convention fairs.
See also
References
- ↑ Radio Forms and the Infinite Archive, Surgipelago Studies Quarterly 3.2 (2021), 44–67.