ABSTRACT
The emergence of modern mass media on the African continent coincided with (and was in many ways a product of) the spread of British and French colonialism (Asante and Ziegler 1982; Larkin 2008). The introduction of radio, television, and newspapers helped colonial regimes to constitute imagined communities of loyal settlers, to link up the colonial motherland to the settler colony, to persuade colonial subjects of the benevolence of colonial administrations, and to dissuade them from challenging the status quo. In the process of establishing colonial domination and building modern mass media, governments developed a particular understanding of those who were watching television, listening to radio, or reading newspapers. As Hartley (1987: 125) has argued, audiences are discursively produced through language:
[Audiences] are the invisible fictions that are produced institutionally in order for various institutions to take charge of the mechanisms of their own survival. Audiences may be imagined, empirically, theoretically or politically, but in all cases the product is a fiction that serves the needs of the imagining institution. In no case is the audience ‘real’, or external to its discursive construction. There is no ‘actual’ audience that lies beyond its production as a category, which is merely to say that audiences are only ever encountered per se as representations.
