ABSTRACT
In December 2008, shortly after the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, I encountered a street vendor selling cheap copies of DVDs on the pavement in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Wearing a T-shirt proclaiming ‘Barack Obama for President 2008’, he was inviting patrons coming from the bakery across the street to browse his selection of titles. These included not only biographical films presenting Obama as a son of Africa, but also some that offered critical perspectives on his predecessor, George W. Bush, by exposing the ‘relationship between Bush and Osama Bin Laden’, for instance, recounting conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks, or including Bush in a documentary about famous dictators. The proximity of this exchange on the pavement (in close proximity to the bakery selling fine pastries and ice cream across the bustling street) struck me as a vivid illustration of the multiple histories, alternative visions of modernity and the layered identity positions occupied in everyday Africa. It also suggested how global popular culture gets sampled, remade locally and re-circulated in order to attain political significance, even if the counter-hegemonic impact of such popular engagement with the political sphere remains debatable. The pavement discussions ensuing from the selling of DVDs about Barack Obama and George W. Bush, shaped to relate to Cameroonians’ daily lived experience, would resemble not so much the elitist public sphere envisaged by Habermas as the vibrant, convivial radio trottoir (Ellis 1989; Nyamnjoh 2005) where current affairs are discussed in informal networks. The overlaps and interfaces of popular media, politics and everyday lived experiences in Africa are at the centre of this book. The example of Obama’s representation in African popular media (see also the cover illustration of this book, where residents of Kibera slum in Nairobi follow the inauguration of Obama on television with expectation and jubilation) furthermore reminds us that African media cannot be studied in isolation from global political events nor could local engagement with global media events be understood as passive consumption. An essentialist view of African media as locked in a binary opposition to those in the Global North could be just as reductive as one which views African media audiences as the passive dupes of American cultural imperialism or an approach to African media which neglects the
differences between African countries, regions or internal contestations in African nation-states. Insights from international scholars like Straubhaar (2007), Kraidy (2005) and Thussu (2006, 2009) have refocused attention on the ways in which global media are shaped by global flows, contraflows and hybrid transculturation. As Nixon (1994: 3) has shown in his study of the ties between South African culture and the United States, these global allegiances are also marked by slippages and barriers, so that connections between African culture and global culture remain partial and intermittent. The visibility of these local-global connections in the realm of the popular should not be mistaken as evidence for equality between the partners involved in cultural exchanges. Critics (see for example Sparks 2007) of globalization theory have pointed to the stubborn persistence of global inequalities in media ownership, production and consumption. These continued imbalances between media-rich and media-poor, both globally and within nations themselves, raise critical questions about the much-heralded demise of the nation-state brought on in part by the globalization of mass media, and underline the continued relevance of critical political-economic approaches to the study of media in Africa. When studying popular media in Africa, one cannot avoid the continued global asymmetries of economic and political power, and one is led to ask how popular media can contribute to the very real, urgent and tangible issues which confront the continent. Given these persisting inequalities in the global media arena, one is compelled to not only celebrate the vibrancy of popular media in Africa in terms of their creative articulations of everyday life, but to examine the relationship between these forms of popular expression and the political and economic spheres on the continent as these relate to global geopolitics and the hegemony of neoliberalism. The popular in Africa, as Barber (1997: 3) notes with reference to Bourdieu, is a site ‘inscribed with the history of political and cultural struggles’. Neither the dismissal à la the Frankfurt School of the popular as material for brainwashing, nor the uncritical acceptance that ‘what is popular is by definition good’ (Barber 1997: 3) can be the only response to the vibrant array of popular media on the continent today. For instance, while critics have denounced tabloid newspapers in Africa as cheap sensationalism that depoliticizes citizens, others have pointed to the way these newspapers articulate the experience of the poor and the marginalized who seldom take centre stage in the mainstream press. Tabloid papers such as the Red Pepper in Uganda, and the Daily Voice, Son and Daily Sun in South Africa have enjoyed tremendous popularity in the past decade. The Daily Sun is now the biggest daily newspaper in South Africa, with a readership of around five million among the poor and working-class black population (see Wasserman 2010). These tabloids have been lambasted for their sensational content, homophobia and xenophobia, accused of diverting readers’ attention from important news with stories about sex and gossip, and providing entertainment instead of information. While these accusations are not without truth, these tabloid newspapers may also be read as part of political discourses in African countries where access to the
mainstream media or participation in political debate remains the preserve of the elite. One of the arguments for the positive potential of tabloids is that they provide readers who feel excluded from dominant discourses and social processes with the pleasure of seeing the establishment’s norms subverted, undermined or satirized. This is the point of view of John Fiske, for whom the existence of tabloids should be read as an index of the ‘extent of dissatisfaction in a society, particularly among those who feel powerless to change their situation’ (1989: 117). The distance experienced between ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ (Pillay 2008) often expresses itself as apathy, ridicule or mocking. West and Fair (1993: 104), referring to development theatre in Tanzania, invoke Bakhtin’s work (e.g. Bakhtin 1968) on the carnival to suggest that ‘laughter, frivolity, and the carnivalesque open up an “unofficial” discursive space from which the “official” world may be ridiculed and resistance sustained’. As Bosch points out in Chapter 5 in this volume, tabloids, like other forms of popular media, may therefore not be dismissed outright as having no political relevance or public value. Tabloid newspapers in Africa are an example of how complex issues are raised by the introduction of global popular formats into the local media landscape in Africa. This engagement between the global and the local is not a one-way street, however. Africans display agency in the way they engage with global popular media formats in the international arena. The popularity of global television formats among African viewers, for instance, does not preclude viewers from challenging representations of themselves, constructing counter-discourses to the dominant ones presented in global television, or negotiating the meanings presented to them. Nor are these engagements limited to a geographically bounded African context, but also take place among Africans in the diaspora, as Mano and Willems (2008) have shown in their analysis of online debates among diasporic Zimbabweans in response to the appearance of a Zimbabwean nurse, Makosi Musambasi, on the British Big Brother reality television show. Their example is interesting not only for its illustration of how diasporic audiences can make use of entertainment media formats to challenge xenophobic and racist representations of Africans (in this case the antagonism against Musambasi stoked up in the British tabloid press), but also for how local (gendered) politics became articulated through global genres and platforms. This appropriation and abrogation of global media paradigms by Africans, with political aims of subverting racist discourses (even as racism became replaced by gender stereotyping), illustrates that the relation between the global and the local in popular media, and the various relations of power entwined in that relationship, are too complex and contradictory to be described by crude media imperialism paradigms. The examples of creative appropriation of popular media by Africans can easily seduce the optimistic observer into celebrating their potential as vehicles to escape the tenacious communicative imbalances between the Global North and South. Nowhere is the emancipatory promise that popular media hold for Africans more clearly seen than in the field of information and communication technologies (ICTs). New media in African have often been seen as an instigator for social change and
‘moves toward democratization’ (Mudhai et al. 2009: x) or unproblematically embraced as tools for ‘leapfrogging’ stages of development (Mudhai et al. 2009: 1). Mobile phones, the ‘new talking drums of Africa’ (De Bruijn et al. 2009) are becoming increasingly central to the way Africans interact with the online public sphere. With their vast penetration in Africa, mobile phones are challenging endogenous and exogenous hegemony (Eskine 2010) and can amplify other ICTs to form ‘new solidarities to challenge undemocratic forces, ideologies and practices that stand in the way of social progress’ (Nyamnjoh, in Wasserman 2009). Yet the initial optimism surrounding new media in Africa has been tempered by more realistic and nuanced assessments of their potential as well as limitations. For critical scholars of new media, the creative appropriation of new media technologies has to be considered against ‘old questions about access, inequality, power, and the quality of information’ (Mudhai et al. 2009: 1). The nuanced stance required for the study of new media technologies on the continent is also advisable for popular media in Africa more broadly. Instead of merely celebrating the existence and vibrancy of popular media in Africa, this book explicitly wants to critically examine how these media relate to discourses of African democracy and development. The danger exists that studies of popular media phenomena might only be celebrating the insignificant without scrutinizing them for ways in which they may feed meaningfully into a process of substantial political engagement. Whether through surveys and interviews, theoretical interventions or political economic critiques, the chapters in this book investigate how audiences/consumers/users use popular media, under which conditions they are doing so and whether such usage may empower them as citizens to participate in political processes or challenge established centres of power. At the same time, the meaning of the very concepts of ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ cannot be taken for granted, nor can the relationship between them be seen as without contradictions and tensions. These concepts are interrogated in the book, both in theoretical interventions and in context-based case studies. The examples shared in the chapters in this book are not only aimed at proving or disproving the potential of popular media to disseminate information necessary for social change – in the ‘entertainment for development’ tradition – nor are they singularly concerned with ways in which popular media can provide spaces for democratic deliberation and the performance of citizenship. While these perspectives are included, and are important, the book as a whole attempts to illustrate how discourses about ‘popular media’, ‘development’ and ‘democracy’ intersect. Discourses about ‘development’ and ‘democracy’ are not always innocent, but may also serve to hide other agendas. H. Leslie Steeves’ chapter in this volume (Chapter 10), discussing the reception of the reality television show The Amazing Race, provides a convincing illustration of how popular genres on global entertainment media platforms may entrench neoliberal hegemony even as they engage in the seemingly benevolent rhetoric of ‘democracy’ and ‘development’. Yet popular media may also make visible the loss of legitimacy of African
democracies, satirize the powerful and create alternative modernities, as several other chapters show. The field of popular media is indeed multifaceted, consisting of different dimensions and contradictions. Although the relation between popular media, public communication and political life is often underestimated, popular media are deeply implicated in the ‘struggle for access to knowledge’ (Conboy 2002: 2). The fact that popular culture, and popular media as one of its manifestations, may be seen as linked to lucrative global economic concerns, has given rise to debates around the extent to which these media are vehicles for hegemony or may be appropriated and adapted by audiences with sufficient agency to use such popular forms in their own interests (cf. Conboy 2002: 15). Although the broad field of cultural studies has established the legitimacy of the popular as an area of scholarly inquiry, this enthusiasm has led to cultural studies often being accused of naïvely celebrating the political potential of the popular, with not enough attention being paid to the continuing limitations on popular discourses imposed by the state and capital. On the other hand, a reluctance can often still be noted in the field of mass communication and journalism studies to take popular culture seriously, with the moral panics around tabloid newspapers – widely seen both in Western and African democracies as a constituting a ‘crisis for democracy’ (Sparks 2000: 11; cf. Wasserman 2010). The political implications of media use have also been central to scholarship on media in Africa, yet arguably such research has hitherto mostly focused on formal, mainstream media. Media in Africa are widely regarded as having the potential to contribute to the exercise of civic rights and responsibilities, the communication of political information, the (re)construction of cultural identity and the achievement of developmental goals. Informed by the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as a space for rational deliberation, elite print media, public broadcasting or community media have been foregrounded as tools for development and deepening of liberal democracy. While a significant body of literature on African popular culture exists, this work has not always directly engaged with the implications of popular media for contested terms such as democracy and development. The dominant frames for investigations into the relation between media, democracy and development in Africa have been those derived from political economy and democratization theory, often incorporating discussions of policy and regulation, press freedom and normative issues (see for instance Bourgault 1995; Eribo and Jong-Ebot 1997; Horwitz 2001; Hyden et al. 2002; Tomaselli and Dunn 2001) – focusing on the role of (often state-owned or controlled) radio and television and mainstream newspapers, with little attention to more informal, popular forms of communication. While it has been argued that popular culture has been ‘assigned a marginal position in scholarship on the arts in sub-Saharan Africa’ (Barber 1997: 1), this neglect seems to be especially striking in the field of African journalism and media studies. The reason for the different perspectives on popular culture might have to do with the dominant normative frameworks for media on
the continent, which sees the African media’s role as predominantly concerned with deepening democracy and furthering socio-economic development (although what form these contributions should take has been the subject of much debate). While in the broader field of African studies, incorporating African cultural studies, popular culture has been seen in terms of the opportunities it offers for antihegemonic resistance (albeit by often naïvely exaggerating the extent of individual agency, as Wendy Willems points out in Chapter 3 in this volume), the emphasis in African journalism and media studies has fallen on the contribution formal media could (and, normatively, should) make to democracy and development on the continent. This book attempts to cross what often seems like a disciplinary divide between studies of popular culture in Africa on the one hand and the role of media in democracy and development on the other. It wants to explore the overlaps and interstices between mainstream, formal media and popular mediated communication; between cultural discourses and those of democracy and development; and between various disciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of popular culture, media, democracy and development. The contributions collected in this volume display an array of perspectives on popular media and its relation to African politics, society and culture. Some of these chapters employ critical theory to denounce the impact of popular media as tools of global cultural imperialism, while others follow ethnographic approaches to celebrate the ways in which Africans have appropriated and adopted popular media to fashion new identities and provide cultural contraflow; some chapters argue normatively for the regulation of popular media while others rejoice in the opportunities popular media offer for the subversion of authoritarian control; some unpack the political economy of these media forms against the specificities of African contexts while others take a more global view to discuss the position of African popular media in the age of globalization and the advent of new media technologies. While some chapters discuss popular media primarily in terms of its implications for democratic politics, others emphasize its relation to developmental issues or the overlap between discourses of development and democracy. It was the clear intention not to impose a particular vision of popular media or prescribe a specific theoretical or methodological approach to authors, but instead invite contributors to provide different perspectives on these issues. Contributors were encouraged to approach popular media in Africa from a comparative perspective, preferably including more than one African country in their purview or to view African popular media against the background of international debates or transnational trends. The objective of this comparative approach was to avoid a set of nation-based case studies but instead provide local, specific responses to more general themes and questions. The choice against following one particular theoretical or methodological approach was made to demonstrate the contested nature of popular culture and its manifestations in media on the continent. A simplistic celebration of its potential or a critique of its limitations would fail to capture the many different dimensions of popular media as social, cultural, economic and political phenomena.
