By Adagbo Onoja
There is a point about the late Raymond Dokpeshi warranting this tribute. Otherwise, his associates and all those who interacted with him closely have said all that ought to be said. The aspect about his contribution to mediatisation of Africa needs to be stressed, with particular reference to one likely outgrowth of that contribution that critical observers can see on the horizon. But we need to begin from the beginning.
The ‘coloniality of modernity’ makes it important to look at many aspects of reality today from the angle of how it affects Africa. This is not what only Africans are doing but everyone else who appreciates the imperative for an inclusive world as a requirement for international peace and security.
It is in this respect that ideologues, practitioners and scholars of global citizenship welcomed the internet as the African moment. The internet, it was strongly believed, would make global citizens of Africans because its own boundaries are more fluid and democratic in terms of what it allows and in relation to bordering. In fact, to a great extent, the internet obliterated many borders – ideological, territorial, racial and so on.
But the internet has equally turned into a site of struggle for power and control. It is not suffering from the coloniality of modernity in the same manner that the traditional media is but it has not transformed Africans into global citizens corresponding to the assumptions of the star gazers, not yet. Africans are still downloading stuff more than they are uploading, meaning that they are consuming other people’s ideas, theories, concepts and practices more than theirs are being consumed. The implication of that is that they will remain the Others of the global normal since reality is interpretive and constructed on the basis of cosmologies. African cosmologies cannot get across if the ideas, theories and practices that should embody them are limited, limited almost to popular culture – music, drama, wise sayings, etc. But, while it is true that Brazil, India and Nigeria, if we must cite examples, have broken into world communication through popular culture, it is still not the case that the gap is closed. There is considerable agreement that the diasporic population of these countries are still the dominant audiences of the popular culture emanating from them even as the gap has been narrowing in recent decades.
Unbeatable Afrocentric signature tune
This is the point where the late Raymond Dokpeshi comes in and which, as mentioned earlier, is just the point warranting this tribute even after all those who interacted with him closely have said all that ought to be said. The argument here is that the point in question needs to be made outside of his political and business circles because of the subject of mediatisation of Africa, the role he has played in it already and the role that his previous role would enable in the near future.
Intervention is not clear if Dokpeshi was aware of the determined statement of that fish to the effect that even as mighty as the ocean, it reduces by the volume of every sip of the ocean it takes. That is exactly what Dokpeshi has done. He could not have been oblivious of the magnitude of the crisis of mediatisation for Africa – the consequences of the ‘preponderance of negativity’ in the coverage of the continent – but which he obviously set out to reduce by each sip of the problem by his media institutionalism. There is no doubt that, being a business man, he must have had a profit motive in pumping resources to setting up the media houses in question. The point, however, is that the media’s control of discourses produce too many outcomes, many of which outrank whatever cultural, financial, geopolitical agenda.
For instance, a decade or so after, AIT was a dominant source of the home information that Nigerian embassy officials updated members of ministerial delegations about home. There were other sources but it is not all sources that reported from the spot or were visual or had the Nigerian flavour. And the flavour factor assumes a dimension that is better appreciated by those who found themselves in distant spaces such as Colombo or South Korea or somewhere in East Europe or Central Asia.
Today, the Nigerian flavour is also available from Arise News, TVC, Trust TV, amongst others. But AIT is still distinctive because the position of pioneer cannot be snatched from it. In other words, should one of these television outlets metamorphose into Africa’s equivalent of Aljazeera, Dokpeshi’s hands can be seen in that. That must be the high point of his life as such would be the African moment. Why should a television station of Aljazeera equivalent be thought of so instead of mega industrial plants?
The answer is: it is one thing to be the extra-ordinarily rich continent of Africa but another thing to be called the ‘heart of darkness’. As long as the metaphor of darkness will set the boundaries by which Africa is related to and treated, it becomes more productive of reality than what any mega industrial plants can. The realisation of this is why some of Africa’s best and brightest – Achebe, Mazrui, Mudimbe, Mbembe, etc – have spent lifetime trying to refute the ‘heart of darkness’ metaphor. So, an African Aljazeera that can throw a counter-metaphor that can repudiate the hegemonic metaphor will bring something beyond but inclusive of thousands of industrial plants. The point then is that anyone such as Dokpeshi who, consciously or otherwise, has a hand in the nucleus of this vital condition of possibility for breaking the African stalemate has made a contribution that deserves solid recognition at his death.
It needs to be pointed out though that metaphors or theories or concepts do not, by themselves, create social outcomes. That process is inter-connected. The dynamics of the interconnection is a matter for another day so that we do not go too far from the subject-matter at hand. Against that background, the only one more point to be stressed is the imperative of the owners of the potential Aljazeeras in Nigeria marching to the National Universities Commission (NUC) to ask it to, please, stop celebrating unbundling of Mass Communications as an achievement in the age of collapse of disciplinary boundaries across the world. It is certainly not an achievement but just another typical suicidal Nigerianism located in obsession with importing models without contextual critique. Too bad!
