Herman Wasserman, University of Sheffield (Originally published in Journalism Studies, 10:2, 281 – 293)
Francis Beng Nyamnjoh was born in Lakabum-Bum, Cameroon, and was educated in Yaounde and Leicester, where he obtained his PhD on a thesis titled Broadcasting for Nation-building in Cameroon: Development and Constraints, supervised by the late James Halloran at the famous Centre for Mass Communication Research. Currently Head of Publications at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal, his research centres around questions of citizenship, globalization and the media and their intersections in Africa. His training in anthropology and sociology has inclined him to view media from the way it is used by people in their everyday lives, among conditions that often differ starkly from those in the Global North. Nyamnjoh’s anthropological interest in the everyday not only affords him a preference for and keen insight into popular forms of communication in Africa like cartooning, radio and gossip – or ‘radio trottoir’ – but also adds a vividness and sparkle to his writing, punctuated with perceptive observations and sparkling with humour. Alongside his academic publications, Nyamnjoh has also published several novels set in the fictional “Mimboland”, a mirror of his native Cameroon.
Nyamnjoh’s attunedness to context and everyday life has given him occasion to criticise the liberal democratic theory underpinning dominant media theory globally, and has directed his attention time and again to the specificities of locale, the agency of ordinary people in their encounters with media and the politics of everyday life. In his widely acclaimed Africa’s Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (Nyamnjoh 2005) he provides a powerful critique of the Western liberal model of journalism based on individual autonomy and freedom that ignores the complicated patterns of “belonging” in Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, upon a closer look. This dichotomy between dominant journalist theories that demand of journalists a professional independence and detachment on the one hand, and their belonging to cultural and ethnic communities on the other, bring about conflicting loyalties. He describes this situation as follows in Africa’s Media (2005:2-3):
African world-views and cultural values are hence doubly excluded: first by the ideology of hierarchies of cultures, and second by cultural industries more interested in profits than the promotion of creative diversity and cultural plurality. The consequence is an idea of democracy hardly informed by popular articulations of personhood and agency in Africa, and media whose professional values are not in tune with the expectations of those they purport to serve. The predicament of media practitioners in such a situation is obvious: to be of real service to liberal democracy, they must ignore alternative ideas of personhood and agency in the cultural communities of which they are part. Similarly, attending to the interests of particular cultural groups risks contradicting the principles of liberal democracy and its emphasis on the autonomous individual Torn between such competing and conflicting understandings of democracy, the media find it increasingly difficult to marry rhetoric with practice, and for strategic instrumentalist reasons may opt for a Jekyll and Hyde personality.
Yet despite this critique of the dominant liberal democratic normative paradigm, Nyamnjoh carefully avoids the trap of an idealisation of Africa or the romantic essentialism of “African values” that many proponents of Afrocentric thought are prone to. He does not spare the rod for African journalists who fail to uphold ethical standards either. This flexible position is characteristic of Nyamnjoh’s work, which takes into account the multiple, overlapping spaces and flows in the era of globalization yet refuses to gloss over global power imbalances and material inequalities. His work on ICTs in Africa is characteristic in this regard – while in the past (1999) he has warned of the “need for mitigated euphoria” with regards to the potential of ICTs in Africa, he views recent developments in media technologies that have given rise to participatory “citizen” journalism as a positive development that could open new opportunities for democratic citizenship and flexible mobility. (This interview was conducted via Skype on his suggestion and following which he fished out and shared with me a magazine article on African bloggers [Bahree 2008]). This fits with his view, as expressed in Africa’s Media (2005:4), that: “Africa’s creativity simply cannot allow for simple dichotomies or distinctions between old and new technologies, since its peoples are daily modernising the indigenous and indigenising the modern with novel outcomes”.
It is this creative tension between the local and the global, between liberal individualism and patterns of belonging, and between global power relations and creative agency that form the focus of this conversation about Africa’s position in theories of media and journalism.
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