| BOOK REVIEW
Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
in Ottawa, Canada
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TITLE: COMMUNICATION & THE TRANSFORMATION
OF SOCIETY
A Developing Region’s Perspectives
EDITED BY: Peter Nwosu, Chuka Onwumechili & Ritchard M’Bayo
PUBLISHER: University Press of America, Inc. 4720 Boston Way,
Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA. 2000
PAGES: 463
PRICE: US$61.50
The emerging game in African journalism today is called
"Afric-centric journalism." It is African journalism rooted in African culture
and history, which models are mixed with the Western ones, which currently dominant
African journalism schools. The London, U.K-based New African magazine has done a
cover story on this new genre, challenging the dominant Western journalism philosophies
and models. Afric-centric journalism sees Africa from African lens first, and any other
second. Afric-centric journalism is African value-oriented, helping to enhance the good
parts of the African culture and exposing inhibiting ones, as the
Ghanaian media did by exposing the trokosi tradition, where teenage girls are
enslaved to shrines for sins committed by their parents. The exposure brought government
legislation banning such cultural practice. Afric-centric journalism attempts to shift
journalism models and philosophies currently practiced in Africa from Eurocentric to
Afric-centric, aiming at Africa’s environment with the help of elements of global
journalism—justice, truth, objectivity, freedom, human rights, etc.
It is in this context that 20 African communication experts write
this book with a foreward by ace Afrocentricist, America’s Prof. Molefi Asante, who
is said to have overseen some portions of the book and offered epistemological advice.
Writes Prof. Asante, "African societies, rich in heritage and material wealth, have
been systematically underdeveloped for five hundred years, and therefore, remain
marginalized in the construction of a new global arrangements. Can this condition be
ameliorated by attention to more humanistic focus on development?" The book is all
encompassing: ranging from development theory and communication to structure and functions
of the mass media in national development in Africa to cultural dependency model of
communication to communication policies and the African experience to the role of
indigenous media in African social development to model for promoting environmental issues
and problems in rural Africa, and many more. The book is basically divided into eight
broad parts.
The 20 contributors grapple with the riddle of communication,
national development and culture in Africa. This trouble arises because of no open
discussions about appropriate approaches to communication and development in specific
cultures such as that of Africa. And for some time most of the discussions on
communication and development have centered on the macro-level—theories and concepts
underpinning the field, which are all Eurocentric. At the micro-level some discussions on
communication and development problematique in the cultural context of Asia and Latin
America have taken place but practically nothing as such about the role of communication
and development in Africa’s societal transformation. It is in this context, uniquely
African settings in communication’s role in societal transformation, that this book
is based, helping to contribute to such discourse.
What values inform African communication and development? The book
answers this by offering that, for the past 50 years, the intellectual perspectives and
the theoretical traditions that have guided African communication models have been
European. The reason being that the West’s industrialization, driven by
capital-intensive technology, after the Second world war was said to be applicable in
traditional societies such as those of Africa with the correct amount of technical and
economic help, and transform these societies. The key motor here was economic growth
powered by capital-intensive technology, which will transform these traditional societies
including shaping "new cultural values." From this thinking, the basic cause of
underdevelopment was viewed to be internal, and economic progress in these traditional
societies are to be attained by applying the West’s model of capital-intensive
technology.
One need not stretch ones brains since the whole structures of the
African nation-states were founded on European development paradigm, without the consent
of the African peoples, as Nigeria’s Dr. Obiora Chinedu Okafor, currently at
Canada’s York University, says, and that means without the culture and history of
Africans. Various development communication theory and practices are examined, and while
the environment are said to influence communication and development planning pattern, this
is not so in the African case. Peter O. Nwosu’s piece in chapter one maintains
"because African nations, then emerging from colonization were politically tied to
the West, it was common sense to these nations to accept patterns of communication and
modes of industrial production as practiced in Western societies."
Despite this critical observation the Western model remains dominant
in communication and development in Africa. Also discussed is the socialist model of
communication and development introduced into Africa when some African states adopted this
after independence from colonial rule. The unsuitability of this model to the African
environment is also discussed. A new model, which is gaining grounds in Africa, and also
discussed, is emancipatory or participatory but this too is said to have its limitations.
In all these, communication had yet not been arrived on the
development scene until in 1961 when David McClelland, a behavioral scientist, suggested
the relationship between communication and social change. But this and other
theories/models lacked African cultural input, and as such were seen as injurious to
Africa’s development. Assumptions were mistaken for facts, Western media concepts and
programming were imported to Africa, tending to ignore the African local conditions and
the African local cultures. Many examples of how some of these Western-style communication
models were used in some African countries are given by the contributors, especially in
the area of agriculture—most failed because of lack of African local and cultural
inputs.
The lack of African culture-sensitivity, or situation-reality has
not seen any plausible alternative to the Western-derived or Marxist/socialist models and
theories. The debate, or rather, the (re) search continues on how to create an
Afric-centred paradigm. Short of this an Afric-centric philosophy of development, the book
says, will guide development and communication efforts with models/philosophies derived
from the West’s experience. This may be useful to Western contexts but not
necessarily sound to Africa’s development goals. Scholars such as Prof. Molefe Asante
has written extensively about Afrocentricity, otherwise called Afric-centricity, as the
"centerpiece of African regeneration," though the "concept has yet to take
a firm hold on development and communication planning in Africa" and though some
aspects of the Western paradigm and socialist model can be adapted to the African
environment.
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