ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will compare websites related to various regions in Africa emphasizing ethnic or regional identity as politically important. Four cases – websites relating to the Moroccan Berber context, websites that stress ‘Kongo’ and ‘Nuba’ identity respectively, and websites produced by people from Englishspeaking West Cameroon – will be presented separately followed by a comparative interpretation. In all four cases, interrelations between marginality and mobility have directly informed the patterns of identity construction and political engagement in the local and (inter)national contexts and hence need to be described before discussing the virtual realm. The discussion of marginality and mobility will be followed by an outline of the various ways in which identity is represented on the websites related to that case. Our discussion will speak to the central themes of this book – popular media, development and democracy – in a number of ways. In our comparative approach we have paid specific attention to websites as connected and embedded instances of social relations and media histories. Another related issue has been the notion of the ‘popular’, leading in turn to a discussion of the social hierarchies involved in the production of and activities related to websites. This includes the influence of ‘access’, but also ‘voice’ and control. Instead of focusing on ‘democracy’ per se, we took the concept of ‘the political’ in its broadest sense and viewed identity construction as a political process.
