A fundamental question that faces the African continent as it grapples with the issues of democratisation and socio-economic development through the vehicle of the African Union is whether indeed there is something one can call “African Media”. Isn’t it more accurate to talk about the “Media in Africa”?
The modern media – newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film and new media – did not originate in an African context. They are part and parcel of the colonial intrusion into Africa. As most studies of Africa’s domination have shown, the media was one of the key institutions used to subjugate Africans, through crude propaganda in the colonial-controlled news media and subtle ideological manipulation in magazines, radio, film and video for the African market.
True, not all colonial media churned out propaganda and ideologically manipulative representations — but the overall framework of the images produced assumed the African was inferior to the European and needed to be civilised. It is also true that some “educated” Africans who mounted resistance against colonial and apartheid domination used the media as a weapon in the struggle.
So the transformation of the colonial media to serve the broad interests of Africans in the post-colonial era has taken, and continues to take, very interesting turns. It is these transformation imperatives that need to be interrogated if we are to determine whether we have “Media in Africa”, as in colonial times, or “African Media”.
First, when it comes to the print media, it is unquestionable that what we still have is Media in Africa. The overwhelming number of newspapers and magazines in Africa use the colonial languages English, French and Portuguese — which, to be sure, are now part of the language landscape. But many are foreign-owned as well — South Africa, the most economically advanced African country, with the largest commercial media sector, is one such example.
The problem with this is that a large majority of Africans (including the “educated” ones) best understand communication in their own languages.
But it is not only the language that is the problem — it is also the content in print media that is linked to the language. Precisely because print media uses a minority yet dominant language, its content is elitist when dealing with African issues — and is also very much skewed towards stories about Europe and North America. It appears that the umbilical cord was never cut.
One would think that the similarities in terms of democratisation and socio-economic challenges with India, China, East and Central Europe, South America and the Caribbean would mean that there is decent and regular content on those parts of the world, in addition to the American and European obsession.
Yet it is not unusual to find that the large and profitable newspapers in Africa have tidbits week after week on the sexual shenanigans of third-rate celebrities in America and Europe, but no stories on major developments in Africa or the rest of the developing world.
The problem of the nature of the content does not end there. Even when there are stories in both government and privately owned newspapers about African issues, they are often sourced from news agencies that are American or European — who naturally frame issues from their own perspective. In short, African stories get told to Africans by North Americans and Europeans with the same subtle ideological manipulations as in the colonial era.
Further, African journalists often have North American or European role models. They view a CNN African Journalist of the Year Award as the height of professional validation. Journalism trainers cite European and North American practices as the ideal, even when those practices are derided as a danger to democracy in their own parts of the world.
Maybe it can be argued that the broadcast media exhibits features that tend towards the African Media model. From a language point of view, radio has essentially been “Africanised”. In most African countries the major indigenous languages are used in radio services.
While the languages of minorities can sometimes be excluded or marginalised, this is often linked to broader political, cultural and economic marginalisation and does not necessarily mean we have a case of “Radio in Africa” (as opposed to “African Radio”). That said, a real problem is that in many countries the benchmark is often the likes of the BBC, Voice of America and Radio France International, and not any model designed for a local context.
Often, therefore, the news in state controlled radio tends to be elitist and official in approach. In commercial radio the news can also be sensationalist, in the mistaken belief that this leads to robustness. So the voices of the large majority of Africans who are not middle class urbanites are left out.
Further, the range of music played is often narrow, driven by the commercial imperatives of the advertising and music industries. African music, with its own unique creativity and inspiration, is marginalised. Fundamentally, in a mass medium with the power of radio, there is a failure to speak to and about the everyday struggles that afflict millions of Africans living on less than “a dollar a day”.
But television is the best — or in this case maybe the worst — example of the Media in Africa model. Beyond the news (predominantly in European languages), which in most African countries is state-controlled, and a few poorly made entertainment programmes (that may attract large audiences but not the advertising) there is little that can be counted as African content.
The number of television channels is growing in Africa because of satellite broadcasting out of South Africa, and could grow even more with digitisation, but MultiChoice Africa does not offer many African programmes — at this stage it is little more than a conduit for foreign programmes into the rest of the continent. Still, to be fair, both MultiChoice and SABC (with SABC Africa) are providing something that could one day form the basis for African Media in television.
Given all this, it is now urgent that Africa embarks on a second round of media transformation initiatives. This time it must be thorough. We must try, if possible, to avoid the shallow efforts that have only resulted in governments and commercial operators seizing the media for their own narrow interests.
The continent desperately requires a combination of private- and publicly-funded media that uses a broad diversity of languages (including the European languages) and has a broad diversity of content. We also need sustainable African-owned community media. The content of an African media system should of course have a strong focus on African issues, without excluding African perspectives on pertinent issues from the rest of the world — to which we are intricately linked.
We must do all of this because a continent cannot develop democratic institutions and address the challenges of mass poverty and disease without a media system that places its own people and their aspirations for a better life at the centre.
Professor Tawana Kupe is Head of the School of Literature, Languages and Media Studies at Wits University.