Media and Identity in Africa (review)

From the outset, what I found most interesting was the book's hardback cover, which shows a cartoon of a car with a license plate that says "Africa." To represent Africa in this way, as a label on a vehicle—itself a major artefact in Western modernity—raises many questions about the continent's identity. In a way it also epitomizes the aspirations of "one African identity," which has remained elusive in many political, economic, and cultural discourses. Notably, the cartoon car has no passengers but is being driven by a big-nosed driver on a road clearly sign-posted "development." It raises crucial questions about the linkage between culture, identity, and development.

The book, co-funded by the International African Institute (IAI), a research and publishing organization founded in 1926, and the Ford Foundation Office of Eastern Africa, is a significant addition to literature on media and identity in Africa. It was the last major project by the late Yale University professor John Middleton on Africa and also his final intellectual and institutional contribution to the work of the IAI before his death in 2009. The publication encapsulates how the IAI has for over seventy-five years promoted events and publications from within Africa about African societies, their cultures, their languages, and challenges they face. The work of IAI also involves initiatives by African and non-African scholars, as shown by the International African Seminar "Media and the Construction of Identity," organized by John Middleton and his colleague and co-editor, Kimani Njogu, and held in Nairobi in August 2004. The book is a collection of papers given at that seminar and later revised prior to publication.

I share Njogu and Middleton's fierce disdain for the obsession with elite culture and elite interests in Africa and the relative neglect of the cultural experiences of ordinary people. This neglect is linked to wider problems in development, including ineffective development paradigms designed in the West and inappropriately translated to Africa. The local origins of most media are rarely recognized in media research, although, as Njogu and Middleton recognize, "many are based upon 'traditional' forms of cultural expression that are no longer purely local but adaptations of wider African themes" (xi). The book, therefore, takes a stand for local African "cultures" and "responses" to media "influences" rather than media "technologies." It is based on a firm realization that media production does not automatically control the process of its reception. The reception context is diverse and complex, and received communications are often used in ways that are "opposed to and not even comprehended by the controllers" (xi). It is not a simple celebration of audience work, but a firm realization that audiences are active and perceptive members of societies.

This collection of essays presents "diverse ways of dealing with the problems of achieving identities based not on periods of colonialism and immediate postcolonialism but on an unclearly defined 'Africa,' of which various meanings have been invented by both non-Africans and Africans" (xiii). Among other themes are the construction of identity, the creation of new cultures out of old ones, and local-global cultures. The prologue also discusses other issues raised at the conference but not covered by the published essays. Well-written and provocative essays by Karin Barber, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Alamin Mazrui, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, and Kimani Kiarie Wa'Njogu, among others, cover topics that include cartoons, music, Pentecostalism, media consumerism, storytelling, diaspora Web sites, video films, and African intellectuals. The book's main strength is that it is the first serious interdisciplinary engagement from a wider perspective by Africans with issues of media and identity. The chapters in the book present a nuanced and critical discussion about "media and identity" as important drivers for development in Africa. Africa's complex cultural spaces, represented by the un-rounded front wheels of the vehicle on the cover, are important engines for African development. Media and identity constitute the...