African Political Thought as an Epistemic Framework for Understanding African Media

Abstract

The central thesis of this article is to apply the epistemic framework of African political thought to a postcolonial understanding of contemporary African media. It achieves this in two ways. First, it argues for a historical and conceptual correlation between African political thought and postcolonial theory in terms of the categories of democratic resistance and cultural identity. It concludes that postcolonial theory imbues African political thought with the theoretical and analytic vitality of an emancipatory discourse that can engage with contemporary questions of, inter alia, African media and global capitalism. Second, it demonstrates how African political thinking has influenced the structure and function of the media in Africa. It concludes that native resistance to colonialism and the subsequent construction of statehood formed dynamic sites of African mediation, and that the postcolonial tendency for self-determination underpins the dynamic of media localization in the neocolonial age of globalization.