ABSTRACT

The invisibility and the inaudibility of the ordinary people in Africa that Karin Barber (1987) wrote about twenty-fi ve years ago in relation to the exclusive dominance of media platforms by tiny national elites seem to have partly come to an end in the last decade following remarkable transformations in communication technology, the liberalization of air waves, and the expansion of democratic space in a number of African countries. In Kenya, for example, the synergy of mobile telephony and private FM radios in the mid-2000s to a large extent brought the ordinary person to the center of national life and discourse. I will come back later to the nature of this synergy and the signifi cant role it plays in the production of listening spaces and public cultures. For now, as a way of contextualizing this discussion, I will give a brief account of developments in telephony and radio and how these advances, coupled with and further impacting on the expansion in democratic space in Kenya, resulted in unprecedented social transformation and cultural resurgence.