IDIA2010 Conference
Re-thinking Communication Research and Development in Africa
Francis Nyamnjoh
Prof. Francis Nyamnjoh, Ph.D
Full paper: PDF
Abstract
Development for Africa is fraught with a multiplicity of exogenously generated ideas, models and research paradigms, all with the purported goal of alleviating or bringing about the end of poverty in our lifetime (cf. Sachs 2005). This discourse, which like fashion, goes round in circles, is carried on mainly by development agents and experts (mainly social and pseudo-social scientists moonlighting through consultancies) and who often limit the question of development to the problematic of achieving growth or the end of poverty within the context of neo-liberal economic principles. Notwithstanding the rise of alternative development thinking and practice, the problem is rarely studied in a holistic manner. This is especially true of Africa, where problematic expectations of modernity (Ferguson 1999) have engendered technicised, disembedded, depoliticised and sanitized approaches to development as a unilinear process of routinised, standardized, calculable and predictable practices (Ferguson 1990). There is more emphasis on teleology and analogy than on the systematic study of ongoing processes of creative negotiation by Africans of the multiple encounters, influences and perspectives evident throughout their continent. Africans are actively modernizing their indigeneities and indigenizing their modernities, often in ways not always obvious to scholarly fascination with dichotomies.
This contribution highlights two factors responsible for the failure of both communication research and development to make a positive and sustained impact on Africa in the last 50 years. The first factor is that the continent has relied on a notion of development and on development agendas that are foreign to the bulk of its peoples both in origin and objectives, and that have not always addressed the right issues or done so in the right manner. The second reason is that development communication researchers have adopted research techniques designed to answer to the needs of Western societies and which do not always suit African cultures or societies that are in the main rural and non-literate. This means that for most of the time communication scholars have either been asking the wrong questions altogether or asking the right questions to the wrong people. The paper seeks to establish to what extent communication researchers and the media have been willing colluders in modernisation, trying to convince local people that this is good for them, the right thing to do, the central value, the one-best-way. It contends that the communication scholars have hardly had the financial, cultural and intellectual independence to set their own agendas in the service of the African masses. The paper ends by inviting a more contextually relevant approach that is sensitive to local perspectives and to the creative appropriation of technological innovations such as the ICTs by ordinary Africans.
Bio
Francis B. Nyamnjoh joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana, where he was awarded the “Senior Arts Researcher of the Year” prize for 2003.
His most recent books include Negotiating an Anglophone Identity (Brill, 2003), Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa (Zed Books, 2004), Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (Zed Books, 2005), Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (CODESRIA/ZED Books, 2006), Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa (Langaa/African Studies Centre Leiden, 2009).
Dr Nyamnjoh has published widely on globalisation, citizenship, media and the politics of identity in Africa. He has also published seven ethnographic novels, Mind Searching (1991), The Disillusioned African (1995), A Nose for Money (2006), Souls Forgotten (2008), The Travail of Dieudonné (2008), Married but Available (2009), and Intimate Strangers (2010), a play, The Convert (2003), and a collection of short stories, Stories from Abakwa (2007).
