Francis Nyamnjoh

The Book

 

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Behold The Book! I have come a long way with it. Did I say ‘it’? How can I misrepresent such a powerful agent with this unassuming pronoun? It is a force far more present and active, even in its absence, than any single-minded determined human. As a force of light and darkness, freedom and oppression, noun and verb, The Book has charmed the mighty and the lowly. It has spurred rulers to burn and ban, and inspired the sidestepped to ink down the sword. The only humans that come closest to matching The Book’s omnipotent omnipresence are those portrayed within its covers, who are denied – if ever that was what they desired – the conclusion of life that mortality confers. Those who write books and those booked and in books seem to have succeeded in eschewing death the last laugh and denying themselves closure.

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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.