Abstract:
This chapter discusses how the African intellectual faces a hostile media environment because media are largely foreign owned or dependent on foreign sources and programming. Media are also involved in a new form of indirect rule – postmodern colonialism – in which the local media try to give the impression of being independent, while all the time getting guidance from Paris, London, Brussels or New York and Washington. Media shape the political and economic agenda, and they define the perceptions of African intellectuals as a community. Instead of fostering free thought, they have become part of a political machine that controls thought, thus frustrating any challenges not only to local political potentates, but also to their external manipulators.
