Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the state of media in Africa. It traces the historical development of newspapers in countries like Kenya, South Africa and Ghana. The chapter pays significant attention to the notion of traditional communication in Africa, which defined how communication messages were shared in Sub-Saharan Africa before the advent of newspapers in the continent. The notion of development communication which characterises the relationship between the media and the state after independence in developing countries was discussed. The chapter pays particular attention to the appropriation of the development communication model by state actors to undermine press freedom in Africa. The chapter concludes with examples of the studies about corruption scandals in Africa.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoting Huntington (1991: 15), Hyden and Okigbo defined wave as a group of transitions from one type of regime to another that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period of time (Hyden and Okigbo 2002: 31).
- 2.
Gold Coast was the former name of Ghana.
- 3.
Cited in Giffard et al. (1997).
- 4.
For a discussion on the changes in South African media, especially due to democratisation and the changing nature of the economy which makes newspapers to pay attention to profit-making, see Tomaselli (2002).
- 5.
In 2009, just before the local elections, there were series of reports in the British press led by the Daily Telegraph about the expenses of MPs, known as the expenses scandal. On July 23, George Galloway, and former British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon exchanged words during BBC’s Question Time programme, on the allegations of British involvement in the BAE arms scandal between Britain and Saudi Arabia.
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Yusha’u, M.J. (2018). An Overview of the State of Media in Africa. In: Regional Parallelism and Corruption Scandals in Nigeria. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96220-7_2
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