ABSTRACT
At least since the nineteenth century, importations and borrowings in Africa have been more or less successfully shaped and constrained through convergence(s) with local popular traditions and media technologies, in the fields of print, film, music, radio, television, performance and drama (on such convergences in African and South African contexts, respectively, see Barber 2006: 3-8; De Kock 1996: 40; Laden 2001a, 2001b; Kruger and Watson Shariff 2001). Popular culture in Africa is hence viewed as constituted primarily through borrowed or imported cultural practices and artefacts, newly imagined, mediated and adapted through a range of media technologies. As borrowed cultural forms, print commodities have long since enabled Africans to access new resources and repertoric options, and motivate social-cultural change (see Even-Zohar 1990, 1997, 1999; Laden 2001a, 2008). In addressing the highly successful, longstanding glossy women’s publication, True Love (launched in 1972), I also refer briefly to Thandi, which first materialized in the late 1970s as a pull-out women’s supplement of Bona, and was launched as a separate publication in 1985, as well as True Love East Africa (launched 2004), published in Kenya (by East African Magazines Ltd, a joint venture between Nation Media Group and MIH Print Africa), and True Love West Africa (launched 2005), written in Lagos, Nigeria, and published in South Africa. Popular media technologies have inspired, and are intricately intertwined with, new popular cultural forms in Africa (see Barber 2006: 3-8). Mediatized forms of popular culture are becoming ever more prevalent, and the impact of convergences between media technologies and local popular traditions in Africa cannot be dismissed merely as ‘cultural imperialism’ (see Laden 2001a, 2001b, 2003; Barber 1997, 2006). For ‘it is important to recognize the extent to which African cultural innovators have seized upon the possibilities of the media to revitalize
their traditions and generate new forms’ (Barber 2006: 3), although neither should popular cultural forms be simplistically celebrated as emancipatory without determining the uses Africans actually make of new media technologies. While I concur with Barber on the centrality of ethnographic research, conceptually, it is important to note that, like many other commercially-oriented cultural practices, popular cultural forms frequently represent aspired to, not necessarily given, states of affairs. It is therefore their evocative power (see McCracken 1990: 104-17), and that of the commodities and beliefs they recommend, that should concern us, for these provide valid ways for people to imagine as plausible alternative realities which may be structurally opposed to their existing reality. Popular cultural forms function both as didactic and aspirational tools, and as means of proclaiming social membership. That is, it is not always what people actually do with media technologies that brings about social change, as much as the way media technologies operate as transmitters of ‘elements . . . out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives’ (Appadurai 1997: 35). As everyday artefacts through which ‘the work of the imagination is transformed’ (Appadurai 1997: 9), popular media discourses in (South) Africa today provide ‘a staging ground’ (Appadurai 1997: 7) from which new options for ‘strategies of action’ (Swidler 1986) may be constructed. They represent sources of data that generate new understandings, images and concrete instructions for recommended social and individual conduct, or, more specifically, they comprise part of the toolkit from which ‘actors select differing pieces for constructing lines of action’ (Swidler 1986: 273). Taking up new options in Africa is often imbued with conviviality (Nyamnjoh 2002: 111-17), which speaks to a sense of being ‘in-fellowship’, and addresses ‘the interests of communal and cultural solidarities’ (Nyamnjoh 2002: 111), so that individual agency and subjectivity are re-negotiated in terms of shared corporate and communal interests, social interconnectedness, interpenetration and interdependence. At the same time, it is precisely the practices and discourses of consumption that should urge us to acknowledge that African popular culture is not simply displaying the culturally homogenizing effects of ‘going-West’ (see Nyamnjoh 2000: 9-10), but also suggests new local reworkings of a rudimentary ‘South African’ idiom. Appadurai’s view of practices of consumption as a ‘force of habituation’, as a central means of regulating, among other things, ‘the rhythms of accumulation and divestiture that generate particular states of material wealth’ (Nyamnjoh 2000: 26), converges with my own view of consumption and popular cultural practices as ways of regulating change, increasing the stabilizing effect of the emerging social order, and standardizing global structures of common difference(s) in the age of globalization (Wilk 1995). Anderson’s concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) serves here as a useful point of entry into what Robert Foster has dubbed commercial, rather than strictly political or ideological, ‘technologies of nation making’ (Foster 1999: 265-7; Foster 1997: passim). In the context of postcolonial Africa and South Africa, reciprocal links obtain between mass-consumption, mass
culture and the constitution of national entities (similar studies on the West include Boorstin 1973; Bronner 1989; Ewen and Ewen 1992; Fox and Lears 1983; Marchand 1985). For our purposes here, the ‘commercial’ technology of nation-making alludes to the ways advertising, and other forms of mass media and culture, such as soap operas, talk shows, magazines, chatrooms and blogs, popular music, film, fashion and popular fiction, all provide, inter alia, a variety of material and stylistic sources for ‘trying on’ new identity options. These cultural practices represent ways for the diverse heterogeneity of Africans and South Africans to forge a sense of themselves as sharing discursive patterns, images and objects (Miller 1995: 277-8; Foster 1999: 154; 2002: 69; LiPuma 2000). In this way (South) Africans will eventually come to believe that collectively they constitute a consumption-oriented, corporate ‘national entity’, which nonetheless exists, as it were, ‘outside themselves’. The literature addressing the manifold and multilayered links between popular culture, public space(s) and notions of cultural citizenship, inquiring into how imported mass or popular cultural forms have contributed to reorganizing people’s lives in Africa and elsewhere, is sizeable; the present chapter is informed largely by Coplan (1985), Fiske (1987, 1990), Barber (1997, 2006), Kupe (1997), Hermes (1998, 2005), Dolby (2001, 2003, 2006), Newell (2002, 2006), Hofmeyr et al. (2003) and Simone (2008).
