Communication in Africa and its Influence

Besides educational institutions and religious institutions, the modern media have been critical channels for spreading ideas. The modern printed press dates to the turn of the nineteenth century. The first newspapers, in both African and European languages, appeared in Egypt in 1798, in South Africa in 1800, in Sierra Leone in 1801, in Ghana in 1822, in Liberia in 1826, and in Nigeria in 1859. The most important Egyptian paper in the first half of the nineteenth century was al-Waqa'ie Al-Misriyya (Egyptian events), founded in 1828, and from the second half of the nineteenth century until the twentieth century it was al-Ahram (The pyramids), founded in 1875. After the British occupation of 1882, Egyptian newspapers became vehicles of nationalist protest. Between 1900 and 1914, 250 newspapers appeared, although many did not survive. The Egyptian press entered its "golden age" after independence in 1922, and by 1937, according to Amy Ayalon, there were 250 Arabic and 65 foreign-language papers.

In West Africa, members of the Western educated elite established newspapers as vehicles to express incipient nationalism in the face of European colonial encroachment. Among the most influential papers were the Accra Herald, later renamed the West Africa Herald, established by Charles Bannerman in 1858, and the Iwe Ihorin, founded in 1859 by African missionaries in Abeokuta, Nigeria, and written in Yoruba. During the first half of the twentieth century, when colonialism was firmly entrenched, a host of private newspapers were established by African businessmen and nationalists, from Herbert Macaulay (1864–1946), who founded the Lagos Daily News in 1925, to Nnandi Azikiwe (b. 1904), the first president of independent Nigeria, who founded West African Pilot in 1937, and whose party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, came to control ten newspapers by the 1950s.

In the French colonies, the first African-run papers did not emerge until the 1920s, although before 1900 Senegal had three settler papers. The press expanded rapidly after World War II: some 365 newspapers were established between 1945 and 1960, when the French colonies attained their independence. In Southern, Central, and Eastern Africa, the press was largely a European creation to serve the information, education, and entertainment needs of the European settler communities, leaving the African readership in search of alternative channels of communication. After World War II some nationalists founded their own papers—for example, Muigwithamia (Work and play) and Nyanza Times, established by Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga, who later became independent Kenya's first president and vice president, respectively.

After independence the print media faced new opportunities and challenges. The growth of education and literacy levels expanded their readership base, but the emergence of authoritarian one-party states and military regimes undermined press freedom and led to the closure or imprisonment and harassment of many journalists. National news agencies were established and many of the new governments either bought existing papers or established new ones. A few governments were more concerned about the role of foreign ownership and tried to encourage local private media ownership, as was the case, for example, in Nigeria, where Moshood Abiola (1955–1998), later elected president in the annulled elections of 1992, and the Ibru Group established vast media empires. Concerns about the role of the international media—its excessive control of global news flows and misrepresentations of events in the global South—soon translated into international demands in the 1970s by African, Asian, and Latin American countries for the establishment of a New World Information Order (NWIO).

The demands for NWIO were not heeded. In any case, the prodemocracy movement that arose across Africa in the mid-1980s soon transformed Africa's media landscape. These movements were fueled by, and in turn facilitated, the rapid growth of newspapers, so that countries that had a handful of tightly controlled papers suddenly had several dozen vociferous tabloids. Another development was the creation of the Internet, which opened new possibilities for the African press to reach new audiences at home and abroad. By 2000, all African countries had access to the Internet and hundreds of African newspapers were available online.

The Internet is the latest in a long line of telecommunication technologies to be appropriated by African countries. Previously there had been the telegraph, then telephony, cinema, radio, and television, all of which, except radio, grew relatively slowly during the colonial period. The transistor radio played a major role as a vehicle of nationalist mobilization during the struggle for independence. But many countries did not have direct telephone connections with each other and it often took years to get a phone installation, a situation that persisted well after independence. Colonial Africa was generally excluded from the international agencies that regulate global telecommunications, a situation that changed as independent governments joined these organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union and the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, and tried to make up for lost time.

The emergence of the so-called information society and knowledge economies, fueled by the forces of global market integration and the emergence and convergence of new information technologies—what came to be known collectively as "globalization"—compelled African governments to accelerate the pace of telecommunications infrastructure development and to liberalize that sector. In pursuit of this agenda, attempts were made to forge more effective government policies, create regional telecommunication initiatives, and leapfrog old technologies by acquiring the latest technologies such as cell phones and satellites. The use of cell phones across the continent skyrocketed. In 1998, the Afristar satellite was launched, the first of its kind in the world designed to broadcast directly to consumer radio receivers.

These initiatives have borne some fruit. Numerous African institutions from governments to universities use Internet services and Africa is more connected to the rest of the world than it has ever been. Yet, many challenges remain. While the number of Internet users on the continent more than quadrupled in the 1990s, reaching 3.1 million by the beginning of 2001, this represented less than 1 percent of worldwide users, which then numbered 407.1 million. The challenge is not only to close the digital divides—within Africa and between Africa and the developed world—but also for Africa to increase its production of the technologies themselves and the content of information on the global information highway.

Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Africa's postcolonial mediascape was a dynamic and multifaceted blend of traditions, influences, and technologies. The most modern forms of communications technologies coexisted with the indigenous media, electronic outlets lived side by side with street information and rumor mills, known under various names in different regions such as radio trottoir in Francophone Africa, radio boca a boca in Lusophone (Portguese-speaking) Africa, and bush telegraph, or pavement radio, in Anglophone Africa.