AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	69. The World Social Forum in Nairobi : exploring the making of African causes.
Paper ID	160
Author(s)	Brisset-Foucault, Florence
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	The paper is based on biographies of African media activists and journalists who participated in the WSF in Nairobi. It is trying to give an analysis of the making of the media cause in Africa : how do local grammars, struggles and dynamics interact with the internationalisation of militant profiles, the universalised grammars and practices promoted by international or northern organisations? How does the integration in an international network (via schools, donors, personal history and contacts etc.) influence the grammar and the deontology that are used and promoted by militants in local African contexts ? How do they use these symbolical and material resources they get in these international networks in their local struggles ? During the WSF, very different kind of media organisations are going to be represented, defending and criticising different actors, sometimes fighting each other in the North (typically : anti-globalisation media critics fighting against situations of media oligarchy versus NGOs defending freedom of the press including capitalistic newspapers and radios : what will be the conflict lines between media organisations in Africa during the WSF ?) Media criticism is central in the anti-globalisation movement, and organisations like Indymedia and Panos are going to be very active in organising activities and looking for more contacts all around Africa. Criticising the media or building alternative press and radios, media activists draw limits between what is considered as useful, good journalism on the one hand and a capitalistic or commercial way of using the media on the other. NGOs also develop languages and norms, urging African journalists to act according to certain values. These different models claim to draw universal media rules. What are the values carried by these organisations and how do they characterise African “specificities” ? How are they received in Africa by journalists and media workers? Who is chosen by whom as a partner ? Why ? How ? We will try to show how African journalists and media activists adopt one language or another, how they reject, combine them, drawing or blurring certain lines on who to protect and who to fight (on what is a good media and what is a bad one etc.), and how they use the relationships they have with international organisations, in their local struggles, in their carriers, and in local definitions of media deontology. We will observe the encounter between local expressions of critics and globalised, universalised grammars. What are the expression and the history of media criticism in Africa? How are these expressions considered by international actors of media criticism? In this paper, we draw the first lines of what is aimed to become a map of the political and moral values crossing the journalistic sphere in Africa. We chose four examples that seem fruitful to expose and analyse these phenomena: Media Council of Kenya ; Indymedia Africa ; Panos Institute for Western Africa ; NAFEO (Network Africa for Freedom of Expression). We will analyse how the African activists in these organisations entered them, why, compare their trajectories and discourses and see how this international involvement influenced their carriers and local struggles.

The media cause in Africa. Journalism deontology in the World Social Forum