Media Democracy Relationship Africa

GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES COPYRIGHT 2002 SAGE PUBLICATIONS LONDON, THOUSAND OAKS &
; NEW DELHI, VOL 64(1): 2145 [0016-5492(200202)64:1;2145;021138]
THEORIZING THE MEDIADEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Guy Berger

Abstract / Theories of media and democracy, entailing concepts like the public sphere and civil society, have been extensively used in western societies. In contrast, analysis of the role of Africas media in democratization has been patchy and lacking in theoretical foundation. By reworking some of the theorization that is born of societies with rather different media conditions to Africa, some useful insights can be gained about the processes on this continent, particularly in southern Africa. In particular, such re-engineered theory can help provide an analysis of contemporary issues regarding media freedom, the growth of private media, the contests around government-controlled media, and broadcast deregulation in Africa. In addition, such reworked theory helps contextualize the gender character of southern Africas media and the signicance of the Internet for democracy on the continent. Keywords / Africa / civil society / democracy / media / public sphere
1. Introduction
This discussion begins with a critical interrogation of how key western concepts have been used in analysing media in Africa and especially southern Africa. Alternative constructions are then developed and applied to key aspects of the mediademocracy relationship in the region. Many writers (but not enough) have sounded warnings about lifting concepts like media and democracy from western conditions and applying them unthinkingly to Africa (see for instance, the cautions forwarded by Mafeje, 1995; Ronning, 1994, 1995; Ansah, 1991; Sachikonye, 1995a; Obeng-Quaidoo, 1985; Uche, 1991; James, 1990; Akioye, 1994; Anyang Nyongo, 1995). These warnings are distinct from the normative issue of whether democracy (or development) on western lines should or should not be present in Africa. It is a matter of standards of explanation and description rather than moral prescription. The quest, therefore, is for universally applicable concepts, which are relevant and explanatory for media and democracy in Africa, and which designate broad processes and functions rather than specic institutions like parliaments and the press. In this light, one might refer to democracy functionally as decision-making power by majority principle, exercised by way of a process that is based on equal rights of participants. There are other important associated principles (informed participants, freedom of expression, right of access to
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public information, rule of law, checks and balances on power, human rights, respect for minorities), but these can also have a life outside democratic decision-making and are not quite as central. To remain therefore at the most general level, one can see immediately that such a kernel denition allows one to apply the concept of democracy to circumstances outside the normal realm of politics, such as the family, workplace, educational institution, etc. Although in this article the key reference point is the nation-state apparatus, a key issue in Africa is the extent to which the private sphere remains outside the public arena (see section 5). Turning to dening media, we can designate it as the function in communication that is manifested through a carrier of signs (or a vehicle: see Metz, 1974) to multi-point destinations. Thus, while language, design, facial expressions and clothing, etc., function as vehicles that mediate communication (they all entail sign systems), they become media in a more conventional sense when they appear on a platform (like print, radio, television and billboards) which is dedicated to a communication function. The same process and functions are also present in mass rallies, communal story tellers (griots), singing, plays, spectacles, meetings and our thinking needs to be ready to recognize such media, especially in Africa. With these preliminaries, we can proceed to analysing the mediademocracy relationship.
2. Critical Concepts
Keeping in mind the working denitions of democracy and media, it is noticeable how casually the terms are applied within the mass media (and indeed in everyday parlance) as if their meanings were clear-cut. Reuben Abati of Guardian Newspapers in Lagos writes that Nigerians are having to learn that democracy is a long-distance race and not a 100m dash (Abati, 1999). But such metaphors leave hidden the matter of what the democratic race is for and about, as compared to other competitions for power. In truth, different content is assumed by different actors when terms are used without denition. This casualness (or is it a kind of avoidance?) is mirrored in the lack of deep denition to be found in much scholarly writing on democracy and media and their interrelationship (see Randall, 1993; Ansah, 1988; Karikari, 1993; Blake, 1997; Ungar, 1990; Clapham and Wiseman, 1995; Faringer, 1992; Lardner, 1993; Maja-Pearce, 1992; Manyarara, 1999; Martin, 1992; Ngugi, 1995; Skurnik, 1986; van Audenhove, n.d.). Most striking of all is the reliance in much of this writing upon unreective, conventional wisdoms about the way that media is an important element in democracy which wisdoms in turn tend to be limited to a liberal pluralist paradigm (see Chole, 1995: 1718). This is problematic for several reasons. Not only is this paradigm itself under challenge on its own western home turf, its suitability to Africa is questionable. For instance, if much African media has historically played a political propagandist role or a developmentalist role, it does not serve any explanatory purpose to hold up a watchdog model and measure Africas historic decit. What needs to be explained is not what did not happen, but rather what did.
BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
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This is not to reject the explanatory relevance of the liberal pluralist paradigm in all cases. The models assumption is that competing elites will utilize media to articulate their interests, and this may help explain recent aspects of African experience in some countries (see Karikari, 1993). Yet, liberal pluralism is too narrow to be a universal analytical framework (much as it may be a dominant normative framework). Even in regard to those historical places and periods when it seems to provide its greatest insight, it is criticized for overlooking monopolization and elite congruence. And even as a normative ideal, its value is questioned by those who analyse the paradigm as archaic (e.g. Dahlgren, 1997; Hardt, 1996), and/ or those who argue for more communitybased goals (e.g. civic journalism advocates like Rosen, 1993, 1999). What is needed, arguably, is a more wide-ranging conceptual framework. Within liberal pluralism, this has been attempted in the so-called theories of the press devised by Siebert et al. (1956). But what we nd there is only a narrow classication based upon degrees of state control of media (see MakOchieng, 1994; Berger, 2000). To the extent that Siebert et al. do in fact go further and try to explain their different classes of press system, it is as manifestations of underlying political philosophy. However, today, only diehard neoHegelian idealists would privilege this kind of explanation. A nal and compelling reason why we need to go beyond the taxonomic and analytical approaches associated with liberal pluralism is because these assume, inextricably, a modernist environment characterized by many competing elite interest groups and a dense media environment. This is not the case in much of Africa. Looking, then, at other alternative paradigms about democracy and media in southern Africa, it has to be noted immediately that there is not much of a tradition here. After independence, much academic writing on Africa, including on African media, was focused (functionistically) on development concerns. It was only in the 1990s, when struggles on the streets put democracy on the political agenda, that this topic began to register signicantly in scholarly analysis of medias role on the continent. In this, only a small body of writing emerged which theorized the democratization decade in ways outside the liberal pluralist paradigm, although still drawing on concepts ready-made from western theory. These writings go a lot further in analysing democracy than just focusing on the question of regular free and fair elections and the role of political parties and the media in relation to polling. They draw attention to ongoing processes whereby democratically relevant politics are practised between, and not only during, elections, and they also highlight the role of actors other than professional politicians. In particular, the concepts of civil society and public sphere have been put to work here (see Harbeson et al., 1994; Osaghae, 1994). Both of these concepts, in the particular forms taken over into Africa, reect their origins in societies extremely different to most of those in Africa. Three comments may be made on the borrowing that has taken place. First, the application of the concepts to Africas democratization period has seldom included a focus on how they related to the continents media (Ronning, 1999). Second, there is typically no clear articulation dened between the two. Third, the concepts are inconsistently utilized. Civil society, to take one
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example, is used by Ronning (1995) to assert that Zimbabwe had two civil societies (plural) under colonialism (settler and nationalist), but also that the nationalists were seeking entry to civil society (singular). Public sphere, as is shown in section 4, has been used by some writers to include state activities, and by others to exclude these. Part of the complexity is because the concepts themselves are used in diverse ways even within their home contexts. As summed up by Mansson (1999), at least three positions can be identied concerning the public sphere. While public sphere is sometimes taken in a singular sense, Habermas himself in later writings theorized class, gender, social and cultural interest groups which could develop different own public spheres. For Curran (1996), there is the organized public sphere (focused on associations) and the general public sphere (which involves individuals). A third way of identifying public spheres comes from Keane (1991) who denes them according to micro, meso and macro levels. The concept of civil society emerged in a different intellectual tradition to that of public sphere and not much work has been done on theorizing the relationship between them. Typically, analyses will work with either one framework or the other, and even when reference is made to both, there are often shortfalls in theoretical rigour (see, for example, Ronning, 1997, 1999). In African application, Moyo (1993, cited in Ronning, 1995) takes the view that state and civil society belong to one public realm. MakOchieng (1994) argues in relation to Kenya that the African media is itself a public sphere. Traber (1995), also referring to Africa, locates the media in civil society which in turn, he says, needs access to the public sphere (singular), or needs to create its own public spheres (plural). He also refers to semi-public spheres. Mansson (1999) sees an interaction between civil society and the independent press, as forming a public sphere in Zimbabwe. She further refers to a(nother) public sphere that is anchored to party and state. Ronning (1997) says that Zimbabwean civil society has created a limited public sphere in spaces relatively autonomous of the state. It becomes even more potentially confusing when one nds similar words (but with different meanings within very different traditions) in work by a writer like Ekeh (1975), who designates two public realms, the primordial (which has the same moral imperatives as the private realm), and the civil structure (which covers the state apparatus). In short, we need further attention and elaboration to the transferability of civil society and public sphere to African media. As Ronning (1999), drawing on Ruud (1996), asks: can you have a public sphere or civil society in an unmodern context? Few scholars have dealt with this particular question.
3. Retheorizing Civil Society

Applied to southern Africa, civil society has been interpreted in two ways: the liberal pluralistic sense described by Shils (1991; cited by Ibrahim, 1995), and as a kind of radical pluralism that goes beyond elite involvement in politics (see Wiseman, 1995). Encompassing both, Sachikonye (1995a: 399, 400) writes
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that civil society can be dened as the aggregate of institutions whose members are engaged primarily in a complex of non-state activities economic and cultural production, voluntary associations and household life and who in this way preserve and transform their identity by exercising all sorts of pressures or controls upon state institutions. He highlights business associations, tertiary institutions, churches, self-help associations and the (private) mass media. Ronning (1999) takes a similar view, adding that a well-functioning civil society must have effective parliaments, a market separate from the state and strong and independent organizations. He notes the role of burial societies, cooperatives, cultural groups, health and religious groups, as well as funded NGOs. Ronning also usefully focuses on the attempts at coercive cooptation of civil organizations by many African governments, while Mansson (1999) notes the contradictions and uctuations in this process in Zimbabwe. While Mansson (problematically) tends to treat the private press as if it were something quite different to civil society (or at least different to the rest of civil society), Ronning takes the more conventional and logical position of seeing private media as part of civil society. Sachikonye (1995a), however, critiques the media in general and argues that social movements (in civil society) should establish their own media to ensure a more favourable image of civil society. Neither he nor Ronning are too explicit on community-owned (as opposed to privately owned) media, reecting the relative absence of this phenomenon outside South Africa and some West African countries. But in principle this sector can also be analysed under the civil society category. There are some insights in among these different nuances, but complicating this picture are nine problematic areas. First, there is the identication of the two realms. There is some difculty in dening civil society as a realm distinct from the state. For example, tertiary institutions are typically state institutions, yet it is not without good reason that Sachikonye (1995a) groups them in civil society. What then about state media operations? To further complicate matters, the question of where the state starts and ends is not that clear. Do traditional authorities in the form of chiefs still constitute part of the state function, even where they are not formally part of the apparatus? Do coercive or authoritarian traditions and practices that correspond to the states operation really count as civil society? Kupe (1999) and Ronning (1994, 1999) draw attention to a culture of fear and self-censorship in civil society journalists, and an assumption in the profession that there are tighter restrictions than there actually are. Again, this points to difculties in drawing the boundaries between civil society and state. These questions indicate that there may be some deeper problem with the dichotomy, at least in its application to southern Africa, and a less extreme counterpositioning is needed to make the framework more effective. This contention is reinforced by many of the points below. Second, there is the matter of interconnection. The notion of civil society as a factor for democracy regarding the state can end up missing important connections between the two realms. Civil society is often presented as a check and balance to the power of a state that represents mainly its own primitive accumulation agenda (that of a self-enriching professional political or
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military class plus bureaucracy, both of which are seen as external to civil society). In some ways, this reects the radical democratic agenda, where a range of social actors, not just the elite lobbies beloved of liberal pluralism, are political players vis--vis the state. It is important that we do not dismiss or ignore civil society as an alternative power centre in society. But liberal pluralism has the merit of not only focusing attention on what are typically the more powerful parts of this centre (i.e. the elite), but also of showing how these actually come to give internal direction to the state not just constitute a limit or block (from the outside). The danger being highlighted here is that the civil society perspective too often implies civil society as an oppositional force, whereas this social realm (or rather, important parts of it) is often closely articulated with or integrated into even contradictorarily and cooptively at times key elements of the ruling establishment. The state may well dominate civil society, but the latter also in many ways represents an active foundation in this relationship in Africa (as elsewhere). Third, the perspective encourages simplistic state bad; civil society good thinking. The perspective tends to direct attention away from real or potential democratic qualities within the state itself (Ronning, 1997). An important corollary is that if the state is seen as a problem from a democratic point of view, and civil society as part of the solution, then the latter is typically unduly romanticized. In fact, however, to take one example, private media instead of being democratic champions may indeed be part of the problem. One example is journalism for sale known as brown envelope journalism in Nigeria, soli in Ghana (from the word solidarity), and gatu in Liberia (from the word gratuity). Another example is sensationalistic disinformation in Malawi (see Venter, 1995; Jamieson, 1999). Going further, however, the strategic emphasis arising from a civil society orientation (as illustrated by Cecil Blake, 1997) is that the power of the state should be shrunk and civil society expanded through a programme of full-scale deregulation and privatization. As Ronning (1994: 3) sums up: the solution to state control has invariably been seen as privatization and a complete opening up to market forces. In turn, the African media issue becomes, for example, opening up access to the airwaves for private broadcasters because the state is seen as irrevocably bad and the no small matter of transforming the character of the state broadcaster (into a public, as opposed to governmental, asset) gets ignored. Fourth, there is the need to acknowledge interdependence between state and civil society. Despite the tensions, they symbiotically need each other (see Ruijter, 1989). Thus, much as most writers counterpose civil society to the state, they also are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the importance of a state for law and order and the existence of civil society. As Ronning (1999: 88) writes: In order to be able to safeguard and develop democracy, the African state must not be rolled back so much that its basic function withers away, for it is through the state that human and citizens rights are secured. Ronning (1995) acknowledges the important question as to whether in Africa the market is a civil society space (for keeping a balance of power with the state), or a sad expression of marginalization a feeble product of a weak state and a lack of regulation. The implication here is that we may well need to dispense with assumptions that a
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strong civil society and a relatively weak state (read the USA model) is the best conguration for democracy in Africa. The notion of a weak state itself needs to be problematized the key issue being: weak in relation to what? Certainly, the weakness cannot be reduced to an inverse relationship with the strength of civil society as if a zero-sum power situation were involved. A weak state can in fact contribute to weak civil society. Ronning (1994: 4) says it is characteristic of weak African states that media are directly linked to the state apparatus and used to promote personality cults. This appears to contrast with the phenomenon rst described by Hamsa Alavi (1972) as the overdeveloped post-colonial state (whose reach includes rm control of the media). But the reality is that a weak state continues to be a preponderant entity in much of Africa especially in relation to an even weaker civil society. In African conditions, a strong state may be equally bad for media and democracy, but a strong state with a different orientation can also assist in strengthening civil society. This may sound paradoxical, but can be seen not to be if one looks at the South African example. In this case, transformative initiatives by the post-Apartheid government have had the effect of empowering communities with radio licences, black business with contracts, trade unions with labour rights and women with legal protection against abuse. This is not to ignore the dangers of a state, including the South African one, strengthening itself at the expense of civil society (rather than creating enabling conditions for the ourishing of that society). Too many African rulers have gone down this non-democratic road. But the analysis should not as a result become anti-state per se. Fifth, there is a need to assess the democratic role and eligibility of elements of civil society vis--vis the state. In this regard, Sachikonye (1995a: 401) notes that there is no presumption . . . that civil society organizations are in themselves inherently democratic. He continues: such organizations can be obstructive to the democratic processes as was the case in the minority white settler societies. The same point applies to community defence units and/ or vigilante gangs, and even in cases to religious and sports organizations, which all t the denition of civil society associations. But where does one draw the line, and does this mean that civil society outside the state can only contribute to democratic governance if its components are purely democratic as well? Bennett (1998) is clearly unhappy with civic medias contribution to democracy, complaining that Zimbabwes private papers are perpetually negative about the government so that every article is overly critical leading to a polarized press in which each paper is a megaphone for special interests. The danger with Bennetts perspective is that only purely democratic bodies in civil society (perhaps saintly trade unions or residents associations?) come to be seen as qualiers of a democratic role regarding the state. Democracy, then, is only for democrats in this view it excludes the involvement of non-democratic interests in a democratic process of majority decision-making. Yet, Traber (1995: 414) makes the valuable point that confusion about the medias place in society is often expressed in the argument, uttered by politicians in and out of Africa, that journalists lack legitimacy because, unlike politicians, they were not elected. His criticism of this argument implies that a democratic system needs
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to encompass all interests in civil society, including those of the private media and other unelected institutions. But even accepting this, the issue then becomes how far one may go in assessing eligibility for civil society. While the civil society notion assumes lawful associations, we should not be blind to how illegal groupings can constitute alternative powers to the state. Depending on their character, they may or may not contribute democratically by restricting the states ability to take decisions against majority interests. In post-Apartheid South Africa, criminal gangs, taxi association maa and warlordism in parts of the country have been bastions of resistance to the new states attempt to combat crime and violence. But, previously, the then-outlawed ANC played a positive democratic role. In Africa as elsewhere, the media as a civil society agent is often faced with the question of whether illegal actions (like stealing documents, misrepresenting identities, refusing to disclose sources) constitute a contribution to democracy or not. Pirate and rebel broadcasters, likewise, may sometimes be a democratic factor (as with the ANCs Radio Freedom during Apartheid), and at other times undermine legitimate processes set up under a democratic state (as with UNITAs radio Vorgan, Voice of the Resistance of the Black Cockerel). Difcult normative issues therefore come into play in assessing the role of civil society media. In the case of Rwandan hate radio, it is even questionable whether one would categorize it as qualied to be part of civil society. Sixth, what complicates the civil society analysis is the extent and inuence of this phenomenon in Africa. Sachikonye (1995b) using the classic concept of voluntary organizations notes that civil society is rather sparse among the mass of people on the continent who live in rural areas. Civil society mass media (private and community) is especially scarce there (Ansah, 1991), leading as Kasoma (1995) points out to arguments that the urban independent press can in consequence play only a limited role in democratization. To some extent, such arguments are a red herring (or in African terms, a maize cob found to lack ears of corn beneath its leaves). For a start, we can take account of how both Sachikonye (1995a) and Ronning (1999) complement their conceptualization of the relevance of civil society to democracy with the concept of social movement allowing therefore that voluntary organized formations may well have inuences way beyond their immediate formal constituencies. In similar vein, the media as civil agency of mass communication can have ripples across the whole society. Kupe (1995: 397) asserts that the media has always been peripheral to the lives of most people in Africa. However, this statement may be taken to imply that media has no indirect impact on these peoples lives, and it therefore risks underplaying the extent to which there is a message multiplier effect whereby even rural dwellers obtain mediated access to the urban-based media. Against such a view, the extensive democratic signicance of an urban private press can be seen, for example, in South Africa. There, in the 1990s, investigative journalism into death squads and police funding of the Inkatha Party by two tiny alternative newspapers had a profound impact on the society at large and thus way beyond the direct readers of the publications concerned. While rural populations in Africa usually do not have direct access to urban mass media like private newspapers or community radio broadcasts, there is
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not a Chinese wall between these media and the kinds of media found within rural areas. Traber (1995) identies the latter as stories, popular theatre, informal networks and oramedia (see also Bourgault, 1996; Harbitz, 1996). To this can be added communal singing such as researched by Gecau (1997) in Kenya and Chimombo and Chimombo (1996) in Malawi. These media are integrated into the extensive movement of people, goods and messages between urban and rural Africa. This is not to ignore the differential density of civic organizations, media and social movements between urban and rural areas. It is to say that the concept of civil society (and the media part of it) is not irrelevant to democracy simply because of the rural situation in Africa. Seventh, another difculty with the civil society perspective is the singling out of mediagovernment relations, to the exclusion of how media relates to the rest of civil society. It is the tendency to pit civil society against state, that orientates the focus of journalism (and of analysis) towards government and governmentmedia relations. The effect is that the civil society perspective is weak in analysing the contradictory interests and competing powers within civil society itself. In a rare study, Mansson (1999) found profound mutual scepticism between students, human rights activists and independent newspapers in Zimbabwe. But usually the focus is on how these civil society components relate jointly or separately to the state, rather than to each other. Noticing this phenomenon, Kupe (1999) suggests that the media also keep a watchful eye not only on the state, but also on the private sector and NGOs (and one could add the family). He is correct to highlight such matters, but one needs to be careful in this paradigm to avoid assuming that the media in civil society is an institution free to focus on whom it likes, i.e. that it is an institution without any interests beyond those of doing journalism. While it is often recognized that other civil society groups have interests and agendas, there is also frequently an (instrumentalist) assumption that the media could or should somehow escape this fate. Civil society adherents need to examine real relations between media and the rest of civil society. Much of southern Africas civic media likes to call itself independent, but such autonomy exists at best in relation to government, not to civil society and its component parts. Similar to the blindspot about internal relations in civil society, what the civil society perspective also obscures are signicant distinctions within the nonstate media. As Ronning (1994: 4, 1819) points out, there is major diversity related to foreign and local ownership, indigenous business ventures and donordependent alternative media, and between broadly targeting media compared to that targeting special interests. (See also Ronning, 1997: 212, for a quadripartite breakdown of independent media.) Eighth, there is a potential problem in the civil society vs the state counterposition as regards the oppositional character often ascribed to civic groups and especially the media. Evidence of tensions between players in the two realms (e.g. media and Ministry of Defence), contrary to some civil society expectations, does not necessarily imply a life-and-death contest over which side will occupy the seat of power. Thus there is a strong insistence by many of Africas private media journalists (and this is not just disingenuous) that they are an independent and not an opposition press. Cast in the latter role (often
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by ruling politicians), the implication is that in a grand contest between civil society and the present incumbents of the state the civil society people have as their aim the ousting of current rulers and the instatement of themselves in the corridors of governance. It is indeed an outcome in many cases in Africa, that independently minded journalists have gone on to become senior government gures. Examples are Ugandas former prime minister Kintu Musoke, and Malis president Alpha Oumar Konare among others. However, there are also signicant cases like T he Post in Zambia, and to some extent T he Namibian in Namibia, where journalists have been as critical of the representatives of a democratic movement that assumes power, as they were of the previous regime. In such cases, the basic civil society paradigm does provide for conceptualizing that some private media may remain in civil society (just as some private media may become coopted out of civil society to all intents and purposes). However, the paradigm is often read as media being opposition per se. Ninth, the question arises as to whether a civil society focus ends up conating this social sector with demands for democratic change. Ronning (1999) correctly argues that this is a reductionist approach. One can further note that civil society groups may just as easily come up with opposition to (as distinct from demands for) political changes, and even their very existence may still be a signicant limit on what a government or state can do. Civil society media relates to all these possibilities, not only to democratic change (or resistance to such change). Civil society may even be opposed to politics per se. (This was a lesson that was fatally learnt by South Africas alternative media, which after the democratic elections in 1994 lost most of its readers by continuing to deliver a diet of struggle politics long after the liberation movement had won its political objectives, see Berger, 2001.) In sum, the concept of civil society raises a number of complexities when applied to African media, and cannot therefore be applied willy-nilly without regard for historical conditions in the continent. However, with the necessary qualications and reservations as indicated earlier, the concept has value. At the very least it locates (some) media in the milieu of actors that stand albeit in varying degrees outside the state apparatus. This context has important bearings on the democratic or otherwise role played by non-state media and its (diverse) relations with other civil society forces. This brings us to the separate concept of public sphere. Unlike the civil society paradigm, the public sphere enables us to look at media as a whole, not just non-state media. The relationship between the two approaches will also be explored in the following section.
4. Reconceptualizing the Public Sphere in Relation to Civil Society

Habermass account of the public sphere has been criticized for focusing on individualized (to the neglect of the group) input into political life, for failing to recognize the exclusion of women and for assuming rational discussion and the triumph of reasoned discourse in this realm (see MakOchieng, 1994; Calhoun, 1992; Curran, 1991; Garnham, 1990; Ronning, 1994). However,
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these criticisms have not prevented numerous scholars from salvaging the concept to use in the analysis of the role of media in democracy in a range of contexts. At general level, the public sphere conception is taken by such scholars as designating a realm related to democratic political discourse. The notion of public as in public opinion refers here to a collection of politically signicant shared common interests which collection is seen as impacting ideologically upon the exercise of state power. The word sphere draws from spatial terminology and suggests a discrete or, rather, distinctive realm where public discussion takes place. Less often stressed is a point with particular value for analysing southern African conditions, namely that the notion of the public sphere can be contrasted to that of a governmental sphere and to that of a private sphere. The public sphere is seen to lie between these two other parts of social life (see section 5). Of course, not all politics (democratic or otherwise) takes place through discussion (public or not). It may take coercive or cooptive behavioural forms as well. The public sphere, however, is a concept applicable to voluntary and violence-free political behaviour. For this reason, Habermas argues that the public sphere needs institutional guarantees of a constitutional state on the one hand, and on the other, a political culture in the broader society of a populace accustomed to freedom (Habermas, 1992: 453, quoted in MakOchieng, 1994). This perception helps explain the importance of a democratic constitution and the rule of law as contextual conditions of medias optimum democratic role. A point to consider is Manssons (1999) view that public spheres can be anchored to one power centre but be captured away. In my view, what she is saying is better reected by recognizing that the status and inuence of a single (if heterogeneous) public sphere may uctuate, and that this is related to the balance of dominant voices within it. If government media predominates, and if government propaganda about leaders speeches is primarily what is heard in the public sphere, then this realm is likely to reinforce state power or in some cases to lack credibility to the extent of having very little impact at all. The latter condition prevailed in Apartheid South Africa to some extent, and is what occurred in Zimbabwe during 2000 where the sales of the independent Daily News surpassed those of the government-controlled Herald (see also Mansson, 1999; Bennett, 1998). Having covered key aspects of the public sphere, how does the conception relate to the civil society perspective in writings dealing with African media? Following Dahlgren and Sparks (1991), Traber (1995) locates the public sphere between state and civil society. According to him, civil society cannot ourish unless it has access to the public sphere (singular) or creates its own public spheres (plural). Mansson (1999: 11) connects public sphere to civil society as follows: she sees civil society associations and the private press as forming a vital public sphere shaping the direction of the state. Although the two perspectives are married rather abruptly by such writers, it is possible to draw from their work a useful insight into the way the two approaches can complement each other. In short, a public sphere without civil society participation is likely to be rather sterile. Correspondingly, the relation of civil society to state power lacks an important effectuating mechanism
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without a concept of the public sphere that would direct us to look for precisely this space in our empirical analysis or journalistic practice. This is not to say that civil society only has political inuence through the public sphere there are many other channels such as armed resistance, riots, boycotts, non-cooperation, lobbying, corruption, defence of tradition, even apathy. Rather, it is argued that an index of democracy prioritizes the existence and role of a public sphere in the practice of politics. (It may be noted here that unlike the civil society perspective which in southern African application at least leans towards grassroots participation in politics, the public sphere model tends towards the liberal pluralistic situation where professional politicians, bureaucrats and other elites dominate political discourse and direct the state.) Both civil society and public sphere perspectives share an assumption about the importance of media. As Mansson (1999) points out, many scholars regard the media as the main institution of the contemporary public sphere. However, in this respect, there is probably more openness in the civil society approach to considering a broad concept of media, than there is in the public sphere school. Because the nodal point of state power operates out of urban areas, the public sphere approach would seem to direct attention to media that impacts here. The civil society emphasis, however, may be more attuned to horizontal communication mechanisms that include the rural areas and non-conventional media. What is also relatively lacking in the public sphere approach is sensitivity to the roles of media that are less evidently political, but which nonetheless still have enormous implications (positive and negative) for democracy. An understanding of the relevance of entertainment-oriented media and media content, with all the attendant emotive satisfaction dynamics, does not sit easily with the concept of the public sphere and idea of political discourse even taking into account the critique of Habermass overconcentration on rationality. In African countries with circumscribed politics, this range and this role of media need more scholarly attention. Where the civil society and public sphere approaches overlap in focusing on conventional media and informational content, there are some problematic similarities in outlook. According to MakOchieng (1994: 82), the African media as a public sphere should be free from political and economic constraints and pressures emanating both from the state and from organized and vested economic interests. Ogbondah (1997: 289) evidences a similar voluntarism when he states that the media need to educate themselves on what democracy is, and dene what their role should be. This echoes a trend in the civil society perspective where the media is seen in a simple instrumentalist sense. The commonality is in incorrectly assuming that the institution could and should be exempt from geographical location and class character of journalists (see Ngugi, 1995: 51), free of social ties of owners, bribe-taking journalists, ethnicity, language, advertisers, sources, donor-funders (see Kasoma, 1999), as well as untouched by its own intrinsic agendas (whether related to circulation requirements, dominant conventions of journalese and denitions of news, professional norms, etc.). Also of interest, much as each approach concentrates on vertical relations to state power, they both tend to underplay horizontal power relations whether
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within the public sphere or civil society. These are serious lacunae in regard to analysing medias role. Interestingly, unlike those in the civil society perspective, public sphere proponents are almost intrinsically led to acknowledge that much as they may oppose or contest the state and/ or contemporary rulers, they need the institution to ultimately guarantee their own existence. Where the two approaches further part company is that the public sphere perspective allows for a democratic role to be played by media located outside civil society. Indeed, the public sphere perspective with its emphasis on being a forum for public participation especially lends itself to assessing state-owned media in terms of public service mandates. While the civil society perspective suggests that the solution to government control of broadcasting is deregulation and privatization, the public sphere approach calls for the transformation of government propaganda media into properly public media. This conceptual difference has signicant implications. The economics of purely private media in southern Africa do not create a media infrastructure that serves poor and especially rural audiences, and it is precisely the state as an allocator of resources that can publicly subsidize media according to extra-market criteria. The danger of the civil society and privatization lobby is to lose sight of those large parts of society which the media market does not reach meaning that to the extent media can play a role in African democracy, the majority populations may end up being marginalized. These remarks are not made in ignorance of the dangers of political control that can go with state funding. Nor am I blind to the escalating trend of public media across Africa having to operate along commercial lines and become entirely selfnancing which then begs the pointed neoliberal question as to why such businesses should need to be owned by the state (see Chikunkhuzeni, 1999). For a civil society perspective, the legitimate concern here would be with unfair competition with private media (see the Maputo Declaration, in PALOP, 1999). From a public sphere perspective, the concern is whether commercialism compromises public service obligations. Both developments have worrying implications from a democratic point of view. Nonetheless, it is by using the two perspectives together, that we can be alert to such dangers. Also worth noting is the extent to which government media can be said to be part of a public sphere. A public sphere implies a diversity of voices and to this extent, for instance, a truly impartial public broadcaster can play the role of a forum and itself constitute a mini public sphere. Yet, a broad societal public sphere classically encompasses not just an impartial public broadcaster, but also a highly partisan private media (pro- and anti-government). One could also argue therefore that, as long as the public sphere entails free expression and as long as government voices do not drown out other voices, even government mouthpieces have a place at the table (as is arguably the case in Namibia with the government-owned New Era newspaper, and in Lesotho with the Lentsoe la Basotho newspaper). Although Traber (1995) sees only what he calls autonomous media (presumably publicly or privately owned) as being part of a public sphere, the public sphere conception should in principle allow for governmental media if there is broad public debate. These remarks are relevant to Mansson (1999), who sees two competing public spheres in Zimbabwe that
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of the ruling elite, constituted partly by state media (print and broadcast); and that of the independent press. In my view, this situation is better conceptualized as a single public sphere, involving two different media sectors, and where the preponderant voice has tended to be that of government, regrettably abusing the public media in a highly partisan way. Thus, taken in their totality, and not individually on their own, partisan voices (whether representing government or other interests, and whether state or privately owned), have a place in constituting a pluralistic public sphere. In this regard, both MakOchieng (1994) and Bennett (1998) conate individual operators with the system as a whole when they express concerns about the onesidedness of media players. There is a strong moral and commercial case, of course, for individual journalists to observe public sphere-style journalistic ethics like balance, multi-sourcing and right to reply. There is also a very strong case for a medium to strive to act as a forum in contexts where media pluralism is lacking (as in the situation of state-owned/ resourced broadcasters reaching the media-poor rural areas or where governments seek to be the dominant communicator through deploying public media as their partisan tools). If the public sphere perspective enables us to put a focus on the role of all media, it also enables us to analyse the state in more strategic ways than the civil society oppositional perspective allows. As noted, it draws attention to the transformation of government-controlled media into public media. It further encourages us to pay attention to, and begin to understand the sense in which civil society institutions have successfully utilized a state institution to advance democracy. An example is the securing of rulings by the courts in Zambia, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe to compel governments to allow diverse voices on state media during multi-party elections. Similarly, the pro-democratic effects of the Zambian judiciary in curbing government attempts to close down T he Post can be understood in ways that the civil society perspective struggles to accommodate. Public sphere thinking also points us to the importance of constitutional and legal dispensations as for example outlined by Ogbondah (1997), such as freedom of expression, access to public information and repeal of repressive colonial laws. Also of value in the public sphere perspective is the door it opens to the notion of medias role in creating citizenship. This is not only in the way that it invokes public service journalism to address audiences as (national) citizens rather than simply media consumers. It goes deeper than this. While civil society includes various identities and subjectivities (political, religious, gender, occupation, age) and includes people addressed as a rich diversity of subjects (Mamdani, 1996) the public sphere notion interpellates people as equals sharing a common right to take part in determining public policy and state practice. While the civil society approach suggests (importantly) rights that people have against the state, the public sphere outlook (in a complementary manner) indicates rights to participate in the affairs of the state. It is true that such rights are tied to nationality and nation-states (Mamdani, 1995), and that this poses a huge problem given the extent of refugees and migrants across Africa, not to mention the legacy of colonial borders and minority rights concerns. The matter that arises from this is how to understand the issues around
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extension of democratic rights within countries (to residents who are not nationals). The same question applies between countries (such as in the SA Development Community) and on a continental scale (especially regarding basic human rights). Signicant in all this is the role of media in countering or contributing to xenophobia. What this discussion signals is that the concept of public sphere should be expanded beyond citizenship to cover not just the question of rights, but also the question of the international identity of the actual participants in discourse. Many Africans are excluded from participation in the public sphere for reasons of government policy and practice, or due to factors of class, language, location, etc., while yet others are prevented by nationality and practical xenophobia. Ironically, however, a great deal of input comes from international role players like NGOs and the World Bank. The analysis of the public sphere in African countries therefore needs to take into account not just who is excluded, but who is included, and with what effects. Certainly, Africas media does not exist in a sealed compartment, but includes much inuence on content (with complex democratic signicance) by outside newsmakers, content-suppliers and donor funders. The democratic role of media in Africa is itself substantially affected by the norms of a global public sphere and the dominant assumptions therein (Berger, 2000). A nal comment on the public sphere perspective is that in drawing attention to citizenship, it helps to build a bridge to civil society by highlighting what Azarya (1994) describes as civility. For him, this is a moral code that transcends family and individual morals. As Ibrahim (1995: 138) puts it: Part of the African tragedy is that rened and civil manners which are essential elements of socialization in most traditional societies have been eroded by state terrorism, war, hunger and parochial politics of authoritarian leaders, and people are losing respect for their neighbours. He argues that for civil society to exist, the conduct of members of society towards each other must be characterized by civility. The issue here is the extent to which the public sphere exhibits not necessarily Habermass rationality, but norms that make possible a meaningful discursive practice for participants one which observes as it were, certain protocols, ethics and rules of procedure. This has a clear bearing on journalistic codes of conduct and general behaviour in Africa, not least in regard to the issue of race and ethnic hate speech. To sum up, the two frameworks civil society and public sphere both have to be qualied in many ways if they are to have relevant application to African conditions (not forgetting too, that even southern Africa contains vast diversity within itself as well). The two perspectives once amended can be seen to be complementary, though distinct, approaches. While sharing some overlap, including some problems, they do highlight different aspects of the mediademocracy question in Africa. The next section discusses some of the implications they have for understanding key contemporary questions in southern Africa.
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5. Re- Engineering Theory for Contemporary Media and Democracy Issues

At the risk of oversimplifying the way in which civil society and public sphere frameworks can be synthesized, we can now proceed to some theoretically informed observations about contemporary issues in African mediademocracy matters. A rst observation is the concern that the continent, far from consolidating an African Renaissance, is in danger of backsliding democratically. This is not only in reference to interregional and national wars. It is also evident in strong state action, at least in southern Africa, in the past few years against the media. This is evident in action against T he Post in Zambia (see Djokotoe, 1999), Zimbabwean independent media (and journalists Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto), Swazi media (and Times of Swaziland weekend editor Bheki Makhubu) and various Angolan journalists (see MISA, 1999, 2000). An arsenal of legislation much dating from pre-colonialism and including items like criminal defamation has been kept on by African governments into the 21st century, and used to suppress media criticism. Part of the struggle to get the state to do its democratic duty is to publicize repression and to push for constitutional and legislative reform against this situation. Media workers have been in the forefront of doing exactly this in many African cases. In addition to this classic civil society watchdog role, southern Africas media in particular is likely to continue to play the role indicated by public sphere orientation i.e. trying to use the public character of the judiciary against governments anti-democratic actions. It is true that when challenged by the courts over the illegal detention (and torture) of Chavunduka and Choto by the military in 1999, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe responded not by releasing the journalists but by threatening the justices. Nonetheless, it is clear that the rule of law cannot be so easily violated in this age of civil protests combined with global nancial controls, and even Mugabe eventually had to accede to some semblance of legality during the 2000 elections. And although his regime sabotaged implementation, the Zimbabwean courts proved democratically oriented once more in 2000 when they ordered state media to accept opposition party adverts and later ruled against the governments monopoly of the airwaves. The extent to which southern African journalists (often by sheer professional necessity) champion democratic state practices (such as constitutional reform and the rule of law), is central to transformation to, or deepening of, democracy in the region. This project clearly hangs in part on how they build alliances with civil society, and how they expand the public sphere to (and from) the information-poor. But what is also of democratic signicance is the extent to which the media overcome the traditional divide between political and personal life. In South Africa, the South African National Editors Forum in 1999 embarked on a long-term campaign that went beyond civil society and public sphere paradigms, by intervening in the private sphere and highlighting the epidemic of rape and child abuse within families in that country. By contrast, one disappointing case concerning the penetration of the private sphere occurred in
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the 1999 Swaziland clampdown against editor Bheki Makhubu. He was red by the (private) owners of Times of Swaziland , after running a story and photo headlined The graduate and the drop-out. This was in reference to King Mswati having chosen out of a parade of young women, a person who, unlike one of his university-educated wives, had been expelled from two schools because of a lack of discipline. Makhubus dismissal was followed by his arrest and prosecution for criminal defamation. According to him, he lost his job as much due to political pressure as to what he described as public disapproval of invasion of royal privacy and disrespect to the monarchy. Civil society, it seemed, rejected his journalism, while neither side appears to have been particularly motivated by considerations of democratizing the autocratic kingdom. In his defence, Makhubu claimed that he had raised a matter of public interest and that he was concerned that the kings manner of selecting wives could expose his royal person to HIV-infected partners. For many journalists the issue, initially, had been Makhubus ethics in publicizing personal information about the womans past. It became one of press freedom once his employers and the state acted against him. Yet nowhere, however, did debate go beyond public sphere issues to highlight the private sphere gender aspects of the incident. The context which requires young women to be available for selection at the whim of a polygamous king, and which potentially exposes them to HIV infection, was absent in the media discourse. The private issue of sexuality and gender power has huge democratic implications for southern Africa (as in many other places). The extent to which the regions media helps put the private into the public arena such as impacting the agenda of governments and political decision-makers, and by aiding attitudinal change to stop women being victims of unsafe sex will have an effect on both health and democratization in southern Africa at large. These discussions about medias potential contributions to democracy are not to forget the critique earlier in this article that the media are not freeoating, autonomous social actors. Two points can be made in this connection. First, the most constrained and inexible media in Africa are state media under the control of undemocratic governments. These remain a huge part of the problem, rather than the democratic solution. In places like Malawi and Zambia, such media have failed to maintain their hard-won status as public service media, which was achieved at the time of their countries rst multiparty elections. Much attention among democrats has thus been upon privatization and the issuing of private broadcast licences. But these measures, while making possible some pluralism in the public sphere, do not solve the problem of state media or of serving the mass of commercially unviable audiences. In addition, without public as distinct from governmental mechanisms to allocate frequencies, cronyism rules the day. Thus, private radio (and cellphone operations) in many African countries are in hock to ruling power centres (Article 19 and Index on Censorship, 1995; MISA, 1999, 2000). At the same time, as noted earlier, many state-owned media in southern Africa are also becoming increasingly commercialized without gaining any autonomy from government. Together with government controls over parastatals and indirect inuence over private companies owned by cronies or clients,
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the effect on advertising for the properly private media is disastrous (Ronning, 1999: 4). Government bans on state advertising in critical papers, as in Namibia and Botswana in 2001, compound the problem. Publicly owned media via the state in this depressing picture continue to lie in the government sphere rather than the public sphere, and often some private media too begin to drift into this ambit for the sake of commercial survival. When all power is centralized in this manner, the public sphere can shrink to the point of irrelevance, and democratic politics then becomes severely constrained. The challenge is for journalists both within and without the state media to engage with the power structures in a struggle for proper public service journalism in this sector, and for fair competition between public and private media where conditions preclude public funding of publicly owned media. A second way in which media is not free-oating but can be a problem (rather than part of the solution) for democracy is where commercialization leads to a collapse of journalistic standards. It is true that freedom of expression and information pluralism as ingredients of democracy require the acceptance of trash media along with the quality. In this respect, Malawis sensationalistic newspapers are evidence of a democratic diversity and vibrancy, irrespective of the shoddiness of their journalistic ethics. The concern, however, is whether such publications can begin to discredit the media as a whole and lessen condence in the public sphere as such. At the same time, such concern should not go as far as Francis Kasomas (1997) controversial view that if African governments do clamp down, the independent press will have got what it deserved. That position effectively condones muzzling of civil society. It would also be wrong to go as far as agreeing to government-imposed and/ or government-dominated media councils to regulate the standards of journalists (the extreme consequence of which is regulating who may even enter the profession). In southern Africa, attempts by governments to introduce exactly such controls on the media in the 1990s were successfully resisted while journalists agreed to get their houses in order through voluntary councils comprising media and eminent citizens (Berger, 1998). The question arises as to whether the best compromise is a non-government media council that is nonetheless a statutory body with teeth. There are dangers in the state coercive aspect of this proposal, if assessed from the point of view of voluntary civil society and a pluralistic public sphere. The answer may be to let the public choose from the scandal-sheets, the one-sided partisan rags and the higher quality media offerings. In this perspective, statutory power should not decide; instead there should be civil society regulation of journalistic ethics, combined with a pluralistic media market within the public sphere. There is certainly an enabling (rather than a restricting) role for a strong democratic state in ensuring that there is media choice for citizens, and particularly in helping to ensure pluralistic media provision where the market does not reach. Finally, the civil society and public sphere synthesis discussed in this article has particular bearing on the African media at a time of new media and globalization. As a global medium (even with all its unevennesses and exclusions), the Internet may serve as an uncensored transnational public space (Thornton, n.d.). The extent to which Africans participate in shaping decisions through this
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forum will determine its efcacy as a real space for international democratic dialogue (as opposed to it being only a way for the North to communicate with the North). As noted at the Highway Africa 2000 conference, New Media provide an important avenue for civil society to engage in global advocacy, and to ensure that the concerns of the poor and marginalized are factored into international agreements and accords being reached in the context of globalization (Highway Africa, 2000). Currently a racial white space (see Bouwer, 1998), the global web needs content from Africa if it is to become a richer and more representative global medium. As of November 2000, all African countries were linked to the Internet and by mid-2001, there were scores of African publications online. However, many of these websites were weak, had poor search and archive capabilities, lacked independent journalistic capacity and were dependent entirely on re-purposing content from their print parent. Business models were absent, insecure or in ux. Radio stations online were fewer, and the much vaunted Worldspace satellite radio service (digital delivery of pan-African radio content) had yet to take hold. Nevertheless, despite such hurdles, in countries ranging from Nigeria, to Uganda and Zimbabwe, journalists facing restraints have used the web for organizing themselves, researching stories and publishing content. There are inspiring cases of journalists with no ofces, telephones or computers still being able to function as successful local and international media stringers by utilizing cybercafes (Ball, 1999a). An important development has been the use of email technology by the media to strengthen itself through content exchanges, such as Misanet, and the Southern African Broadcasters Association. Radio programme exchanges via email, and regional feature stories, were growing in Francophone West Africa. The picture as a whole represents at least a signicant start to African media using new technology to expand its reach and roles. Much of the Internet media use and development on the continent has been driven by Africans in the diaspora (Olorunnisola, 2000). For example, Sierra Leones Expotimes.net claims 71,000 registered users around the world, who debate national issues through the websites fora (Anthony, 2001). Expatriate South Africans became involved in the 1999 South African elections on the web (Ball, 1999b). In many cases within Africa, cyberspace is the most vibrant part of the public sphere, in part because its possibility for anonymity makes it the safest. Thus, political debate between citizens on the continent and abroad has raged on the web (see Lupa-Lusaga, 1997; Wakabi, 1999). However, one relatively neglected but critical issue requiring debate is precisely government policy and practice around telecoms and Internet service provision. A stumbling block to further development of new technology in Africa is undoubtedly the inertia, political control, vested interests and lack of capacity of many states to move forward on these decisive matters. A further issue is that of the distribution of and access to new media technology. As the information elites, in southern African countries at least, continue to get wired, the question will arise as whether and how this media will play a part in representing and networking this component of domestic civil societies into a cyber component of the public sphere. This issue is the constitution of such users into what Accone (2000) calls an e-uential elite. These
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decision-makers in government and business, with their power to allocate resources and decide policy, are too important to be left without African content online. Here is certainly an area where liberal pluralism and its elite orientation can contribute to insights about the democratic role of new media in Africa. But what about extended access and participation? Estimates in May 2001 were that only one in every 200 Africans was an Internet user (Jensen, 2001). Thus the gap between a wired African (and male) elite and the masses of Africans, not least rural women, needs to be monitored by the media. An important related aspect of the access issue is also the need for African content on the Internet which can help preserve indigenous languages, knowledge and cultural values (Highway Africa, 2000). In turn, these concerns are linked to whether African journalists nd viable ways to ensure a global two-way ow between information rich and information poor in an extended chain of media reaching from broadband Internet on one end, to civil society rural village meetings at the other. Thus, websites like AllAfrica.com and Africaonline.com at the one extreme, and cybercafes (not to be visualized in the cappucino First World sense) at the other, are vital parts of the picture. As noted at the Highway Africa 2000 conference, in order to maximize the impact of New Media on African societies, efforts should be made to marry the new media with existing media and other forms of communication (Highway Africa, 2000). In this context, there is the question of whether African journalists will use computer-assisted journalism to tap online sources so as to enrich the content carried in old media (radio, etc.) and traditional media; as well as exploit the new technology to ensure a bottom-up ow from these forms of media to cyberspace audiences both domestically and internationally. Unfortunately, as Accone (2000) writes, Even in the most populous and developed Web nations in southern Africa, journalists access to the Internet remains a privilege rather than an accepted norm, both in gathering the news and getting it out to consumers. If democracy in Africa is to be meaningful to the majority of the continents citizens, in a context of the uptake of new media resources for and by the elite, the challenge has only just begun. However, as in South Africa, the massive uptake of cellphones, combined with media provision of audio and SMS (short message service) news services, reects an important new development promising incorporation of broader sectors of civil society into the public sphere. Exploiting syndication, as well as convergence and multi-platform publishing, is another way in which African media may increasingly extend its democratic reach and role (see Parker, 2000).
6. Conclusion
This article has laid out a methodological approach for theorizing media and democracy in Africa, with special caution about utilizing concepts derived from different contexts. It has reviewed the confusing application of public sphere and civil society in some writing on African media, and reworked the two concepts more appropriately as well as acknowledging some of their limits. In addition, it has put forward a synthesis model which brings public sphere and
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civil society into clear relation to each other, to the state, the media and to democracy. At the root of all this is the issue of power relations as they impact on African participation in political decision-making, whether this be through informed choices at elections, the voices contributing to policy formation, or communication that inuences the states implementation programmes and not forgetting the raising of private power issues to a public level. Democracy should not be reduced to serving as a means to development that would be to devalue its own worth. But democracy is not just a political system just for the sake of it: rather, it is about the distribution of decisionmaking power about key resources in society, and about checks, balances and limits on how such power is used in various instances. The public sphere and civil society concepts help us understand the role of media in this. Going further, however, the theorization in Africa also needs to pay attention to internal relationships within civil society, the effect on the public sphere of factors such as class and nationality, the place of the private sphere in the power equation, and globalization and the Internet. The political dimension needs, of course, to be integrated more closely with the economic. Also requiring attention is the complex, but critical, relationship between democracy and development, and the range of historical transition models as analysed and concretized in various empirical case studies (see, for instance, Sandbrook, 1996; Ronning, 1997). It may be that some of the re-engineering in this article is of value to the First World contexts whence the concepts of civil society and public sphere derive. However, what we should be alert to is not just acquiring, reworking or even exporting borrowed concepts. The challenge is also to develop original theory based on African experiences precisely to explain these experiences more accurately and to act on this to advance the cause of democracy on the continent. If researchers elsewhere in the world then considered such theory for amendment and application to their circumstances, that would be a turn of the globalization tables.
Note
This is a revised version of a paper rst prepared for the conference Communication in the 3rd Millennium: Which Way Africa? held at Makarere University, Kampala, October 1999.
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Guy Berger is head of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa. He has a PhD in development studies, and has also worked in newspapers, magazines and television, and as a trainer in mainstream and community media. His research interests are in media, democracy and development in Africa, within the context of globalization and the rise of new media. He is a founding council member of South African National Editors Forum. Address Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa. [email: g.berger@ru.ac.za]

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GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES COPYRIGHT 2002 SAGE PUBLICATIONS LONDON, THOUSAND OAKS &

; NEW DELHI, VOL 64(1): 2145 [0016-5492(200202)64:1;2145;021138]

THEORIZING THE MEDIADEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Guy Berger

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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3. Retheorizing Civil Society

BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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4. Reconceptualizing the Public Sphere in Relation to Civil Society

BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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5. Re- Engineering Theory for Contemporary Media and Democracy Issues

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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BERGER: THE MEDIA-DEMOCRACY RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

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