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Decoloniality and the push for African media and communication studies
An introduction
Winston Mano and viola c. milton
Media and communication are integral to politics, culture, economies, societies and everyday life. The teaching and research of media and communication involves making sense of the ways in which we communicate as well as accounting for the impact of media and technology on society. It entails investigating how people, communities and institutions influence the media and how media and communication technologies themselves shape social relations. As a result, media and communication are implicated in the constitution of power relations and exercise of power. Media power and political power, for example, combine in ways that, amongst other things, shape and direct geopolitical contestations informing politics, culture and knowledge in the academy. It can thus be noted that media and communication are implicated in specific agendas that can result in the marginalisation of those without power. The media are an important means for understanding centers of power that must be questioned and challenged.
From an academic point of view, the area of media and communication can be an entry into contemporary debates about marginalised and silenced epistemologies and ontologies. This academic injustice is a mobilising force for the academic quarrel underpinning this volume. The volume is, in the first place, a recognition of the structural violence imposed by asymmetrical power relations between trajectories of media and communication in the academy, and secondly a call to action for centering African approaches which have thus far been understated or ignored as legitimate knowledge. The study of Africa without Africa has become a dangerous pattern not only in Western universities but within Africa itself. This is evident in the extent to which African universities and scholarship at large have developed media and communication as a discipline without engaging knowledge, praxis and theories from the continent. The systematic imposition of theories and ideas from the global North in communication and media research, syllabi and curricula across the continent led some to question whether we have African universities or universities in Africa (Nabudere 2006; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Nyamnjoh 2016; Asante 2016). The quest for establishing truly African universities, aligned to continental exigencies, finds resonance in a context where voices from the global South are loudly claiming their space and positioning within the academic pluriverse. In this context, the Routledge Handbook of African Media and Communication Studies is claiming space for African media and communication studies.1
African media and communication is a formative intellectual field whose core focus and shared concepts are arguably not yet clearly identifiable, nor adequately represented in academic discourses. This volume addresses this gap at a time of decoloniality and renewed questioning of knowledge about Africa that misrepresent, essentialise or marginalise the continent. African perspectives are being mobilised to reimagine the field of media and communication in tandem with lived experiences of Africans. To this end, African media and communication studies reclaims power to unapologetically explore the manifestations of media and communication in Africa, from Africa and by Africans. This is not meant to signal an ethnic preoccupation, but is instead about relevance, voice and power. Media and communication have been implicated in the manifestation of power in Africa, from the precolonial through to the contemporary era. We argue for the need to āmake intelligibleā the emerging field of African media and communication.
Contributions to this volume recognise that knowledge production in Africa has emerged from colonised spaces occupied by those with power, and hence there is an urgent need to disrupt and undo the marginalisation, silencing and disidentification of efforts by the continentās scholars. It is an attempt to stir scholars writing in and on African media and communication more towards reflecting on the politics of polemicising, to relexicalise the language and space within which their roles and status in the academy are debated. The academic stance implied here is meant to boldly advance a pluriverse of knowledge and enlightenment. The chapters in this volume lay out a critique against the notion of āuniversalā knowledge as well as the nuances of a pluriverse of knowledge. The academic quarrel centers on the lack of ontological pluralism in media and communication studies. The quarrel, born out of systemic biases, unequivocally advocates a new trajectory that reimagines prevailing narratives of Africa and its positioning in new academic fields such as media and communication. The narratives in question are shaped by colonial institutions, colonial texts and anthropological ethnographies and are now urgently being reread or replaced to restore the epistemological dignity of Africans. It is a necessary response to bring into conversation input from African scholars that has over the years been consigned to obscurity. It connects with how scholars in different disciplines have rightly questioned blind reliance on the legacy of colonial scholarship that has failed to respond to and capture the realities in Africa and the global South. They critique how the continent has been undermined by Western representations that both consciously and unconsciously ignore or misrepresent the African condition.
The theorisations and practice from an unacknowledged center have made it difficult for Africans to have a voice in the academy. This practice results in marginalisation and even erasure of the African epistemological and ontological realities in academic life. African scholars have justifiably recognised the need to disrupt, reshape and reject such forms of ideological domination by others. They have declared that a wrong exists and signalled their intent to disrupt the accepted processes of knowledge creation about Africa, its communications and its people.
The fulcrum of the coloniality/modernity/decoloniality nexus in universities is the Falls movements of 2015, which signalled a collective stand against coloniality by Africans, echoed by other marginalised groups across the globe. While the creative force of resistance and re-existence that emerged from the Falls movement certainly provides rich ground for understanding and exploring the dynamics of intellectual dissent and disruption, this volume argues that the questioning of knowledge about Africa that misrepresents, essentialises or marginalises it is not a new concern. Concerns about Africaās representation have been raised by scholars ranging from Frantz Fanon (1925ā1961), Steve Biko (1946ā1977) to NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiongāo (1938ā), to give but a few examples. More recent contributions include key texts such as The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Mudimbe 1989); On the Postcolony (Mbembe 2001); Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013); Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness (Nabudere 2011); and Afrikology and Transdisciplinary (Nabudere 2012). These texts by African scholars represent indomitable efforts at the forefront of questioning the colonial frameworks and contributing to the decolonising perspective. The overriding concern of these works is not only to expose the politics of knowledge within colonial and postcolonial contexts but to also suggest new narratives that speak to realities in Africa. The critiques raised by voices from the South and their clarion call for knowledge equity also resonated in the findings of the UNESCO-funded McBride Report (UNESCO 1980), which, spurred by decolonisation (if not decoloniality), called for equity in global communication and the removal of structural imbalances in the field of communications. From an academic perspective, this volume adds to the rebalancing needed in this area, but with a much stronger focus on the insights from decoloniality discourses in the global South.
In media and communication studies, the growth of African scholarship is signalled by the emergence of scholarly journals related to communication, media and journalism studies, such as Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research (1974); Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies (1979); Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies (1980); Communicare: Journal for Communication Sciences in Southern Africa (1981); African Media Review (1986); Communitas: Journal for Community Communication and Information Impact (1995); African Communication Research (1997); and Journal of African Media Studies (2009). While all of the journals proclaim a situatedness in Africa, Manoās (2009) inaugural editorial for the Journal of African Media Studies, aptly entitled āRepositioning African Media Studiesā, criticised how academic journals have remained decidedly āNorthernā. Manoās provocative editorial served as a clarion call for thinking Africa from the African metropolis rather than alongside it. To this end, Communicatio 38(2) in 2012 was a themed issue on āAfrican Communication and Media Theoryā. The publications added to efforts by individual academics, such as Francis Nyamnjoh, anthropologist cum communication scholar, who has long been among those advocating for rethinking how we do communication studies in African contexts. CODESRIAās Africa Media Review (especially prominent between 1986 and 1997) was also a precursor to many of the discussions about decolonising and/or Africanising communication studies today. Even earlier, the late Professor Fancis Kasoma had been arguing for āAfriethicsā, by which he called for journalism ethics aligned to continental ethical roots to provide more relevance for the profession in Africa as well as frameworks that could actually teach the rest of the world journalistic manners (Kasoma 1996; Banda 2009). But, in the context of a changing Africa and shifting geopolitics, it is worth asking once more if the study of Africa can walk more in tandem with the lived realities of African people and their intellectual, sociopolitical and economic trajectories.
It is widely accepted that those who produce knowledge about a discipline, wield considerable power over it. The silencing of African stories and the lack of the African in African studies is an ongoing and concerning matter. This epistemological and ontological gap has prompted a notable response from Africans. African scholars have sought to redraw epistemological, methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of Africa, from an African perspective, that is with Africans as authoritative subjects rather than objects of history. Yet, in spite of the disruptive challenges to knowledge production about Africa, the 54 countries that constitute Africa have yet to be appreciated, not just in their own terms, but as part of a connected and vibrant continent with rich histories and shared, yet diverse, lived experiences. Africans have always produced knowledge about their continent and their condition and the provocative demand instigated by the call for contributions to this volume is that Africans can and should be the most authoritative voice on Africa. The disruption of knowledge hierarchies opens up new domains of inquiry by highlighting the contingency of established ways of engaging with and making sense of Africa. Some argue that critiques of Africaās misrecognition is not based on sufficient evidence. For Scott (2015, 193), āIt is a myth that we know how Africa is covered in the US and UK media ā¦ [because] the comprehensiveness of existing research has been maintained through certain citation practices and interpretations of evidenceā. His main point here is that such assumptions are implicated within multiple political and commercial agendas. Nothias (2018, 1153) responds to Scottās article through analysis of news presentations of Africa in foreign newspapers. He found that, while there may indeed be instances of change in how Africa is being represented, a more nuanced reading of the empirical evidence suggests continuity in terms of how African contexts are framed and discussed, even when attempts are made to be more representative. This includes the emergence of an Africa-rising narrative which projects an overly positive media image of Africa to promote investments as part of a broader neoliberal agenda (Bunce et al. 2016).
The effect of misrecognition of the continent is seen, for example, in U.S. president Donald Trumpās outrageous claim that āonce immigrants from Nigeria had seen the U.S., they would never āgo back to their hutsā in Africaā as reported by The New York Times at the time (2017, n.p). During an immigration meeting in April 2018, he added to this uninformed view of Africa by allegedly refering to several African countries as āshithole countriesā. Thus, the assertion that research on misrecognition and misrepresentation of Africa might be misguided, is undermined by the so-called leader of the free world. His utterances clearly play into existing racist tropes about the continent and its people in ways that have implications for power relations in international policy and investments in Africa. It also signals that the destructive epistemologies that guided knowledge about and representations of Africa are far from disappearing, hence the urgent need to confront them head on. Disruptive intervention is needed to fundamentally change existing intellectual engagement with the sociopolitical and economic realities of everyday life in African contexts.
The chapters included in this volume make clear the contestations and resignification struggles over a more genuine connection with being African, in ways that do not only disrupt the remnants of coloniality but also promote emancipation and enlightenment (Cabral 1973). Media and communication is widely understood to be conduits of the narratives through which we come to understand the social, political, ideological and economic conditions of our existence. In fact, one could argue that narratives are key to how we imagine and understand the world we live in. Yet, the āsingle storyā (Adichie 2009) that often arises from the way African stories are told and how m...
