African Traditional Media: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Abstract

If you cannot look back, one cannot imagine what is new, especially within the media ecological epistemology. Contemporarily, technically and semantically, radio, television, newspaper and magazine are categorized as traditional media, while the new media are the various social media platforms that are aided by the internet technology. Though some of these traditional media (radio, television, newspaper and magazine) now have their presence on various social media platforms in order to reach a wider audience who most times are perpetually online; however, the Afro-centric explanation of what the traditional media means for Africans differs. Within the Afro-centric context, the traditional media refers to the various traditional/indigenous means Africans used in communicating among themselves in ancient times. In essence, there were sections of functional indigenous media industries in medieval Africa before the arrival of the Western forms of media; and some of these indigenous African communication systems have represented themselves in modernity, even as new forms of indigenous modes of communication have also emanated in some African cities. This is what this chapter sets out to explore in detail and also what presently constitutes the media industries in Africa in the digital age. Globally, the media plays an important role in influencing and altering the views, beliefs and behaviours of people who consume its contents. Hang and Weezel (2007) while citing Krippendorff (1986) say that “the mass media is the generic term for newspapers, book publishing, radio and television. Other media include the recording industry, movie industry and theatre. All media are associated with more or less elaborate forms of audience participation.” The media can be used to influence and construct what people would believe about a set of people, their systems, ideology and their geographical location. This assertion seems to be true when Africa as a continent is being beamed through the lenses of the Western media, or portrayed by the Western ink. Generally, the larger bulk of what the rest of the world believes about Africa is Western “media-constructed.” Unfortunately, the African continent is the only continent that some Western scholars have relentlessly painted in their writing as epitomizing hopelessness, abject poverty, destitution and backwardness. For instance, The End of Poverty, a book authored by Jeffrey Sachs, clearly showcases African content as artless in documentation of her media artefacts. Sadly, some African scholars such as Semple (1911), Lele (1981), Narayan et al. (2000), Alagoa (1966), and Obadina (2004), among others, seem to agree with the Western scholars in their writings that Africa is culturally backward, artless in artistic documentation, poor in cultural and traditional heritage and has non-material traditions of oral history. Most often, several attempts by early African scholars to trace the semblance and similarities of Western media inventions with that of the early African media inventions are always characterized by variegated experiences (Bianchi & Boniface, 2002; Broadman, 2007; Dieke, 2000; Easterly, 2006; Gamble, 2007), which to some extent, according to some Western scholars, most times these claims of Africans’ conceptual prowess cannot be proven or substantiated due to lack of written documented evidence (Hyden, 1980; Mercer, 2003; Reid, 2008; Saith, 2001). These views are not only factually incorrect and theoretically misleading, but practically unacceptable. This is why a “single story” is very dangerous if we must go by the postulation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 Ted Talk, especially in a bid to correct historical errors that are media-related. With these kinds of Western postulations, research in this area to prove these similarities or semblance often become cumbersome, herculean, complex and complicated. That is why in verifying the veracity of Africans’ media creations that have striking similarities and semblance with the Western world’s media inventions should not be studied from the lenses of a Western ontology, axiology or epistemology, but from the eyewitness account of the creators who are still alive, the beneficiaries of such inventions or art creations, and from African theoretical perspectives.

No one newly-introduced mode of communication or combination of new modes wholly replace or supplant the traditional ones. The fact is that they supplement the old ones or replace some of their functions but never all of their functions.

—(Colin Cherry, 1978)