COSF 184

Mass media played a role as a revolutionary tool for political education and mobilization as well as countering colonial propaganda.

Because mass media serves positive functions by informing, education, mobilizing, and motivating the people for national development; learning the relationship between mass media and politics from colonial structure.

When African countries became independent, they inherited the situation where there was a creation of market in Africa for European export without developing any sort of industrial base, so they had to industrialize without necessary infrastructures. Also, they had to overcome the way they participate in global markets as source of raw materials and cheap labors.

They had to modernize societies, build national identities, political integrations, national economics, and services for people.

Mass media could play a role for priming people to modernize. Also, it promoted mass mobilization for development such as promoting government policy, working toward national cohesion and integration, and popularizing government leaders.

They wanted to use media as an ideological tool; they knew how they used mass media to build the movements to overthrow colonialism, so they were concerned about the possibility of other people using mass media to overthrow them.

Mass media is the enterprise of colonialism; you can see continuities from colonial period to present day; even after independence, the countries inherited something from the colonial period; there are the impacts that different colonial policies have on the media.

shapes information and transmission in Africa; has a legacy for how subsequent technologies develop such as print media; the media we are talking about (print, radio, television) are coming in this different context; Ziegler and Asante say oral tradition is still relevant in Africa today; print forms did not replace oral forms, and they just fit into a broader sphere of passing information around

a community, constructivism approach for the group of people who see themselves belonging together, having something in common such as goals, histories; you can have a nation that extends the boundaries of the states you call nation-state, which tends to develop in modern Europe such as France and Britain; but in Africa, the situation is different since the states boundaries were drawn on the map by colonial powers, and they do not necessarily correspond to what you may think as nationalist groups such as people speak the same language or people have the same ethnic background; one example is Somali people because you can find them in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya

there was an effort to create a common feeling of nation among people who are bounded by the colony, the border of the colony in order to bring them together to force against colonial powers, that was what Kwame and Nnamdi tried to do; to create a sense of national identity among people speaking different languages, having different ways of life, who just happened to be forced together

1990's onward movements to promote liberal democracy in Africa through things like constitutional reforms, multiparty elections

increasing debt burden of African countries come to a point that during the 1970's to 1980's debt was much more than the countries' gross demotic products, governments' revenues; debt burden was so great that international organizations had to come up with programs to reduce debt of African countries

president of Ghana, arrested by british colonial authorities, non-aligned movement, pan-africanism

believed in the necessity of a politically and economically unified Africa, promoted african socialism

included people's point of view, president of nigeria

• imagined, limited, sovereign, communities
• *mass media enable nations to come into being; nationalism initially emerged with the development of "print capitalism"