Propositions for Decolonising African Journalism and Media Research

Abstract

In 2015, student activists at the University of Cape added their voices to calls for decolonising “postcolonial” Africa that had been happening since the 1950s (Achebe 1958; wa Thiong’o 1986; Mbembe 2001; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, 2015). Students challenged manifestations of White supremacy on the University of Cape Town campus specifically and at other universities more broadly. They demanded for an end to the violence and dehumanisation of Black people at the institution, a critical rethinking of curricula as well as the removal of hurdles in the tenure process for Black faculty among other issues (UCT: Rhodes Must Fall petition 2015). The commentary that follows adds to the above calls by proposing ways African journalism and media research can be decolonised. In most African countries, the media together with academic research were deeply implicated and complicit in the colonial project. They were used by colonial administrators to legitimise settler colonialism. In the media, Africa was depicted as backward, primitive and uncivilised, a “dark continent” desperately in need of civilising and developing (Zaghlami 2016). These representations of the continent were akin to images in Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness. Achebe (1977, 783) observes that Conrad framed Africa as “‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe [...] a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality”. In these narratives, Africans were dehumanised and pathologised, mostly portrayed as barbarians and the inferior Other. In his 1890 book, In Darkest Africa, journalist, author, explorer and colonial administrator Henry M. Stanley constantly referred to people he met in Africa as savages. Fanon (1963) explains that colonial discourses had very little regard for nuance or texture. Fanon (1963, 150) elaborates that “the ‘nigger’ was a savage, not an Angolan or a Nigerian, but a nigger”. Interestingly, the White, middle-class, able-bodied male was framed as superior, sophisticated, civilised and an embodiment of the norm. Some disciplines like psychology, anthropology and biology were notorious for propping up the milieu of ideas that framed Africans as “the least human of all” (Kessi 2016). Bulhan (2015, 249) explains: