Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa

Herman Wasserman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136911606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa examines the role that popular media could play to encourage political debate, provide information for development, or critique the very definitions of 'democracy' and 'development'. Drawing on diverse case studies from various regions of the African continent, essays employ a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to ask critical questions about the potential of popular media to contribute to democratic culture, provide sites of resistance, or, conversely, act as agents for the spread of Americanized entertainment culture to the detriment of local traditions. A wide variety of media formats and platforms are discussed, ranging from radio and television to the Internet, mobile phones, street posters, film and music.

As part of the Routledge series Internationalizing Media Studies, the book responds to the important challenge of broadening perspectives on media studies by bringing together a range of expert analyses of media in the African continent that will be of interest to students and scholars of media in Africa and further afield.

Part I
The popular media sphere

Theoretical interventions

Chapter 1
De-Westernizing media theory to make room for African experience¹

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Theorizing the local and the global in Africa

How should one think about popular media in the African context? Should we attempt to understand and analyse the increasing proliferation of tabloids, reality television shows, pop music, websites and mobile communications through the analytical frameworks constructed by scholars in the Global North, or does Africa pose unique research questions? Is there a danger of either essentializing Africa by treating her as ‘different’, or by ignoring her specificity by approaching her media via Western theoretical constructs?

The scholar wishing to understand the interface between popular media, development and democracy in contemporary African societies is faced with a complex double bind. Elsewhere (Nyamnjoh 2005: 2–3) I have argued that African worldviews and cultural values are doubly excluded from global media discourses, first by the ideology of hierarchies and boundedness of cultures, and second by cultural industries more interested in profits than the promotion of creative diversity and cultural plurality. Little attention is accorded to how Africans negotiate and navigate the various identity margins and cultural influences in their lives, in ways that are not easily reducible to simple options or straightforward choices. The consequence of rigid dichotomies or stubborn prescriptiveness based on externally induced expectations of social transformation is an idea of democracy hardly informed by popular articulations of personhood and agency in Africa, and media whose professional values and content are not in tune with the expectations of those they purport to serve.

The predicament of media practitioners in such a situation, as well as those wishing to understand African media practice through media theory, is obvious: to be of real service to liberal democracy and its expectations of modernity, they must ignore alternative ideas of personhood and agency in the cultural communities within which such practices take place and of which such practitioners and, often, scholars form part. Attending to the interests of particular cultural groups as strategically essential entities risks contradicting the principles of liberal democracy and its emphasis on civic citizenship and the autonomous individual, which media practitioners in African societies are being held accountable to. Torn between such competing and conflicting understandings of democracy, the media find it increasingly difficult to marry rhetoric with practice, and for strategic instrumentalist reasons may opt for a Jekyll and Hyde personality that is, at the end of the day, of service neither to democracy nor to development (Nyamnjoh 2005).

Yet despite this critique of the dominant liberal democratic normative paradigm, one should avoid the trap of an idealization of Africa or the romantic essentialism of ‘African values’ that many proponents of Afrocentric thought are prone to (Kasoma 1996; Pecora et al. 2008). A flexible theoretical position is needed, one which takes into account the multiple, overlapping spaces and flows in the era of globalization yet refuses to gloss over global power imbalances and material inequalities (Ferguson 2006). For instance, while the potential contribution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to development in Africa has widely been lauded by cyber-optimists, such euphoria should be mitigated (see Nyamnjoh 1999) by a sober assessment of the political economy of access to new media technologies, and by the reality of the social shaping of these technologies by Africans who harness these technologies to simultaneously reproduce and contest existing social structures in ways that technological determinism masks more than elucidates (Mbarika 2003; Nyamnjoh 2005; de Bruijn et al. 2009). In this light one should hold out hope for the creative ways in which recent developments in media technologies can give rise to participatory movements like ‘citizen’ journalism which could open new opportunities for democratic citizenship and flexible mobility (Bahree 2008; Panos 2008; Dibussi 2009). Africa’s creativity simply cannot allow for simple dichotomies or distinctions between old and new technologies, since its peoples are daily modernizing the indigenous and indigenizing the modern with novel outcomes.

No theorization takes place in a void. Meaningful theorization about media has to be contextualized, and African scholars should critically situate their scholarship in relation to theories from Europe and North America. The test of the theoretical pudding being in the practical eating, no scholar should enter the marketplace of ideas without fully being aware where they’re coming from, and the extent to which the theories on display in the shop windows of ideas, make sense. When you buy a dress you don’t buy it to hang in a wardrobe, you buy it to wear it, so you try on different dresses to see which one fits your bulk. If you’re a bulky person and you go and buy a Barbie-like dress just because it’s fashionable to be a Barbie, you won’t have the opportunity of wearing that dress. The dress would not be relevant to your reality, because your reality is simply too large for the Barbie-like dress, no matter how appealing that dress might appear. It is not a question of finding a dress somewhere that fits you. It is a question of finding a dress which has room for expansion, a dress you could extend to accommodate the fullness of your being. There should be room on the sides of existing theories for African scholarship to extend the cloth (Nyamnjoh 2004a).

If critical-cultural theory as it has historically emerged from European media and cultural studies, finds reason to be critical of American scholarship because it is too narrowly focused, either because of a focus on American society or an American understanding of what society should be like, then it is normal that an African who buys into Western theoretical articulations would say that as much as it makes sense when you narrow it down to comparing European and American societies, these theories don’t quite make that much sense when you compare Western societies taken together with non-Western societies like those in Africa. So if African scholars find inspiration from critical thinking, they still need to open up this dress and beat it and stretch it, because of the African colonial experience and because of the African postcolonial situation of living in the shadows of global forces, and then come up with something that is not radically different as such but has different nuances in tune with the African experience (Ferguson 2006; Zeleza 2006).

Providing for African creativity

An African proverb says: ‘Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter’ (Achebe 2000: 73). The wisdom of this proverb is brought home not only through an analysis of writings on Africa, but also and perhaps more sensationally through the images of Africa captured in the cinematic gaze of the supposedly superior others. As the bottom rungs of the ladder of race and place, Africa has through the centuries provided especially Euro-American cultural entrepreneurs with a rich catalogue of stereotypes, prejudices and other negations on which to capitalize. If this is true of publishing, cinema and television have, since the twentieth century, offered more efficient vehicles for effective traffic in such misrepresentations (Walker and Rasamimanana 1993; Barlet 2000; Gugler 2003; Harding 2003).

In their study of educational films on Africa in American schools, Walker and Rasamimanana (1993) discovered not only the prominence of Tarzan films in the repertoire of ‘America’s most consistent cinematic denigration of Africans’, but also a tendency in Hollywood films to persist in presenting Africa as a continent of negations inhabited by stupid, bloodthirsty savages who are incapable of teaching anyone anything of value, but who must learn all from others to make progress. Hardly ever is there mention of the Africans who ‘fought determinedly against European aggression and influence to preserve their indigenous and sovereign ways’. Nor do the films recognize that many contemporary, welleducated, and cosmopolitan Africans have chosen to maintain their indigenous values and behaviours, or that many others have eclectically adapted or ‘Africanized’ some elements of Western culture while deliberately and consciously rejecting others as inferior to their own.

If stereotypes and prejudices are this evident in educational films, the situation is worse with commercial films. An effect of feeding school children and adults alike with a consistent menu of misrepresentations about Africa and the African diaspora is the reproduction of hierarchies that exclude and render invisible African humanity and creativity (Walker and Rasamimanana 1993: 7–16). We could add to this study examples of Hollywood movies (Blood Diamond, Lords of War, etc.) that articulate African predicaments in ways that fail to do justice to the nuances and complexities of the realities they seek to capture.

Since colonial times, Africans have been confined largely to consuming (even if creatively) pervasive ‘mythic Hollywood screen imagery’ (Ambler 2001), and to feeding the Africa misrepresentation industry (Barlet 2000; Harding 2003). In a context like this, where Africans find themselves peripheral to global trends and subjected to the high-handedness and repression of their own governments, it is easy to slip into meta-narratives that celebrate victimhood. While there is genuine reason to be pessimistic and cynical, there is often, on closer observation, also reason to be hopeful. However repressive a government may be and however profound the spiral of silence induced by standardized and routinized global cultural menus, few people are completely mystified or wholly duped. There is always room for initiative or agency at an individual or group level to challenge domination, exploitation and the globalization of indifference to cultural diversity. Histories of struggle in Africa are full of examples in this connection. In cinema, just as in publishing, Africans have found myriad creative ways of participating as active agents in national life and global cultural processes, and of reimagining their continent, its struggles, victories, challenges and aspirations (Gugler 2003).

As Eddie Ugbomah, a renowned Nigerian filmmaker, observes, in Africa ‘There are many trained filmmakers who can make films better than Hollywood directors, but they do not have Hollywood money’ (Ukadike and Ugbomah 1994: 157). They are making do with their widow’s mite, seeking to fill the cinematic vacuum on the positive contributions of African cultures. In the face of global cinematographic indifference and caricature of their realities, the African lions have sought – despite financial, political and other hurdles – to enrich or contest the accounts of the Euro-American cinematic hunters through films of their own (Medjigbodo 1980; Ukadike and Ugbomah 1994; Barlet 2000; Gugler 2003; Harding 2003: 79–83; Ngugi 2003).

In response to many of these dilemmas, the vibrant Nigerian video-movie industry, with its highly localized locations, settings, dress and narratives, has responded with direct-to-video marketing, cutting out theatre-going, which is perceived as not being central to African cultural patterns and practices. The assumption is that given the tendency for Africans to view movies in their own homes, movies need not necessarily be distributed mainly for cinemas, where they would have to compete with Hollywood blockbusters. Through direct-to-video sales, the Nigerian movie industry is making a name for itself locally and internationally, notably amongst Nigerians and Africans in the diaspora (Adejunmobi 2002: 77–95; Ambler 2002: 119–20; Harding 2003: 81–3; see also Chapter 14 in this volume).

Though sometimes overly dramatic, sensational and stereotypical in their portrayal, especially of the occult and ritualized practices drawn largely from ethnic Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa cultures (Okwori 2003), the Nigerian video-movie industry covers themes and uses language in creative ways relevant to and popular with its African audiences (Adejunmobi 2002). Throughout Africa and thanks to flexible mobility, cities are full of shops owned mainly by the Nigerian Igbo business community selling Nigerian-made and pirated films from Hollywood, Bollywood and Nigeria’s very own popular Nollywood, at affordable prices. The fact of the films being a mixture of English, pidgin English and indigenous Nigerian languages does not seem to detract from their popularity across Africa. Commercial and public television stations throughout Africa feed heavily on Nollywood videos (through popular digital channels like Africa Magic), while from Maputo to Dakar through Harare, Nairobi, Accra and Freetown pirated latest Hollywood films proliferate at US$5 and less. Indeed, ‘video dens and theatres have become ubiquitous features on African landscapes’, offering new forms of leisure to urban and rural Africa alike, ranging from establishments where funds are informally collected in exchange for film shows, to more formal movie theatres, through obscure backrooms and home viewing (Ambler 2002: 119).

Pirating may be a breach of copyright but it is also an indication of the desire to belong by those who are denied first-hand consumption of the cultural products in question. Using very basic equipment and releasing its products directly on video cassettes and CDs, Nigerian filmmakers have captured a large market among Africans at home and in the dias...

Table of contents

• Internationalizing Media Studies
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Part I The popular media sphere
• Part II Popular media, politics and power
• Part III Audiences, agency and media in everyday life
• Part IV Identity and community between the local and the global
• Index