The Changing African Mainstream and Social Media Realities

 By Takura Zhangazha*

 There is a new Reuters Institute and Oxford University report on the changing characteristics of the media and journalism. Not only in relation to the internet, social media but also the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

This is a global report whose executive summary can be found on their website here. 

I would however advise colleagues or followers of my blog to read it as extensively as they can.  Not only be cause of its importance as to how the old and new media industries are interacting.  

But also more importantly as to how the new is shaping global journalism, reception of information, social media use and how as is now a sociological given, affecting not only human behavior at a global level.  This would include how we interact with global politics, economics and everyday existence as human beings.  Be it at a pragmatic (food, sustenance, money) or even an emotional (religious, political and historical) level.

I am not going to summarise the report in the form of a review. 

I will take note of some of its key findings as they differentiate global consumption of media products, new technologies and their use between the global north and the global south. 

While the report does not directly touch on Zimbabwe specifically I am quite certain that it reflects general trends in the Southern African region where it looks at South Africa, the country as an example.

What it makes generally clear to all of us is that we are no longer both globally and regionally relying on traditional or mainstream media for everyday news.  Though in some European countries mainstream media remains more important for more serious news. Be it via television, radio and in some cited instances, traditional print media. 

In the global south like almost everywhere else in the world there is a rise in the use of social media platforms to create new sources of information via what we now refer to as ‘influencers’.   These are individuals that as outlined in the report are now either influencing news cycles through increasingly utilized platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok or just generally shaping public discourse as they deem  for more likes and/or revenue.  

Specifically in Zimbabwe we have witnessed the impact that social media influencers are gaining.  Not only in politics but also entertainment (comedy skits) and religious matters.  Even with our mainstream media, we are no longer as sure of who their primary sources of information are because many news stories are broken first on social media platforms such as Whatsapp before they are seen or confirmed in your regular newspaper, radio or television station. 

We have also within the Zimbabwean context seen how government is trying to straddle these new platforms in order to control their societal impact. This, by trying to have its own team of influencers in the form of ‘Varakashi’ countering narratives they deem to be detrimental to their hold on power. 

Ditto the recent incident of war veteran Blessed Geza going viral on social media and the subsequent at least three month detention of journalist Blessed Mhlanga for interviewing him. A matter that is still pending before the courts but caused international condemnation at the government's repressive tendencies against the media.  

What is however clear from the report within an African context is that while we are not that much studied in it, we are clearly enroute to the same societal impact in how we interact with mainstream social and AI media.

Where in part this is now a generational question.  It is younger men that are more interested in new media and what I would hazard to call populist views on social media.  One that tends to be more misogynist, nationalist and materialistic.  Especially in the global north. Even though we now have our own mimicry versions here in Zimbabwe that mix masochism, religion, displays of wealth, political partisanship’s as measurements of life success. All mainly online.

And where it concerns young African women things become more complex because of either gender based cyberbullying and the dominance of young men online. Or an emerging celebrity female influencer culture that remains highly sexualized and again misogynist.  Almost in the same tradition of mainstream British media ‘Page 3’ photoshoots of hyper-sexualised young women. 

The report however in a penultimate comment on it, makes reference to Africa’s skepticism of AI.  On this, I would agree that for now here in the global south we are not too trusting of news brought us via that ‘artificial’ way.  The only catch is that we will be taught to eventually do so.

Mainly because of AI’s inevitability in how we receive and interact with news or critical technologies.

The only sad part is that we will not realize until its too late that AI is couched in what I consider borderline racist tropes about African people, their languages and their histories.  Mainly because of the origins of its key inventors and how they process information, algorithms in their own imperial and preferential image(s).  Please don’t talk about a gorilla fighting a hundred men in Africa! 

Finally, and based on the report I have been citing, I should have probably done a video ‘podcast’ of my views on it.  Even within the African context.  Unfortunately I am not that photogenic.  But we are now going to a situation in which where what we see and simultaneously hear is increasingly more important in the media.  Or our access to information.  Over and above what we have the patience to read. 

And that will be a big problem soon.  If not already. Unless we become more contextually organic to our African diverse and progressive media cultures.  

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

 

 

 

 

The Re-Emergence of Racism in Global Relations: Africa and Mimicry

By Takura Zhangazha*

It is getting harder to explain to younger and older Zimbabweans or even Africans about the way the world is now working retrogressively against us. 

There is now limited room to talk about ideals and values given the fact of a re-alignment of global power dynamics.  I use the term re-alignment because indeed there is a return of a new ‘Cold War’ pitting the global West against Russia and China, the global East.

And then there are also proxy wars that are occurring across multiple continents including our own African one in Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan and in the broader West African region incorporating Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea. 

Proxy wars that also include the Israeli genocidal one against the struggling people of Palestine who we must always, as Africans, be in solidarity with. Mainly because of our common anti-colonial struggle solidarity and its attendant history.   

The key question that I have raised earlier is around the fact of trying to explain a progressive worldview to young and older Africans in light of various high level global impact events.

These include for example the election of Donald Trump as the president of the USA, the war between Ukraine and Russia and its global impact.  Or even as mentioned prior the proxy wars we are seeing in various continents and regions of the world.

Gone are they days where we could take our time to not only understand these emerging conflicts as we used to do in the 1990s and wait for the next quarterly journal to give us the details of the matter.

Now its basically what you see, what you prefer is what you get on social media.

We used to for example anxiously wait on a United Nations report to understand the conflict in the DRC.   Or an investigative journalism long duree analysis of what was happening in either Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan.  Or even the amazing whistleblowing work done by Wikileaks and Julian Assange on the now clearly false premise of the ‘Global War on Terror’ as led by western superpowers.

In these years we were more reflective of global international relations.   It may have been predicated on an assumption of the universality of human equality as espoused by the United Nations (UN). As also accompanied by a Barack Obama ‘black’ presidency of the then only world global superpower, the USA. 

As Africans we made and are probably still making many wrong assumptions on issues of universality of human equality in todays’ global political dynamics and international relations.

As they relate not only to race but also global capitalism and its main financialised neoliberal global banking and shareholding systems. 

Hence the emergent challenges around new racist tropes in the global north where immigration is a major electoral issue and the colour of your skin is a shockingly new dehumanization tool in what were previously considered legacy democratic countries.  

This is even before we bring in the other key global question of religion and how it has come to affect again global consciousness and what can be accepted culturally.   Where the latter concept, culture, becomes one of global mimicry of the west or the east.  With conversations all ringing around the repressive and elitist dynamics of global capital and its new found energy around ‘trickle-down economics’. 

So its getting harder to explain progressive ideals to young and older black Africans.  Mainly because of the same said cultural/lifestyle mimicry understandings of what can be human success and what can be human regression.  

The idealistic days of Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Cabral, Machel and others and neither looking to the west or the east but ‘forward’ appear to be lost in the annals of history.  Or even more recently argumentations around what would be considered an ‘African Renaissance’ as led by Mbeki, Abdel Aziz Bouteflika, Abdoulaye Wade and Olusegun Obasanjo  seem to be now be behind us.

All of this was compounded (made worse) by the terribly racist treatment that Cyril Ramaphosa received from Donald Trump at the white house.

But we have to recover and see new global realities as Africans.   The world as we know it today has gone “nuclearly” neoliberal and racist. And this is not a rumour.  It is evident not only in the proxy wars that are currently being fought but also in the evidently racist and exclusionary attitudes of citizens of global superpowers.

Mbeki et al were wrong about assuming an acceptance of an African Renaissance by global superpowers.  As noble an idea as that was.  

We need to dig deeper into our African consciousness and history to begin to re-think how we interact with the rest of the world beyond post colonial capitalism and neo-liberalism.   Even as we learn from our own histories and liberation struggles. 

For now it is self-evident that being African is looked down upon.  Not by just those that see us as that.  But also by ourselves.

Perhaps what is required is a broader balancing of ‘generational praxis’.  An admission that those who led liberation struggles and also countries on the African continent have failed to think outside of the postcolonial and neoliberal boxes that they were and are hemmed in.  Or even the shallow populism that links religion and political arrival at power with the approval of the ‘white gaze’ as fundamentally important to our African futures.

I know we cannot all read Nkrumah, Fanon, Nyerere or Cabral.  But we still need to see and understand that the global perceptions of Africa have come back full circle to us being ‘othered’. Not only by way of racism but also by way of assumptions of dependency.  The question becomes whether we can bridge mimicry and contextual reality. 

I prefer contextual reality first before we assume we can all be Donald Trumps. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com) 

 

 

 

 

Africa's Newest Cultural Battles and Artificial Intelligence: Remember the Maxim Gun

 By Takura Zhangazha*

Africa has newer cultural battles within our current Trumpian global context. The re-emergence of global economic contestations between the USA,  China, Russia, European Union (EU) and the generic former colonial Global South (GS) have serious cultural connotations beyond the immediately material.

Because what now exists is a rewind of a Cold War and post Cold War global perception of what can be considered human progress. Together with multiple racist connotations that come with a globally awkward repetition of history. 

 I have used the term 'newer' because there are older ones that have existed since our struggles against colonialism. 

 Ones that were led by for example cultural, musical and literature in Africa luminaries (in no preferential order such as Fela Kuti, Thomas Mapfumo, Kasongo Band, Oliver Mtukudzi, Lady Smith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri and Stimela, Miriam Makeba, Brenda Fassie, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, China Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Maphalele, Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, Steve Biko and many others I am sure I have forgotten but not deliberately left out. 

I cannot, for the purposes of this blog list all of them. Please reflect on your own preferred consciousness semblance including an historical and contemporary list of your own African cultural icons. Because they are many. And they influenced our cultural African struggles for liberatory and emancipated African minds differently. 

In this while with the specific purpose of making us more confident in striving for a more equitable, justiciable and therefore fairer world for not only ourselves as Africans. But also every other previously oppressed people on the planet. 

I have deliberately mentioned culture because it is in the final analysis what makes us function on a daily basis as it relates to our own collective and in the contemporary now individual values. 

And how it is closely enmeshed within a capitalist, Hollywood determined lifestyle experience of what it can or should mean to be a human being today. No matter your global geographical location. 

 Not only because of our increasing and in most cases privatised access to electricity, telephony, mobile telephony and fibre optic enabled access to the internet and social media.

 And an expansion of the historical context is important here from an African and even global anti-colonialism perspective. 

In this technological African reference point it is important to recall how the arrival of in particular the maxim gun which defeated us in our initial struggles for liberation left us in awe of same said arrival by ship military technology. We fought gallantly but we were defeated in that moment.  

By the time we saw not only the first mechanised wagons (cars) and electricity that was combined with religious fervour and a change of our social lifestyles we were lost at the proverbial (colonialist) sea.

 We recovered with our second struggles for liberation across the African continent and the Global South. 

This was mainly because we had begun to grasp the full import of these technologies and how they were aiding in the decimation of our peoples. So we learnt how to use them in solidarity with others in similar corrosive/oppressive environments or with those in the global north that sympathised with us. 

We learnt how the radio worked not only by way of frequency but also by way of propaganda. Same with newspapers and magazines together with the full import of what ownership of a printing press can do. 

In this eventual mimicry of what we were up against we became entrapped as Africans in a false understanding of the progressiveness of the technology that we had used/borrowed during our liberation struggles (military or civil). 

We forgot that the owner of the medium also determines the message (to paraphrase a famous British engineer Marshall MacLuhan who argued about the social life changing impact of electricity on human behaviour (black, brown but mainly white). 

We have come full circle to that interlinked colonial, post and neo colonial discourse of where Africa is placed with emerging "technologies of being" outlined above. 

Including how they have impacted our perceptions of our existence and more significantly political, religious, economic, social and other values in the world we now live in. 

And as argued by globally public intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, Soshana Zuboff and Yannis Varoufakis from varying nodes, we are now being reinvented as human beings. By what they invariably refer to as 'techno-feudalism'. Something that affects us more in the Global South than the global north due to our less protective privacy laws around social media and the internet (including banking).  

But as Africans and beyond their understandably Eurocentric/ GlobalNorth centric arguments, on our own we are faced with a colossus that seeks to repeat our technological defeat to colonialism. 

 And this via the big issue being discussed globally, with our bit part as Africans on Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

 I used the turn of phrase 'bit part' because again as Africans we don't own the main algorithms nor the fibre optics that bring the new ICT infrastructure to us directly. 

 Even as we naively clamour for Starlink to keep us in the loop with mainly social media connectivity at a for now comparatively cheaper cost. 

 In this sense, and as a word of caution, our embrace of AI may be our newer encounter with a maxim gun. Except without the physical and rapid bullets. Just cultural ones. 

 You cannot harness what you do not own or control. Be it via Chinese or American owned AI or telecommunications and fibre optic companies. Where you chose to not resist and join the fray and it's attendant benefits, remember the full import of the maxim gun. 

 We need a much more Pan African approach to this. And I acknowledge the work being done on language and imaging on what AI algorithms do.  But its not all about business and money or trying to be the next owner of Meta (which will never happen if you are an African and in particular a black African).We may need to rethink what entertains us as Africans. And where we want to be recognized not only physically but also via the clearly unstoppable AI, internet and its attendant social media algorithms. With the added caveat of how it affects young Africans consciousness, a debate for another day. 

Unless we take on a more coherent and people driven cultural approach, we may be faced with a new maxim gun. Culturally only. For now.

 * Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity  (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)