In their time, the champions of African independence and unity, people like Kwame Nkrumah, have been constantly calling for the immediate and unconditional unity of the continent or the need to take its fate in its own hands. They insisted that the failure for Africans to control their common destiny or speak in a common political language was an indispensable precondition for their total liberation from colonialism and neocolonialism. Until Africa speaks in a common language to defend its vital interests, the dream of continental unity is bound to remain a mirage and not a tangible reality.
It is indeed sad if not painful to see that those lofty dreams of African unity have so far remained unrealized and the going is even getting tougher every time Africa is fighting to come out of the quagmires of a world dominated by multinational media corporations that undermine its global image and continental unity.
Since independence, Africa has not been speaking in one voice. Divided as it is into Francophone and Anglophone Africa as a legacy of colonialism, Africa has spent the last 60 or so years being pulled and pushed by regional and global forces working to achieve hegemony in Africa in general and in strategic regions in particular. Consequently, the Western-dominated global media have served and are still serving as tools for facilitating the multi-pronged, overt and covert operations by neocolonial interests.
Western powers are speaking about peace through their media but deep down they have been working for the destabilization of the continent or the Balkanization of Africa in ways that will reproduce old relationships and keep the continent prisoner of media bias and hegemonic machinations. If Africa is to achieve geopolitical and spiritual unity, it has to liberate itself from the chokehold of global media houses owned by Western multinationals through a long process of building its own capacities and become more affirmative in dealing with global issues that affect it in one way or the other.
Since the 1970s or the period known as the independence, Africa has started making efforts to have its own voice expressed through its own media. The establishment of the Pan African News Agency 1979 was a reflection of the desire Africans had to speak through a common media outlet that would concertedly push the ultimate objective of African unity. The Pan-African news Agency which was founded on 20 July 1979 in Addis Ababa has its headquarters in Dakar, Senegal. PANA was established in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa by the then OAU. It was then relaunched by UNESCO in 1993 and provides news in English, French, Portuguese, and Arabic. Its affiliate PanaPress also works in collaboration with UNESCO.
Although PANA struggled to articulate Africa’s interests by disseminating authentic or unbiased information about Africa, it may not be said that it has fully lived up to earlier expectation. It did not really work as a tool for promoting African unity and its achievements are often controversial. It has never been outspoken and spent most of the decades in relative anonymity even within Africa because it could not withstand the aggressive campaigns and systematic propaganda by the Western media that disseminated information that undermined Africa’s image.
We should not however attribute the absence of a dynamic and impactful African media institution to the underperformance of African Union supported media outlets which are relatively young, weak and their efforts, however small are constantly undermined by global media corporations bent on keeping Africa, poor, dysfunctional and a prey to their economic and political ambitions.
Western media have been conducting their anti-African campaigns on several fronts. First, they have created the so-called African image which is a stereotypical description of a dark continent with no prospect for revival. This is the view created and propagated by Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), the British novelist who used is craft to denigrate Africa under cover of art or literature. The imaged created by Conrad has been the dominant narrative in the West for many decades and was later on updated and replaced by the neo-imperialist view propagated by Western media houses that have been working in tandem with Western interests.
The second reason why the attempt to create strong pan African media institutions has been undermined could be related to the rise and growth of global media corporations that thrive by building their neo-imperialist narratives atop the older stereotype invented by Conrad. The globalization of the media, although a welcome development from the economic and technological perspectives, has contributed to the further marginalization of African issues in global media attention.
Media imperialism went hand in hand with media globalization but there is a difference between the two. Media imperialism is defined as “a process whereby the ownership, structure, distribution or content of the media in any one country are singly or together subject to substantial pressure from the media interests any other country or countries without proportionate reciprocation of influence by the country. “On the other hand, media globalization is briefly defined as “the universal integration of media through the multicultural exchange of ideas. Global media includes all forms mass communication that reaches every corner across the globe.” Another definition of globalization in mass media is “The production, distribution and consumption of media products on a global scale, facilitating the exchange and diffusion of ideas cross-culturally.” Globalization of media may indeed have many benefits by providing greater opportunity for people to tap into more diversified and larger markets around the world.
However, when we look at globalization of media from the point of view of content distribution and ownership, particularly in the context of interaction with Africana countries, we can assume that it has serious drawbacks. “Cultural and ideological bias are not the only risks of media globalization. In addition to the risk of cultural imperialism and the loss of local culture, other problems come with the benefits of a more interconnected world.”
Among the main disadvantages of media globalization are, unequal economic growth, meaning that although globalization tends to increase economic growth for many countries, the growth is not equal. Richer countries often benefit more than developing countries in general and African countries in particular. Moreover, media globalization tends to undermine local businesses that do not have the resources to compete with the big global companies. It also increases potential global recession in the sense that when many nations’ economic systems become interdependent, the likelihood of global recession increases dramatically. Globalization exploits cheaper markets and cause job displacements.
All these factors and actors that emerged in the last two or three or four decades make it incumbent upon Africa not only to fight against the negative tendencies of media globalization but also build its own pan-African media structures to expedite the process of freeing African media from the negative impact of globalization. In order to make this vision a possibility, African countries individually or in groups or regional entities should develop the exchange of information among themselves and thereby diminish the influence of global media organization in distorting African realities or in undermining Africa’s image in general.
African media institutions cannot be born out of thin air but on the basis of available resources in trained manpower and skills that are required to make the dream come true. Africa needs huge financial and technical resources to liberate the media from the shackles of media imperialism. It needs to channel resources and technology towards the realization of its objectives in building independent institutions that would only be responsible to the people of Africa in its news coverage, opinions and reporting current events so that the true image of the continent could be reflected globally. In this way, the one way traffic from global media organizations towards Africa could be reversed and include the flow of authentic information from Africa to the world.
While continents are coming together in every area of engagement, there is no reason for Africa to sit with arms folded and watch the process unfolding without doing anything to change the reality on the ground. Africa may not dictate its terms to the rest of the world but it has the capacity and acumen to make its case known and reverse old relationships based on imperial diktat and the marginalization of the continent. The American continent is integrating around NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Area.
Europe is advanced in its level of integration with its economic union while Asia will do the same in the long term perspective. There is no reason why only Africa remains trapped in the anachronistic and oppressive global media monopoly that undermines its image while making huge profits. News contents about Africa often show striking similarity in whenever African issues are addressed in the Western media which then relay the same information to the rest of the world. This has to stop somewhere and give way to a balanced power relationship between Africa and the world of media monopoly and domination.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SATURDAY 26 AUGUST 2023
