THE POLITICS OF BELONGING: MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY IN AFRICA

It is commonplace to claim that liberal democracy and Africa are not good bedfellows, and how apt! Implementing liberal democracy in Africa has been like trying to force onto the body of a full-figured person, rich in all the cultural indicators of health Africans are familiar with, a dress made to fit the slim, de-fleshed Hollywood consumer model of a Barbie doll-type entertainment icon. But instead of blaming the tiny dress or its designer, the tradition has been to fault the popular body or the popular ideal of beauty, for emphasizing too much bulk, for parading the wrong sizes, for just not being the right thing. Not often is the experience and expertise of the designer or dressmaker questioned, nor his/her audacity to assume that the parochial cultural palates that inform his/her peculiar sense of beauty should play God in the lives of regions and cultures where different criteria of beauty and the good life obtain. This insensitivity is akin to the behaviour of a Lilliputian undertaker who would rather trim a corpse than expand his/her coffin to accommodate a man-mountain, or a carpenter whose only tool is a huge hammer and to whom every problem is a nail. The history of difficulty in implementing liberal democracy in Africa attests to this clash of values and attempts to ignore African cultural realities that might well have enriched and domesticated liberal democracy towards greater relevance. This call for domestication must however not be confused with the ploy by opportunistic dictatorships that have often hidden behind nebulous claims of African specificities to orchestrate highhandedness and intolerance.

It is important to revisit through non-prescriptive scholarship how civil society and ethnicity and belonging actually relate to democracy in Africa. Such scholarship should examine to what extent overstressing individual rights and underplaying the rights of cultural and religious communities could well be a key problem with the current democratisation process. The future direction of democracy may well be in a marriage or conviviality between individual aspirations and community interests, since Africans continue to emphasise relationships and solidarities over the illusion of autonomy. For democracy to succeed in this context, it must recognise the fact that most Africans are primarily patriotic to their home village, to which state and country in the modern sense are only secondary. It is in acknowledging and providing for the reality of individuals who straddle different forms of identity and belonging, and who are willing or forced to be both 'citizens' and 'subjects', that democracy stands its greatest chance in Africa.

Within this complex I would argue that while the media and journalists may be largely to blame for their highly unprofessional and unethical journalism in liberal democratic terms, other factors have contributed in no small way to such journalism. Evident from this discussion of the relationship between the media and democratisation in a multiparty context is the inadequate attention given to the quality of democracy needed and the quality and role of the media that should foster such democracy. Almost everywhere, liberal democratic assumptions have been made about the media and their role in democratisation and society, with little regard to the histories, cultures and sociologies of African societies.

The difficulties of the media in action must be understood not only as failures, but also, and more importantly, as pointers to the very inadequacies of the liberal democratic model in Africa. If African philosophies of personhood and agency stress interdependence between the individual and the community and between communities, and if journalists each identify with any of the many cultural communities all seeking recognition and representation at local and national levels, they are bound to be torn between serving their communities and serving the 'imagined' rights-bearing, autonomous individual 'citizen' of the liberal democratic model. A democracy that stresses independence, in a situation where both the worldview and the material realities emphasise interdependence, is bound to result only in dependence. The contradictions of and multi-facetted pressures on the media are a perfect reflection of such tensions and a pointer to the need for domesticated ideas of democracy in Africa.

If democratisation requires fundamental changes, as it should, such changes usually entail a challenge to vested interests, be these local, national or foreign, private or public. Contrary to some optimistic accounts, media that have facilitated genuine democratisation may appear rare in Africa. It is however clear that media which decide in earnest to play an active and positive role in this process will find themselves in a hostile environment if prevailing attitudes and practices are not in tune with the spirit of change. For to democratise means to question basic monolithic assumptions, conventional wisdom about democracy, media, government, power myths and accepted personality cults, and to suggest and work for the demystification of the state, custom and society. To democratise in Africa is to provide the missing cultural link to current efforts, links informed by popular ideas of personhood and domesticated agency. To democratise is to negotiate conviviality between competing ideas of how best to provide for the humanity and dignity of all and sundry. To democratise is above all to observe and draw from the predicaments of ordinary Africans forced by culture, history and material realities to live their lives as 'subjects' rather than as 'citizens', even as liberal democratic rhetoric claims otherwise.

The mere call for an exploration of alternatives is, as we have seen almost everywhere on the continent, bound to be perceived as a threat and a challenge. In particular, such a call would receive a hostile hearing from those who have championed the cause of one-dimensionalism nationally and internationally - that is, those who benefit from the maintenance of the status quo, and who stand to lose from any changes. They cannot withstand the challenge, stimulation and provocation that democracy (as the celebration of difference and diversity) promises. They want life to go on without disturbance or fundamental change. And they are well placed to ensure this, thanks to their power to regulate media ownership and control, the power to accord or to deny a voice to individuals and communities. Only well-articulated policies informed by public interest broadly defined to include individual and community expectations, and scrupulously respected, would guarantee against such abuse and misuse of office and privilege.

The future of democracy and the relevance of the media will depend very much on how well African states design policies that negotiate the delicate balance between public interests and private concerns. In the process they must enable the harnessing and interplay between old and new information and communication technologies towards this end. It is a future that could well be bright for communication and democracy in a broad and participatory sense. For, as Alec Russell has quite aptly observed, one of the enduring mysteries and marvels of Africa is the ability of Africans to pick up again from any setback, including even the most appalling of disasters. Such determination, demonstrated through the creative appropriation of various worldviews, values, influences, and information and communication technologies, implies that Africans have simply refused to celebrate victimhood.

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is author of Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. London: Zed Books.(May 2005). 320 pages. Cost: Hardback: GBP 60.00 $85.00; Paperback: GBP 18.95 $29.95