Francis Nyamnjoh

(Podcast) Francis Nyamnjoh Talks to Herman Wasserman about Tabloid Journalism in South Africa

Click here to listen to Podcast.

Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa? (Book Review)

Originally published here

Bruijn, M. ., Nyamnjoh, F. B., & Brinkman, I. (2009). Mobile phones: The new talking drums of everyday Africa. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa.

I have been reading up on mobile phone use in developing countries recently for a couple of papers. One of the few books entirely devoted to the issue is “Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa”, edited by Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh and Inge Brinkman from the African Studies Centre in Leiden and published in 2009 in cooperation with Cameroon’s Langaa group. #The book takes an anthropological and historical perspective on the role of mobile telephony in a wide range of (sub-Saharan) African societies.

 

Profess Democracy but Implement Autocracy: Politics in Nyamnjoh's Married But Available

By George Esunge Fominyen

Is Francis Nyamnjoh’s *Married But Available simply an account of the experiences of Lily Loveless, a Muzugulander (western) researcher, who travels to Mimboland (Cameroon/Africa) to study the relationship between sexuality and power? Or is it about the telenovela-styled sneak peek into the lives of couples by Britney, Lily’s young research assistant? Isn’t it a, rather, witty stab at African leadership, democracy and the role of the media in society?

(Video) Talk by Prof. Nyamnjoh about CODESRIA

In his address, Francis Nyamnjoh introduces the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) as a model for open access development and implementation. CODESRIA is a multi-disciplinary, pan-African organization based in Senegal, “working towards bringing back the missing African voice” to the global publishing industry.

Francis Nyamnjoh – Scholarly Communication in Africa: Project Scoping Workshop from Creative R&D on Vimeo.

Africa’s Media: Between Professional Ethics and Cultural Belonging

Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2010). Africa's media: Between professional ethics and cultural belonging. Windhoek: Fesmedia Africa, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

In 2005 I published Africa’s Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. One of the main findings of that study was that the media have assumed a partisan, highly politicised, militant role in Africa. They have done so by dividing citizens into the righteous and the wicked, depending on their party-political leanings, ideologies, regional, cultural or ethnic belonging. By considering the Cameroonian experience, the book sought to understand how scapegoatism, partisanship, and regional and ethnic tendencies in the media have affected their liberal democratic responsibility to act as honest, fair and neutral mediators – accessible to all and sundry. It did this by looking at polarisation in the press and at how the media have shaped and
been shaped by the politics of belonging since the early 1990s.

Re-thinking Communication Research and Development in Africa

Keynote address for 4th IDIA Conference 2010, UCT, Cape Town South Africa

Introduction

Development for Africa is fraught with a multiplicity of exogenously generated ideas, models and research paradigms, all with the purported goal of ‘alleviating’ or bringing about ‘the end of poverty … in our lifetime’ (cf. Sachs 2005). This discourse, which like fashion, goes round in circles, is carried on mainly by ‘development’ agents and ‘experts’ (mainly social and pseudo-social scientists moonlighting through consultancies) and who often limit the question of development to the problematic of achieving growth or ‘the end of poverty’ within the context of neo-liberal economic principles.