Decolonising Political Communication in Africa

Front matter

Routledge Contemporary Africa Series

DECOLONISING POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN AFRICA

REFRAMING ONTOLOGIES

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Notes on contributors

PART II Film and photography as activism: decolonisation and performance

4 Zanele Muholi’s work as decolonisation and political communication BESCHARA KARAM vill

Contents

Documentary film as political communication in post-apartheid South Africa: Miners Shot Down PIER PAOLO FRASSINELLI

Remembering and memorising: the efficacy of photography in political communication in postcolonial Africa GEORGE NYABUGA

“Killing with kindness”: political icons, socio-cultural victims: visual coloniality of the Siddis of Karnataka, India SAYAN DEY

On the question of decolonisation, gender and political communication SALLY OSEI-APPIAH

PART III Music, radio and social media as politicised “spaces”

Freedom in the jazz imaginary: twentieth-century aesthetic revolt SALIM WASHINGTON

Empowering communities through liberalisation of airwaves in Ghana AFRICANUS L. DIEDONG

In the realm of uncertainty: Kenya”s Ghetto radio as politicised space WILSON UGANGU

Social media as a sphere of political disruption TRUST MATSILELE AND BRUCE MUTSVAIRO

Contents ix

PART IV The media, the digital public sphere, and decoloniality 191

13 Transformation, fragmentation and decolonisation: the contested role of the media in postcolonial South Africa 193 YLVA RODNY-GUMEDE

14 The voice of the voiceless? Decoloniality and online radical discourses in South Africa 207 LORENZO DALVIT

Index 225

Figures

7.1 Political icons, socio-cultural victims

7.2 Indians of African origin

7.3 Hardworking Siddi woman

74 Ramzamma laughs when she is asked if she is pregnant with her first child

7.5 Indians of African descent

7.6 A beautiful Siddi woman

7.7 Siddi in India

7.8 Siddi boy with a painted face playing the Ngoma drum

Tables

3.1 Analytical questions 38 12.1 Broader categories of Mawarire’s disruption 184

Notes on contributors

Tendai Chari is a Media Studies Lecturer in the Media Studies Department at the University of Venda, South Africa. Previously, he lectured at the University of Zimbabwe where he coordinated the Media Programme, and at the Zimbabwe Open University and the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) (Zimbabwe). His research interests are Political Communication, Media Representation, Media Ethics, New Media, and Media, Democracy and Democracy. His publications have appeared in the Journal of African Media Studies (JAMS), African Identities, Ecquid-Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory Research.

Colin Chasi is Director, Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice, University of the Free State, South Africa. He works on various aspects of the philosophy of communication. He is currently occupied in the development of what has been called participation studies—an attempt at presenting a quintessentially African approach to the field. This work follows from his efforts to put forward an existential approach to HIV/ AIDS communication. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher (C3) by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Colin has supervised in areas of health communication, political communication, and participatory communication. He continues to be interested in a range of areas that involve the thinking and rethinking of key conceptual underpinnings in the fields of communication.

Lorenzo Dalvit is the Head of ICT Education at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Until recently, he was the MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication in the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies. His areas of academic interest include issues of power and social justice in relation to ICT, digital communication theory, ICT for development, mobile services, and localisation in African languages. He has co-authored over 100 publications and has supervised more than 30 students across various disciplines (Media Studies, Education, African Languages, and Computer Science). He is involved in various ICT-fordevelopment initiatives and international collaborations.

xvi Notes on contributors

Sayan Dey grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal. He completed BA (English), MA (English), and PhD (English) from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, and is currently working as Lecturer at Yonphula Centenary College, Royal University of Bhutan. Before joining there, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Amity Law School, Noida and as a Lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities, Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. As a contributor and editor, his publications appear in different edited books, journals, blogs, and tabloids. With respect to his research on decoloniality, he has been awarded several international conference and project grants: German Research Foundation Conference Grant (2016 and 2017), Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship (2017), GAPS Travel Grant (2018), Journal of International Women’s Studies Fellowship (2018 and 2019), and Volkswagen Foundation Scholarship (2019). Besides these, he is aresearch documentary film maker. His first documentary “Their Stories, Their Voices: The Orphans of the British Raj” has been screened in several film festivals and academic forums across the world. He is one of the founding members of “Aurthaat Productions: A Creative Research and Academic Archive” which preserves stories and documents associated with unique histories, cultures, and traditions across the world. The link to the website is https://www.aurthaatproductions.com/. Apart from Aurthaat Archives, he has also recently initiated a podcast series on “Everyday Decoloniality: A Multicultural Initiative” in collaboration with The Indian Hour Tabloid (https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCENrAt-FdVZN4Pn6gmXZ4Lw). The central purpose of the project is to reach individuals beyond the academia. His areas of academic and research interests are decolonial studies, postcolonial studies, racial studies, cultural studies, social anthropology, food humanities, and modern Indian theatre.

Africanus Lewil Diedong is the Editorial Chair of the Ghana Journal of Development Studies. He holds a PhD in Social Communication from the Gregorian University, Rome. He is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies, Faculty of Integrated Development Studies, University for Development Studies.

Pier Paolo Frassinelli is an Associate Professor, who has lived in Italy, England, Ireland and, since 2003, in South Africa, where he first came to take up a position as Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. Along the way, he has developed research and teaching interests that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. They span critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, translation, African cinema and culture, communication, and the common. Among his edited and co-edited volumes are Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies and Dossier: South Africa, a special issue of the US journal Mediations. He has recently published in, among others, Critical Arts, Journal of African Cultural Studies,

Notes on contributors xvii

Studi Culturali, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Social Scientist, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Beschara Karam is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of South Africa and teaches political communication and film studies. Beschara co-wrote the White Paper on Film in 1996, which served as the basis for the conceptualisation and implementation for the South African National Film and Video Foundation. She has published on political communication, film and decolonisation, censorship and film, representation and the media, gender and the media, trauma, counter-memory, postmemory, Afrofuturism, Black Panther, and the artist, William Kentridge. Beschara is on the editorial board of the accredited journal, Image & Text. She is the co-founder of the community engagement project Landscapes of Cinema: Hearing our Voices, Screening our Cultures, which screens and presents seminars about African trauma, memory, post-colonialism, and decolonisation. Beschara was an anti-apartheid activist in Imbali, and its surroundings, at the height of the state of emergency, in the middle of the civil war in then Natal. She also wrote and introduced the first South African undergraduate political communication module in 2001.

Trust Matsilele is an academic, journalist, analyst, and political consultant with over ten years’ experience in media, civil society, academia, and party politics. He started his career at Zimbabwe’s national broadcaster in 2004 as a producer cum presenter. He later worked for a number of entities for varying periods: The Zimbabwean newspaper, Kaya FM, ARD Radio, Radio VOP, National Constitutional Assembly, CNBC Africa, Forbes Africa magazine. During these stints, he worked as a political and business journalist covering stock markets, investment summits, and regional political gatherings like the SADC and AU summits. Educationally, Matsilele’s highest qualification is a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Johannesburg which he obtained in 2019. He holds a Masters’ of Philosophy Journalism from Stellenbosch, BA Honours from the University of the Witwatersrand, and a Diploma in Journalism and Communications from CCOSA in Zimbabwe. He has a wide knowledge of politics in Africa generally and South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya, and Senegal in particular where he worked actively for democracy and political entities. He is currently a lecturer with the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

Rofhiwa Felicia Mukhudwana is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication Science, University of South Africa. She is an academic who has worked with Wits, University of Johannesburg, and University of Pretoria. She is a corporate communication professional, a government communication researcher, a reader of International Relations, Foreign Affairs, and a scholar of Media Studies. Rofhiwa envisages being xviii Notes on contributors involved in the professional world wherein analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills are utilised for the best possible results. Some of her research interests include strategic communication, effectiveness and excellence in communication management, communication evaluations, stakeholder management, crisis communication and crisis management, media relations and media evaluations.

Bruce Mutsvairo is a professor of journalism at Auburn University. He studies the socio-political significance of journalism and social media as potential harbingers of democratisation, particularly in the Global South. He spent five years reporting for the Associated Press in the news agency’s Amsterdam, Netherlands bureau. Previously, he served as an associate professor in journalism at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and an assistant professor in digital journalism at Leiden University’s Liberal Arts Program in the Hague, the Netherlands. He also spent three years as a member of the journalism faculty at Northumbria University in England, where he directed the MA in Mass Communications. While completing his PhD, he was a teaching assistant at Emerson College’s Study Abroad Program in the Netherlands. He has delivered keynote addresses at major conferences in several countries, including Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi (2012), Wageningen University in the Netherlands (2017), and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa (2016). An author or editor of eight scholarly books (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 2018a, 2018b, 2016a, 2016b) and Rowman & Littlefield (2019, 2018), Bruce is the founding editor of Palgrave Studies in Journalism and the Global South, a Palgrave Macmillan book series (co-edited with Saba Bebawi and Eddy Borges-Rey). He also serves on several editorial journal boards including Digital Journalism, Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies, and African Journalism Studies. His research has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals including among several others Digital Journalism, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, Media, Culture and Society, Information, Communication and Society, African Journalism Studies, and Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture.

George Nyabuga is a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Nairobi. He holds a PhD in Politics, History, and Media from Coventry University. His interests include Kenyan, African, and world politics; how various actors (governments, civil society, and ordinary citizens) can enhance their use of media and journalism; and the impact of information and communication on society. He also has nine years of practical experience in journalism at various newspapers in Kenya, South Africa, and the USA. He has worked as a managing editor, reporter, correspondent, and sub-editor.

Notes on contributors xix

Sally Osei-Appiah is a Teaching Fellow at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. Her research expertise is in political communication, gendered mediation, digital campaigning, African media and politics, democracy, and visual communication. She has published for both academic and non-academic audiences including in African Journalism Studies, Political Communication and Covid-19: Governance and Rhetoric in Times of Crisis, UK Election Analysis 2019: Media, Voters and the Campaign, and The Conversation. Sally has also been involved with several public engagement events where she has shared her expert knowledge on women in politics, gender inequality, democracy, and sustainable development goals in Africa. She is Reviews Editor for the journal Information, Communication & Society.

Ylva Rodny-Gumede is the Head of the Division for Internationalisation and a Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg. She is also a Senior Associate Researcher with the Stanhope Centre for International Communications Policy Research at the London School of Economics. She holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University as well as an MA degree in Politics from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and an MA in Journalism from Cardiff University in the UK. Ylva is a former journalist with experience from both print and broadcast media. Her current research focus is on communication and transformation and innovation of the discipline. Ylva is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

Wilson Ugangu is currently Senior Lecturer of media studies at Multimedia University of Kenya, where he also holds the administrative position of Associate Dean, Faculty of Media & Communication Studies. He has written and researched extensively on Kenya’s and Africa’s media and attendant issues of policy, democracy and participation, training and research. His research focus includes media and communication policy in developing societies, media and culture, international communication, comparative media studies, and media theory. Dr Ugangu has undertaken various consultancies in the broad area of communication for various organisations such as UNESCO, UNIFEM, IDRC, ASARECA, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the Media Council of Kenya among others. He has received personal IJE grants from the Ford Foundation to research various issues, including studying media trends in Kenya and Uganda and an assessment of media reportage of Kenya’s elections in 2013. In 2012, Dr Ugangu led an initiative for the Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security programme (CCAFS) that utilised local language radio as a tool for enhancing knowledge and dialogue in communities coping with climate change. Dr Ugangu received the Doctor of Literature and Philosophy degree in communication science (D. Litt & Phil) at the University of South Africa in 2013.

xx Notes on contributors

Salim Washington is a composer and multi-instrumentalist, playing tenor sax, flute, oboe, and bass clarinet. He has played and recorded with many of the luminaries of the art form and has been featured in festivals and other venues throughout the USA, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Washington has combined a life in music with a life of the mind, and is a scholar of Black music and culture, having written several articles and co-written with Farah Jasmine Griffin a book about the collaboration between Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He currently serves as professor of music in Durban, South Africa, teaching jazz and mentoring young musicians at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He works to combine his artistry and pedagogy with his political conviction that we must work to improve our society with greater justice for all.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the unsung heroes of this project, our external reviewers, without which this project would not have been possible:

Professor Anthea Garman, University of Rhodes

Professor Tendayi Sithole, University of South Africa

Dr Kelvin Chikonzo, University of Zimbabwe

Dr Monica Chibita, Uganda Christian University

Dr Oswelled Ureke, University of Johannesburg

Dr Priscilla Boshoff, University of Rhodes

Dr Ronesh Dhawraj, South African Broadcaster Corporation (SABC) Dr Shenid Bhayroo, Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia Dr Ufuoma Akpojivi, University of the Witwatersrand

Mr Leshaba “Tony” Lechaba, University of South Africa

Mr Melusi Mntungwa, University of South Africa

Mr Simphiwe Rens, University of South Africa.

We would also like to thank the publisher, Routledge, as well as editors Leanne Hinves, Helena Hurd, and Henry Strang. With a huge shout out to Matthew Shobbrook for his passion and verve.

Foreword

Political communication for upending colonialism and its legacies

Colin Chasi

If politics is, as Harold Lasswell (1936) famously said, a set of practices that informs who gets what, when, and how, then political communication is an important art. For political communication will then say something about how the craft of distributing social goods is recognised, expressed, discussed, and deliberated about with consequences for how commonwealths are created. Political communication is hence of importance for those who are interested in upending the colonialism and its legacies, replacing these with more emancipatory orders.

Depending on how a population recognises its realities, and on how it uses communication to express differing views about how the commonwealth should be formed, politics can be emancipatory or oppressive.

For Giddens (1991: 210), emancipatory politics is about “liberating individuals and groups from constraints which adversely affect their life chances.”

Emancipation means that collective life is organised in such a way that the individual is capable—in some sense or another—of free and independent action in the environments of her social life. Freedom and responsibility here stand in some kind of balance. The individual is liberated from constraints placed on her behaviour as a result of exploitative, unequal, or oppressive conditions, but she is not thereby rendered free in any absolute sense. Freedom presumes acting responsibly in relation to others and recognising that collective obligations are involved (Giddens, 1991: 213).

Politics that is emancipatory promotes freedom of choice. It produces an existence that is free of oppression. “In the context of a social existence free of oppression, alienation and immiseration, the striving for identity could become an exuberant expression of the joy of existence in a liberated life that is an open field of possibilities” (Zack, 1997: 106).

Colonial heritages are oppressive in part because they stand against people claiming sovereignty over their situations. Being subjected to colonised ways of seeing and acting people, fail to see the unjust reality that their situations strongly merit to be fought and overcome. By seeing the world through colonial languages and logics, the oppressed become parties to their own oppression.

xxiv Colin Chasi

The history of anticolonial struggles is marked by efforts to enable the oppressed to engage in emancipatory politics. This history is a history of interventions that has been described as Black Radical Politics, which draws on influences of Marxian thought and experiences that grew out of the history of African peoples’ fights against European domination in search of civil rights, national liberation, Black power, selfdetermination, or in anti-apartheid struggle (see Modiri, 2017). This rich history includes struggles against slavery by people of African descent in the Americas and beyond. It includes the expressions of the Negritude movement, which emerged in the 1930s and 1940s to assert pride in Black identity as a way to enable blacks to fight against the oppressions that black people experience globally on account of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. It also includes the work of the Black Consciousness Movement that emerged in South African in the mid-1960s to fight against apartheid—which it saw as an extension of colonial domination.

Black Consciousness is concerned with the political disinheritance of Blacks. Drawing on histories of Black thought, including the work of Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire, it calls upon Black people to regain the agency needed to fight against colonial oppression. It thus calls upon the oppressed, to engage in the “game of power politics” by building strong institutional foundations, “to rise and attain the envisaged self” (Biko, 1987: 68).

The “envisaged self” that Biko speaks of is a self that can only materialise in a society free of colonial and apartheid oppression. It is a self that is able to act with the freedom to co-create a world in which it and others jointly enjoy dignity and worth.

“The envisioned self” was Biko’s futuristic concept by which he called for more than just the recovery of a human essence dismembered, distorted, disoriented, oppressed, but also for how that essence could be recovered and remoulded under new historical circumstances spanning more than 150 years of a painful yet purposeful effort of seeking to reconstitute it into a new human being (Ndebele, 2017: x).

Biko’s envisioned self is a social self. Its possibilities of freedom are tied to the freedoms of others on the premise that “we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage. We want to attain the envisioned self which is a free self” (Biko, 1987: 49).

What is at stake in the emancipatory politics that Biko and others of the Black Radical Tradition have articulated is the possibility of moving towards decolonial futures under which people can work together to flourish rather than to oppress one another. This is to imagine, as Gulick (1965: 8) prognosticated in a different context, a realm within which social instincts can lead to humans

1 acting in with freedom and choice; 2 evolving a productive culture of communicative cooperation;

Foreword xxv

3 creating a theories of how life should be lived that conduce to the production of better worlds; and

4 using both individual and communal memories to communicatively to make promote more just social arrangements.

Gulick says this in the context of his “departmentalisation theory” which idealises the possibility of coordinated behaviour in “self-contained” organisational units (March & Simon, 1965: 28). For current purposes, this is important. For it is important to see that political communication must go beyond thinking merely about those modes of communication that are ascribed to actors in legitimated political theatres. We must see that politics is for everyone and that all communication is political. After all, communication designates what matters and how it matters with consequences for how freedom and oppression are distributed—to whom, when, and how.

Because of the heightened sense of importance that arises from how pandemics rupture logics of existence (Singer, 1990: 119), we can also see more acutely how all communication is political (at least in the sense that it says something about who gets what, from whom and when).

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, one sees with heightened clarity, the capacity of communication to lend meanings to realities and to inform how people live their practical lives. Simply observe how declarations of pandemic are demonstrated to be political acts. It is not the fact that there are actual risks to life that determine that a pandemic is declared. It is the political will to raise attention with regard to particular risks that allows a pandemic to be announced. What we are seeing is that political communication, in this instance of COVID-19, has consequences beyond those that which it specifically addresses. In the instance of COVID-19, which is apparently a medical predicament, the political communication that arises has significance that relates to economic, racial, and other spheres as followers of the news may discern.

The symbolic power of colonial naming can be seen, for example, in how colonial ideas to do with race have shaped geo-spacial planning in places such as South Africa. This colonial special planning has rested on racial symbolisms to designate and allocate Black people (including those called “Black Africans,” “Indians,” and “Coloreds”) to areas that are environmentally undesirable. Thus, to be Black is often to live, in South Africa, in overcrowded southern suburbs to which daily winds blow the worst of the industrial smog that the country’s industrial machinery produces. It is also to generally live on the worst pieces of agricultural land, which suffer from overgrazing and general environmental degradation.

An unmissable aspect of postcolonial struggles is unsurprisingly, then, about how the historically marginalised can get a political say in the order of things. The tragedy is that, often, those of the previously colonised who gain a seat in positions of authority, for example, in the government, in private enterprises, or in the media are often constrained to act according to xxvi Colin Chasi colonial system-logics so that nothing fundamentally changes for the vast majority who continue to experience short and brutish lives. At least two significant points need to be made here:

1 The political systems that undergird colonial and apartheid oppressions are embedded deep in the frames of how postcolonial societies were formed. In consequence, mere cosmetic changes in the faces of those who run these systems does not change the ways in which they generate inequities and injustices. It is important, if the goal is to produce more equitable societies, to identify and replace the underlying mechanisms by which injustices are produced with ones that conduce instead to justice.

2 Political communication, which is enabled by factors of the symbolic power of languages, is key to the political distribution of risks. It either enables the productive capacities of injustice to be seen and to be removed, or it enables their production and reproduction.

To reckon with the above, one is led to see that anyone who acts to decolonise, and to thereby create a system that works for everyone in ways that are just, must be prepared to bring down certain parts of the ways in which the “system works”. Here, the problem is that colonialism works for some against others in ways that are unjust.

Meanwhile, it is difficult to know which aspects of colonial systems to attack—for these systems are so complex that one cannot be sure that upending even one element does not lead to greater harms. The hands of politicians whose aims are to decolonise the systems within which they operate are therefore always sallied by uncertainty. It is well known that some, such as the late President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, in the name of decolonising their societies, have persevered with policy options that are filled with immense loss and pain on the grounds that the ends of decolonisation justify the means. If it is true that political choices always yield messy and unintended consequences, particularly in complex postcolonial settings, what is evident is that the art of politics involves the wise calculation of the risks associated with each choice of action.

It is reasonable, however, to see, as Machiavelli (1925: 154) says, that

...we may conclude that those who cannot change their system when occasion requires it will no doubt continue prosperous as long as they glide with the stream of fortune; but when that turns against them they are ruined, from not being able to follow that blind goddess through all her variations.

At the same time, we can see that were those who suffer on account of histories of colonial suppression cannot escape their oppression by doing nothing.

Foreword xxvii

In postcolonial states, if the study of political communication is to go beyond blaming societies and individual leaders and followers for their failures to attain decolonial purposes, it will be wise to invest in new forms of knowledge that recognise the complexity of the task at hand. The point is not to deny individuals and societies their responsibilities for how they act in their risk contexts. It is rather, with Zwi and Cabral (1991), to speak of “risk contexts” as social determinants of behaviours. This is to recognise that risk is “so to speak, ascribed by civilization[s]” (Beck, 1992: 23), and in the way to change the profile of the risks we face is to change the civilisational logics within which we co-create our realities. This is why the study of political communication matters.

If one studies political communication within its multitudes of sources of stigmatised and degraded (cf. Schoepf, 2004: 19), then one has a fair chance to improve the courses of action or calculated risks one makes. In short, the study of political communication in its multitudes of arenas—as this book seeks to do—is an important element in producing the kinds of knowledge by which reliance on colonial epistemologies and cognitive schema can be overcome.

To be human is to live with uncertainty and to always deduce new possibilities from surrounding realities. Indeed, we humans have the remarkable capacity of finding infinite possibilities even among the most limited options. This capacity is best actuated whenever live or practicable options for agentic action are made available. By departing from existing frameworks that limit what political communication study is to what Western scholarship has laid out, this book enables its readers to think with increasing vitality about diverse contexts in which they find themselves. In this way, it lays out new grounds upon which desirable decolonial ideas and practices can be envisioned and practised.

Beck, U. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage.

Biko, S. 1987. J write what I like. Oxford: Heinemann.

Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.

Gulick, L. 1965. Management is a science. Academy of Management Journal, 8:7-14, Mar.

Lasswell, H.D. 1936. Politics; who gets what, when, how. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co.

Machiavelli, N. 1925. The prince. London: Philip Allan & Co.

March, J.G. & Simon, H. 1965. Organizations. New York: Wiley.

Modiri, J. 2017. The jurisprudence of Steve Biko; A study in race, law and power in the “afterlife” of colonial-apartheid. Unpublished thesis: University of Pretoria. Ndebele, N.S. 2017. Foreword: “The envisioned self”. In J write what I like. Edited by

Biko, S. Johannesburg: Picador Africa, pp. vii—xiv.

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Schoepf, B.G. 2004. AIDS, history, and struggles over meaning. In ATV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond epidemiology. Edited by Kalipeni E., Craddock S., Oppong J.R. & Ghosh J. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 15-28.

Singer, L. 1990. Erotic welfare: Sexual theory in the age of the pandemic. Edited by Butler, J. & MacGrogan, M. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.

Zack, N. 1997. Race, life, death, identity, tragedy, and good faith. In Existence in black: An anthology of black existential philosophy. Edited by Gordon, L.R. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 99-111.

Zwi, A.B. & Cabral, A.J.R. 1991. Identifying “high risk situations” for preventing AIDS. British Medical Journal, 303:1527-1529. 14 Dec.

1 Reframing African ontologies in the era of decolonisation

The central aim of this book is to “decolonise” political communication. However, considering the complexities of the sub-field, as well as the fact that it is a theory-praxis, it is almost a near impossible claim. With regard to the complexities of political communication, we refer to how the sub-discipline (which falls within the more established field of Communication Studies) is made up of several, often dissenting, fields, such as Organisational Communication (consider, for instance, branding, institutional communication, advertising, and public relations, to mention but a few), International Communication, Government Communication, Media Studies, and Politics. With regard to the theory-praxis, it deals not only with theories — such as agenda-setting, social semiotics, and framing — but also with practical skills — such as how to write a press statement, or media report — and the skills involved in being a spokesperson or speechwriter. All of which are taught within the triad of the media, politics, and citizenry that make up “political communication”; and all of which function in democratic societies. These societies privilege the west and Europe as the centre of this democracy, which in turn has capitalism as its foundation, all of which need to be unpacked and critiqued. This is a monumental undertaking for only one book, most especially because this collaborative volume is the very first scholarly work to embark on such a responsibility. Instead, we would like to present this work as a form of “problematising” the sub-field of political communication, and, as a form of “consciousness raising”, about the need to decolonise this inter-disciplinary theory-praxis.