From the Editor

FROM THE EDITOR - ~ - - - - - - T he reputation of the digital super highway as the greatest, most efficacious cultural manifestation of the democratic ideal since the printing press and photography, is today almost generally accepted, and the tenacity with which the electronic community has in recent times come to the defense of cyberspace as a territory of liberties underlines the centrality of cyberculture in the post-humanist age. Yet, few are in doubt that for the majority of humanity the facilities of this machinery, like those of liberal democracy, are in truth, anything but accessible or democratic. Cyberspace, much as it may provide us with multiple and unguarded routes of interzonality across the globe, nevertheless remains the preserve of a statistically negligible fraction of the world, unable as yet, and indeed unwilling, to undermine fundamental boundaries within and without our principal terrains. Increasingly we find that the greatest shortcoming of cyberculture, is not in the provision of occasionally disreputable freedoms and liberties, but in the unavailability of such facilities of democratic participation and fulfillment to the majority; in its foreclosure to certain geographies, and in the general unwillingness of the privileged to account for the unrepresented. A democratic machinery outside the reach of the majority is merely virtual and unreal, and cyberculture, it seems, after all, is not the democracy we presume and defend, but an aristocracy of location and disposition. This is the case with the west, as it is with those regions of the world where numerous factors of social and material configuration combine to preclude even the barest access to the empowering liberties of the digital sphere. To remember that the vast majorities in the world's most populous nations, in India, China, Africa, and Latin America, have no knowledge whatsoever of these new discourses, but also to call our attention to the dangers and challenges of forsaken geographies and silent territories, of populations and denominations on a new margin, those races condemned, as Marquez ominously observes, to a hundred years of solitude with no respite on earth. It is to underscore the true nature of cyberculture as a teritory of privilege, and to remind us of dominions which, though left behind in our march into a new age and a new millenium, nevertheless remain to invalidate our claims to progress. This interrogation takes us into the peculiar conditions of territories like Africa, which is our main area ofconcern, isolated and unable to partake in these adventures that define our epoch, and to explore the challenges posed by such absences. To avoid the paradigm of pity and piety that often underlies our considerations of so-called "Others", it is our intention, also to call attention to the huge territories of otherness in our own midst in the west, and to critically examine the implications and challenges of these forsaken geographies for cyberculture. Olu Oguibe Journal of Contemporary African Art· Fall/Winter 19951:I:m1 ...