When one curriculum developer was asked if she intended to produce educational packets on African nations similar to ones she had already published on the Philippines and China, she pointed to a packet on world hunger and responded, "We already have an Africa packet.""The role of communication and media in the process of development should not be underestimated, nor [should] the function of media as instruments for the citizen's active participation in society. Political and educational systems need to recognize th eir obligations to promote in their citizens a critical understanding of the phenomena of communication."
--UNESCO declaration issued in 1982 at the International Symposium on Media Education (Grunwald, Germany)
The educator's response illustrates two not-uncommon problems with the way Africa is perceived. The first is that the African continent--with its 53 countries--is seen to be equivalent to individual nations in other parts of the world (i.e., Afr ica-Philippines or Africa-China). The second problem is that Africa's nations and peoples are often viewed through the lens of dominant media images such as hunger, famine, or refugees. The resource materials in this chapter examine critically the various ways in which Africa has been portrayed in the media. They also describe efforts to foster "media literacy" in African nations and elsewhere.
Gretchen Walsh catalogs a rang e of print and audiovisual resources on this topic in The Media in Africa and Africa in the Media: An Annotated Bibliography (Walsh 1996).
In Disasters, Relief and the Media, anthropologist Jonathan Benthall analyzes the diversity of issues facing relief agencies and journalists who report on disasters such as the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s and the Armenian earthquake of 1988. He considers the different styles and marketing techniques of major relief agencies in the UK, Europe, and the United States, and devotes an entire chapter to a study of "the cultural styles" of humanitarian agencies such as the International Commit tee of the Red Cross, World Vision, and Médecins san Frontiêres. Benthall's final chapter focuses on "how disasters and disaster relief are represented across a range of visiual imagery and narrative devices." Special attention is given to the dom inant role of television in conveying images of disasters and relief.
Land, Freedom and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya (Maughan-Brown 1985) looks critically at the "use that is made of fiction as an instrument ofThe short and anecdote-filled book illustrates how commercial interests shape the portra yal of world events and how the selection of stories to be covered and presented is often dictated by random happenings and by strong-willed individuals. News Out of Africa also raises disturbing questions about "the present direction of media tren ds of faster and faster news--of the 'quick and headline-seeking superficial coverage', which seizes on the dramatic and the exceptional, but fails to place it in any meaningful context."
In Disasters, Relief and the Media, anthropologist Jonathan Benthall analyzes the diversity of issues facing relief agencies and journalists who report on disasters such as the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s and the Armenian earthquake of 1988. He considers the different styles and marketing techniques of major relief agencies in the UK, Europe, and the United States, and devotes an entire chapter to a study of "the cultural styles" of humanitarian agencies such as the International Commit tee of the Red Cross, World Vision, and Médecins san Frontiêres. Benthall's final chapter focuses on "how disasters and disaster relief are represented across a range of visiual imagery and narrative devices." Special attention is given to the dom inant role of television in conveying images of disasters and relief.
Land, Freedom and Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya (Maughan-Brown 1985) looks critically at the "use that is made of fiction as an instrument of propaganda, the way race myths and stereotypes are embodied in fiction." The case study for David Maughan-Brown's study is the "Mau Mau" armed struggle waged by the Gikuyu peasantry against the British colonial forces in Kenya from 1952-56. The term "Mau Mau," Maughan-Brown writes, "perhaps more than any other [term], still signifies for ma ny whites the 'atavism' and 'primitivism' of 'darkest Africa'. This can be attributed in part to the voluminous writings about 'Mau Mau', both fictional and 'non-fictional', produced during the Emergency by Kenyan colonial settlers and their sympathisers. " The literary works of Robert Ruark, Elspeth Huxley, Meja Mwangi, Charles Mangua, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and G. R. Fazakerley, are analyzed.
Patricia Lorcin's scholarly study Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (Lorcin 1995) shifts our geographical focus from Kenya in East Africa to Algeria on the north coast of the continent and our historical t imeframe from the early 1950s to a 70-year period of French colonial rule in Algeria, 1830-1900. (Algeria won its independence from France in 1962.) Lorcin's investigation shows how French colonial adminstrators (military and civilian) concocted false ima ges of Algeria's indigenous population and then used these stereotypes to negate the beliefs and values of their colonial subjects and to impose French cultural, social, and political values.
Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (Cameron 1994) surveys the body of more than 400 English-language films that have been made about or in Africa and finds a mixed legacy of racism, sexism, and imperialism, on the one side, and "occasional" accurate portraits of Africa, on the other.
Two UNESCO-sponsored studies--the first, in 1953, and the second, in 1980--produced evidence to support the charge that the international flow of information has been dominated by a handful of Western transnational media monopolies whose financial and technological wealth has created a situation whereby Africans and non-Africans learn about African realities through the filtered lens of news agencies based outside of Africa. (Two news agencies alone--Reuters and Agence-France Presse--control an estimated 93 percent of the news that flows into Africa.)
The two UNESCO studies, The Flow of News (UNESCO 1953) and Many Voices One World (MacBride 1980), are described and analyzed in Contra-Flow in Global News (Boyd-Barrett and Thussu 1992). Boyd-Barrett and Thussu assess the effective ness of international and regional "news exchange mechanisms" (e.g., the Pan African News Agency and the Union of National Radio and Television Organizations of Africa) that were created as a counter-balance to Western-dominated news gathering and dissemi nation.
The fourth edition of Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (Bagdikian 1992) transports concerns first raised about monopoly ownership and control in the U.S. media industry to the international level. Bagdikian n otes that "the time has come for an international convention to set standards for the modern mass media, one of the most powerful forces in history." He cautions, however, that "with or without an international convention, some governments, openly or not, will always try to retain excessive and inappropriate control."
In their essay in Africa's Media Image (Hawk 1992) Thomas Winship and Paul Hemp echo Bagdikian's concern about government control, writing that the Pan African News Agency "has not become a credible source of news to Western readers and editors, in part, because the participating national news agencies often serve as government propaganda mouthpieces."
In Thunder & Silence: The Mass Media in Africa (Ziegler and Asante 1992) professors Dhyana Ziegler and Molefi Kete Asante situate the problems of media control and censorship by African governments in the broader historical context of colonialis m. They quote Africa-specialist Colin Legum, who has observed that "all the colonial governments, without exception, maintained severe forms of censorship, either directly, as in Francophone countries, or indirectly through sedition and other laws."
The legacy of colonial control is described in various publications issued by international human rights organizations such as Article 19 (London) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (New York). See, for example, Who Rules the Airwaves? Broadca sting in Africa, a joint publication issued in February 1995 by Article 19 and Index on Censorship.
Louise Bourgault investigates three principal influences on African radio, television, and newspapers in her study Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bourgault 1995). They are the precolonial legacy of the oral tradition, the presence of an alien ated managerial class, and the domination of African nations by systems based on political patronage.
History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Brown et al. 1991) represents attempts by South African authors and historians to write their own history of South Africa, using words, photographs, and comic-book illustrations that present images that are in conflict with "official" interpretations of South Africa's history.