Media and identity in Africa

Abstract

Kimani Njogu and John Middleton, eds. and Identity in Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, for the International African Institute, 2009. xvii + 333 pp. Tables. Pictures. References. Index. £50.00. Cloth. 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 questions about the continent's identity. In a way it also epitomizes the aspirations of one African which has remained elusive in 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 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 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 die 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 die West and inappropriately translated to 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. …