Communication in Africa and its Influence

The communication of ideas in and from Africa is characterized by enormous changes over time and variations among societies. Historically, as might be expected for such a large and ancient continent—the second largest in the world and the one where humanity originated—African societies have exhibited high levels of cultural diversity, uneven patterns of political and socioeconomic development, and different forms of engagement with other world regions. Africa is home to hundreds of cultural groups and languages that have influenced each other in complex ways. It has given rise to advanced societies, such as the ancient civilizations of Egypt and West Africa, which existed alongside simpler societies. Many parts of the continent in the northern and northeastern subregions, and later the western coastal regions, were integrated into extracontinental cultural and commercial traffic, while some parts in the interior were relatively isolated. It was in the zones of intensive inter-cultural communication that ideas from Africa were transmitted to the outside world and ideas from other regions entered Africa. Needless to say, modern African countries are at different stages of industrialization and development, and unequally integrated into the global circuits of ideas and information.

Understanding these disparities is crucial to analyzing and mapping out the changing processes and patterns in the communication of ideas in and from Africa. For one thing, it underscores the difficulty of, indeed the need to avoid, simple generalizations. The development and connections between the various modes of communication—oral, textual, visual, and performance—have manifested themselves in multiple ways across the continent at different times. Similarly diverse are the institutional forms, and their patterns of growth, through which ideas have been expressed, ranging from educational and religious institutions to civic and professional bodies and mass media outlets. As an interactive process, the communication of ideas has a spatial dynamic that entails not only the travel of the ideas themselves from one place to another through several media, but also their transmission by human agents who move and settle in different places.

In this context, for example, the conquest of Spain by the Moors from northwestern Africa, which they ruled for nearly eight centuries, was crucial to the diffusion of ideas from Africa and other parts of the ancient world to Western Europe. So was the forced migration of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic important for the spread of countless African ideas to the Americas. Likewise, European invasions of Africa, most crucially colonization (both the ancient Roman colonization of North Africa and the nineteenth-century European colonization of the continent as a whole), played a profound role in the spread of ideas from Europe, some of which were, as is true of Christianity, ideas that previous generations of African thinkers, such as the Egyptian Gnostics and St. Augustine from the Maghreb, had contributed to their development, and that the newly converted Africans proceeded to further transform. This back-and-forth process typifies the complex flows of ideas in world history and the dangers of ethnocentric claims of exclusive cultural authorship.