[FoME] Democratic Impact of ICT in Africa / Media and National Identity in South Sudanese Media

[Christoph Dietz]

GIGA Institute Hamburg, Zeitschrift "Africa Spectrum", vol 47 (2012),
nr. 1
 
1. Alexandra Dobra: The democratic impact of ICT in Africa, p. 73-88
 
http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/afsp/article/download/521/519 
 
This paper takes a critical look at the view that the Internet can
serve as a laboratory of political experimentation for reconfiguring the
repertories of political actions. The overall discourses on information
and communications technology (ICT) are too often focused on technology
and infrastructure, when the question of its use should be central. In
order to comprehend how ICT can serve as a democratic enhancer, this
paper critically examines the African anthropology of the state and of
the public sphere. It captures the African endogenous productions of
political modernity and the subsequent way ICT is appropriated and
indigenized by African local instances. African states and civil
societies do not fit into prescriptive Western paradigms. In order to
encourage the effective use of new technologies, this paper has
developed the so-called “African model of ICT practice”, which
proposes a set of hypotheses that aim to enable the effective usage and
integration of ICT within the democratic process in the context of an
African self-defined political reality. (source: abstract)
 
2. Ole Frahm: Defining the nation - national identity in South Sudanese
media discourse, p. 21-49
 
http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/afsp/article/viewFile/519/517 
 
This article examines debates about national identity in the media
landscape of post-referendum and post-independence South Sudan. Having
never existed as a sovereign state and with its citizens being a
minority group in Sudan, collective action among South Sudanese has
historically been shaped in response to external pressures: in
particular, the aggressive nationbuilding pursued by successive Khartoum
governments that sought to Arabize and Islamize the South. Today, in the
absence of a clear-cut enemy, it is a major challenge for South Sudan to
devise a common identity that unites the putative nation beyond
competing loyalties to ethnicity, tribe and family. Analysing opinion
pieces from South Sudanese online media and placing them in the context
of contemporary African nationalism, this article gives an initial
overview of the issues that dominate the public debate on national
identity: fear of tribalism and regionalism, commemoration of the
liberation struggle, language politics, and the role of Christianity.
(source: abstract)

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Christoph Dietz
CAMECO
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christoph.dietz at cameco.org 
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