Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging

by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

This major study explores the role of the mass media in promoting democracy and empowering civil society in Africa. The author contextualizes Africa within in the rapidly changing global media and shows how patterns of media ownership and state control have evolved and the huge difficulties under which most African media workers labour. The author also explores the whole question of media ethics and professionalism in Africa. The general analysis is supported by a very detailed unique case study of Cameroon. Nyamnjoh is critical of the Western-derived institutional framework for multi-party democracy that overlooks the social realities of African citizens' multiple identities, and their cultural orientation to communal values. He also concludes that African governments have gone very little way in encouraging independent media, but that the media themselves must also share some of the blame.

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 2005

About the author

Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Professor of anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and a prolific writer.
He won the Eko Prize for Literature, an Anglophone Cameroon prize in 2014 for "his lifetime contributions to creative writing and arts in Cameroon and beyond'.