
© Council for the
Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2012
(ISSN 0850-3907)
Interrogating
Public Sphere and Popular
Culture as
Theoretical Concepts on their Value in African Studies
Wendy Willems*
Abstract
Concepts
such as civil society and public sphere have been frequently used both as
analytical tools and as normative concepts deemed essential to a
wellfunctioning liberal democracy. Because of its theoretical roots in Western
liberal thinking, scholars in African studies such as Comaroffs, Mamdani and
Ekeh have vigorously debated the extent to which the concept of civil society
is useful in explaining and interrogating developments in Africa. However, the
concept of the public sphere has been subjected to less rigorous debate in the
field of African studies. In media studies and political science, however, a
number of scholars have problematised the normative connotations and idealistic
assumptions of the Habermasian public sphere. This article argues that both the
debate on civil society in African studies and the debate on public sphere in
media studies and political science could inform a more critical discussion on
the relevance of the concept of public sphere in African contexts. Secondly,
the article contends that the concept of popular culture addresses some of the
concerns brought up by critics of the concept of public sphere. It argues that
popular culture is the public sphere of ordinary Africans, but we must be
careful about how we define popular culture itself.
Résumé
Les concepts
tels que société civile et espace public ont souvent été utilisés comme des
outils d’analyse, mais aussi comme des concepts jugés essentiels pour une bonne
démocratie libérale. Du fait que ses origines théoriques se retrouvent dans la
pensée libérale des Occidentaux, des intellectuels africains

*
Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South
Africa. E-mail: wendy.willems@wits.ac.za
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tels que
Comaroffs, Mamdani et Ekeh ont vigoureusement débattu l’utilité du concept de
société civile dans l’explication et l’analyse de ce qui se passe en Afrique.
Seulement, le concept de l’espace public n’a pas été soumis à autant de débats
dans le domaine des études africaines. Pourtant, au niveau des études des
médias et de la science politique, plusieurs chercheurs ont étudié la
problématique des connotations normatives et des conceptions idéalistes de
l’espace public habermasien. Ce qui est d’un apport considérable dans la
discussion critique sur la pertinence du concept de l’espace public dans le
contexte africain. Aussi, l’article soutient que le concept de culture
populaire est l’espace public du commun des africains. Cependant, on doit faire
attention à la manière dont on définit la culture populaire.
Introduction
The genealogy of the concepts of civil
society and public sphere are inextricably linked. Both constitute fundamental
building blocks of liberaldemocratic political theory. While there has been a
lively debate on the relevance of the concept of civil society in African
studies, the concept of public sphere has been subject to less rigorous
discussion and debate. It has often been deployed in a rather loose manner and
has frequently been used interchangeably with the concept of civil society.
This article starts by providing a brief outline of debates on civil society in
African studies and critiques in media studies and political science of the
Habermasian public sphere. It argues that both debates could inform a more
rigorous discussion of the concept of the public sphere in African studies.
Secondly, the article seeks to demonstrate the value of the concept of popular
culture in contributing towards a fuller and richer understanding of public
spheres in Africa.
Civil Society as Policy Recommendation
The concept of civil society gained
popularity in the early 1990s in the wake of the so-called ‘third wave of
democratisation’ which comprised a gradual disappearance of autocratic
one-party and military governments and the introduction of multi-party regimes
in Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. The rising popularity of the concept of
‘civil society’ in both policy and academic accounts on Africa should be
understood against the background of the end of the Cold War and the declining
legitimacy of communism as ideology (Abrahamsen 2000). Whilst previously a
strong state was considered to be crucial for economic growth, the Washington
consensus that emerged in the 1980s prescribed a reduction of the state and an
increasing role for civil society. Civil society then primarily emerged as
policy prescription in order to improve the performance of African states
(Lewis 2001). While the state was perceived as bad, civil society was
considered to be inherently good.
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The concept of civil society features prominently in
the discourse on ‘good governance’ which has been a major policy priority of
Western donors. Donors have sought to promote more effective states through
support of civil society organisations which are expected to watch over state
performance. For example, in 2007, the British Department of International
Development (DfID) launched a £100 million Governance and Transparency Fund
which was designed to ‘help citizens hold their governments to account, through
strengthening the wide range of groups that can empower and support them’.1
With concepts such as ‘civil society’, ‘democracy’
and ‘good governance’ at present dominating the development debate on Africa,
it is easy to take these ideas for granted and to conclude that these have
always been regarded as intrinsically good values. However, while at present
there appears to be a consensus that liberal democracy is required for
development, until the early 1990s, it was commonplace to argue that
development could only be obtained in the absence of democratisation
(Abrahamsen 2000). In order to accelerate economic growth, it was deemed
necessary to temporarily suspend democratic freedoms. But with the growing
hegemony of neoliberal ideas since the 1980s, liberalisation of the economy and
a retreat of the state have been advocated as measures required in order to
speed up economic growth. Until the post-Washington consensus of the mid-1990s,
the state had been presented as inherently bad for development and an increased
role for civil society organisations was often proposed as a solution that
would improve state performance.
In the post-Cold War context, civil society thus
increasingly began to emerge as programmatic ideal or policy prescription, not
only in grey literature but also in academic analyses. It was seen as both a
counterweight to a ‘bad state’ and a replacement for a ‘reduced state’. For
example, Harbeson (1994:1-2, quoted in Lewis 2001:5) argued that ‘civil society
is a hitherto missing key to sustained political reform, legitimate states and
governments, improved governance, viable state-society and state-economy
relationships, and prevention of the kind of political decay that undermined
new African governments a generation ago’. The emphasis here is on ‘missing
key’ which suggests that Africa does not have a ‘civil society’, and that it,
therefore needs to be ‘established’. This is echoed in development policy
reports such as the guidelines of DfID’s Civil Society Challenge Fund which
state that ‘[m]ost Civil Society Challenge Fund projects involve a partnership
based around the applicant helping ‘to build the capacity’ of the southern
partner to empower the poor’.2
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The strengthening of civil society was conceptualised
as a means towards poverty reduction and good governance. Civil society was
considered as intrinsically ‘good’ and as a ‘power-free’ zone which,
nevertheless, has the capability to hold the state to account. However, this
approach assumes that power is concentrated in the state and that by increasing
the power of civil society, a more accountable government is created. This
simplistic conceptualisation of power is very similar to what Foucault
(1980:122) summed up as to ‘cut off the king’s head’, i.e. the idea that just
by cutting the King’s head off, one is able to solve the problem of too much
power vested in the state. However, this ignores the actual workings of power
and the way in which power tends to be dissipated in networks of relations.
Foucault objected to the idea of power as a system of total domination. He
understood power not as emanating from a certain point but as dispersed through
a network of relationships. Hence, civil society can then not be seen as a zone
where there are no conflicts of interests. Like the state, civil society is
subject to a range of contestations and power struggles. Because of this
entanglement in relations of power, it cannot be assumed that a strengthening
of civil society automatically will result in a more democratic state. While
the state cannot be conceptualised as a priori bad, the aims and objectives of
civil society should be evaluated critically in order to assess their potential
contribution to a more benevolent state.
The Debate on Civil Society in African Studies
The recurrent
deployment of civil society as policy prescription for Africa in the 1990s in
both policy and academic discourse provoked a response from scholars in African
Studies. They argued that the prescription that Africa should ‘build’ its civil
society assumed that Africa did not have a ‘civil society’. The dominant
normative discourse profoundly masked the historical legacy of civil society
organisations on the continent and also excluded African organisations which
did not neatly fit with assumptions made about civil society because these
organisations were not defined in opposition to the state but organised along
the lines of kinship, ethnicity or local ‘tradition’. Mahmood Mamdani, for
example, has criticised the practice of carrying out ‘history by analogy’, i.e.
to assume that ‘civil society exists as a fully formed construct in Africa as in
Europe, and that the driving force of democratisation everywhere is the
contention between civil society and the state’ (1996:13). Mamdani is concerned
about the way in which the concept of civil society has been deployed as
normative concept, i.e. where it is expected to operate as a counterforce to
the state.
Instead of using civil society as a
programmatic and prescriptive tool,
Mamdani proposes to deploy the
concept as an analytical and
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historical tool. In this regard, he has
advocated for ‘an analysis of actually existing civil society so as to
understand it in its actual formation, rather than as a promised agenda for
change’ (1996:19). In his book Citizen
and subject, Mamdani (1996) describes what he calls the ‘bifurcated state’
in Africa which he considers to be a result of settler colonialism. Settler
colonialism entailed the creation of a category of citizens who enjoyed full
civil, political and economic rights, and the creation of a category of
subjects who were denied these fundamental rights. Settlers were given citizen
status and had access to the cities while natives were subjected to customary
rule and were contained in rural ‘reserves’. Mamdani argues that civil society
should be seen as primarily the creation of the colonial state. As Mamdani has
pointed out, civil society was profoundly racialised and ‘[t]he rights of free
association and free publicity, and eventually of political representation,
were the rights of citizens under direct rule, not of subjects indirectly ruled
by a customarily organised tribal authority’ (1996:19). This is what Mamdani
calls the first historical moment in the development of civil society in
Africa. The second moment is the moment of the anti-colonial struggle. Mamdani
sees this period as profoundly a struggle of the ‘native’ strata, the subjects,
to gain entry into civil society. That entry, that expansion of civil society
was the result of an anti-state struggle, and the consequence was the creation
of an indigenous civil society. Mamdani, therefore, does not consider the
emergence of civil society in Africa as a recent phenomenon that took off in
the 1990s, but treats anti-colonial liberation movements as perfect examples of
African civil society organisations (which later often established themselves
as post-independent African governments).
In their edited volume Civil
Society and the Political Imagination, anthropologists John and Jean
Comaroff (1999) also deem it necessary to move away from the Eurocentric
tendency to limit civil society to a narrowly defined institutional arena. They
advocate for the acknowledgement of African forms of association, often perceived
as ‘uncool’, ‘partisan’, ‘parochial’ or ‘fundamentalist’ in donor policy
discourses. Instead of asking what the idea of civil society can tell us about
contemporary Africa, they propose to ask what a specific set of African cases
can ‘tell us about the planetary appeal of the idea of civil society’ (Comaroff
and Comaroff 1999:3). Given the historical roots of the concept of civil
society in European eighteenth century thinking, the Comaroffs ask: what were
the circumstances under which the idea of civil society gained prominence in
the European context, and what could civil society mean in the African context?
Like Mamdani, they propose to look at ‘actually existing civil society’ instead
of transposing a prescriptive concept of civil society onto the continent.
16
Similarly, Wachira Maina (1998:137) has argued for
the need to open up the concept of civil society in order to reveal the broader
spectrum of associational life:
A shift in perspective from
a preoccupation with organisations and institutions to an activity view of
civil society. Those who focus on organisational forms and institutions do
great injustice to civil society in Africa. Much of that is both interesting
and transformative in the continent occurs outside or at the periphery of
formal organisational life. Spontaneous protests, laxity and lack of discipline
and active non-cooperation with the State are important civil activities […].
Spontaneous, non-confrontational methods […] are safer ways of registering
one’s disagreement with the government than more robust public activities such
as protest marches, placard-waving and burning effigies.
By broadening the definition of
civil society, issues not captured in conventional theories on civil society
suddenly become visible. While civil society as policy prescription merely
seeks to highlight the absence of civil society in Africa in order to justify intervention
from Western donors who have a vested interest in a weakened state and a
stronger civil society dependent on donor funds, deployment of the concept of
civil society as explanatory concept assists in revealing a complex, vibrant,
diverse and historicised picture of associational life on the African
continent.
The Public Sphere in the Habermasian Sense
While the concept of civil society
has often been considered as a policy prescription, a similar tendency can be
discerned in writings on the public sphere in Africa. Of course, both are
treated as fundamental building blocks of liberal-democratic political theory
and considered as essential to a wellfunctioning liberal democracy. The term
‘public sphere’ is mostly associated with the German sociologist Jurgen
Habermas who used the term in his book The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society which was published in 1962 in German but translated into
English in 1989 and has since then become very influential.
In this book, Habermas argues that the emergence of
capitalism in European feudal societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries enabled a new sphere or space for the exchange of ideas through
rational communication. In the feudal era, public communication was always
constrained by the power of the two most powerful feudal institutions: the
church and the state. Both exercised a very considerable degree of control over
the circulation of ideas and information. However, with the expansion of
capitalist markets and production relations, a new space emerged between the
church and the state which opposed the absolutist monarchical regime.
17
Habermas argued that this space ‘may
be conceived as a sphere where private people come together as public and
discuss matters of common concern’ (1989:27). In the public sphere, individuals
were expected to put aside their private interests and to deliberate about the
collective good. Habermas argues that the emergence of such a level of
collective discussion was unprecedented in history, and was sustained by the
emergence of a network of theatres, coffee shops, newspapers, journals and
debating societies.
Habermas considers the public sphere as a normative
concept and as a precondition for ‘true’ democracy, just like civil society has
been considered as a crucial counterweight to the state. For Habermas, public
deliberation is essential in order to ensure that public policy decisions are
made in an informed and enlightened manner. He considers the public sphere as a
space where public opinion is shaped. Politicians then take their decisions on
the basis of democratic debates in the public sphere. The function of the
public sphere is to mediate between civil society and the state and it provides
a space for rational debate that ultimately will give rise to a consensus on
public affairs. Media act as conduits in this regard; they constitute a
discursive space, a space in which issues of public concern are deliberated.
Audiences are seen as citizens engaged in public dialogue in and through the
media. Media are considered as important in carrying information that enables
citizens to make informed political choices. Having access to information on,
for example, the positions of different political parties is taken as ‘the
precondition for political knowledge and action, and the creation of
citizenship’ (Bignell 2000:155).
In his book, Habermas presents the concept of public
sphere as a profoundly normative concept. For example, he describes a
historical transformation from the ‘good’ eighteenth century public sphere to a
decline in what he considers a ‘worsening’ public sphere in the nineteenth
century. Habermas argues that in the nineteenth century communication and the
exchange of ideas increasingly became dependent upon a new group of sponsors
and patrons and upon new structures of authority which pose an increasing
threat to the rationality of debate and the universalistic criteria by which
arguments should be evaluated. For Habermas, the capitalist system gradually
coming into place in the nineteenth century replaces monarchs, church and
feudal lords with advertising, public relations and commercial sponsorship of
mass communication. In this transformation, the distinction between rational
communication and the public representation of private interests becomes
increasingly blurred. As capitalism progressively refeudalises the public
sphere, the selection and representation of information placed in the public
domain is undertaken according to commercial or political interests rather than
based on ‘pure’ reason and rationality. In this regard,
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the demise of public service
broadcasting and the commercialisation and tabloidisation of media is often
brought up as an example of the declining public sphere and the ‘dumbing down’
of public debate.
Habermas’ account of the public sphere has been
criticised for a number of reasons by media scholars and political scientists.
First of all, critics have argued that the Habermasian public sphere was
essentially a bourgeois space and was not as easily accessible as was implied
in his book. For example, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1972) have argued
that the public sphere is not the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie, but
they distinguish elite and proletarian public spheres which exist
simultaneously along class lines. Both spheres are formed by different and
often competing constituencies and are not usually recognised as legitimate
public spheres. As examples, they include phenomena such as labour strikes and
football matches which operate outside the usual parameters of institutional
legitimation, and constitute different arenas of self-expression by groups
excluded from formal arenas of public discourse. Similarly, Todd Gitlin (1998)
highlights a trend towards a segmented public sphere split into public
sphericules which further undermines Habermas’ idea of a unitary public sphere.
Nancy Fraser (1992) also argues against the desirability of a unitary public
sphere as normative ideal. She accuses Habermas of idealising his liberal
public sphere and of failing to examine non-liberal, non-bourgeois and
competing public spheres. Fraser particularly highlights the way in which women
were excluded from Habermas’ liberal public sphere.
Another point of contention in Habermas’ theory is
his focus on rationalcritical debate which arguably is based on an elitist
conception of liberal democracy that precludes a more radical conceptualisation
of democracy as dissensus and conflict (Mouffe 2000). Habermas’ understanding
of democracy merely favours an elite minority and has not resulted into a true
‘democratisation’ of power relations. For example, Laclau and Mouffe have
argued that ‘the problem with "actually existing" liberal democracies
is not with their constitutive values crystallised in the principles of liberty
and equality for all, but with the system of power which redefines and limits
the operation of those values. This is why our project of ‘radical and plural
democracy’ was conceived as a new stage in the deepening of the
"democratic revolution", as the extension of the democratic struggles
for equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations’ (1985:xv). These
scholars thus advocate for a more substantive definition of democracy which
goes beyond merely the regular conduct of free and fair elections, a
multi-party system and respect for human rights. Scholars such as Dahlberg and
Siapera (2007) have used Laclau and Mouffe’s normative concept of ‘radical
democracy’ to assess the democratising potential of the Internet.
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Habermas’ idea of rational debate as a power-free
zone should thus be understood as a profoundly ideological construct. It
presumes that particularly those with access to education and those with
property can participate in a rational debate, thereby excluding those without
education and property. In his account of the public sphere, Habermas assumes
the possibility of a consensual world in which there is a shared, mutual
understanding of the conventions of debate and a shared interest in the outcome
of political and moral debates. The Habermasian public sphere is characterised
by rational communication that is undistorted by interests or power structures.
This is in strong contrast to, for example, Foucault who questioned whether it
even makes sense to speak of the possibility of ‘rational communication’, given
that power relations permeate all of human relations. Foucault would firmly
reject the possibility of a power-free zone of communication. Habermas does not
deal with the exclusion that is involved in the designation of a ‘particular’ form of communication as
the rational and democratically legitimate norm.
Foucault would be more interested in investigating
under what conditions knowledge is considered as true and under what conditions
a public sphere is considered to be rational. For him, truth is something that
is contingent and constantly changing while Habermas retains a firm belief in
the enlightenment project, in a single truth which he would define as the
outcome of rational public deliberations. For Foucault, rationality and power
are not two opposing categories, in the sense that one situation is
characterised by power and the next step is to move towards consensus and
rationality. Foucault does not deem it possible to conceive of a public sphere
as a space which is free from power relations under the right circumstances.
However, for Habermas, the absence of market pressures under capitalism – which
according to him resulted in the decline of the public sphere in the nineteenth
century – could lead to a ‘better’ public sphere. Foucault, on the other hand,
considers power relations to be always prevalent, and he prefers to see the
public sphere as a site of political struggle and conflict rather than as a
consensual space.
Like the concept of civil society, the Habermasian
notion of ‘public sphere’ should thus be understood as primarily a normative
concept. Although many African(ist) scholars have critiqued the concept of
civil society, the concept of public sphere has predominantly been criticised from
the fields of media studies and political science. Points of contention have
been: the bourgeois character of the Habermasian public sphere, his assumption
of a unitary public sphere and Habermas’ neglect of power relations within the
public sphere.
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The Debate on the Public Sphere in African
Studies
While there has been a vigorous
debate on the notion of civil society in African studies and a lively exchange
on the public sphere in media studies and political science, there has been
less explicit theorising on the concept of the public sphere in African
Studies. Peter Ekeh’s seminal 1975 article entitled ‘Colonialism and the Two
Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement’ probably springs to mind most
immediately. In this article, Ekeh (1975:111) argues that the Western
experience of a unified public sphere, which the state and civil society both
occupy, is not reflective of African social spaces:
[I]f we are to capture the
spirit of African politics we must seek what is unique in them. I am persuaded
that the colonial experience provides that uniqueness. Our post-colonial
present has been fashioned by our colonial past. It is that colonial past that
has defined for us the spheres of morality that have come to dominate our
politics.
Crucial to this colonial inheritance
is Ekeh’s distinction between two publics: the primordial and the civic public.
Ekeh argues that the post-colonial African state has not been successful in its
hegemonic drive, so that the political space it occupies is by no means the only
public space that exists in Africa. For Ekeh, the sphere of what he calls the
primordial public ‘occupies vast tracts of the political spaces that are
relevant for the welfare of the individual, sometimes limiting and breaching
the state’s efforts to extend its claims beyond the civic public sphere’
(1975:107). Ethnicity offers a shared identity in Ekeh’s primordial public. He
provides voluntary ethnic-based associations as example of primordial publics.
However, even though Ekeh uses the term ‘public’, one
could argue it actually refers to the notion of civil society. Subsequent
scholars have also primarily adopted Ekeh’s concept in this way. For example,
Eghosa Osaghae (2006) has used Ekeh’s ideas to argue that Western scholars in
their conceptualisation of civil society have only focused on those
organisations that had the capacity to challenge the state, and hereby they
have excluded ‘rural and kinship, ethnic associations’ from their analysis,
which for Ekeh would belong to the ‘primordial public’. In this way, as Osaghae
argues, they have made it appear that Africa does not have a civil society.
Because of their particular definition of civil society, they have not fully
appreciated associational life in Africa.
As Calhoun (1993) has argued, it is common for
scholars to use the concepts of civil society and public sphere
interchangeably. However, as he outlines, the concepts have very different
connotations. For Calhoun, the public sphere refers to a discursive space of
public deliberation whereas civil society implies some form of political
organisation. Furthermore, civil
21
society is defined by virtue of being
a realm outside the state (often in opposition to the state although this has
been fiercely contested in African Studies). The notion of the public sphere,
on the other hand, is defined in opposition to a private sphere, i.e. the
domain of the home or the space where private interests dominate. Hence, the
public sphere partly overlaps with the state and civil society; it is a sphere
where both the state and civil society articulate their interests.
While Ekeh’s work may not explicitly engage with the
definition of public sphere as an arena of public debate, his acknowledgement
of the bifurcated nature of publics in Africa is useful. As stated above,
Fraser, Gitlin and Negt & Kluge have all criticised the unitary nature of
the Habermasian public sphere. Ekeh similarly argues that colonialism resulted
into two fundamentally separate publics: the primordial and civil public. If
for example, we look at the way in which media in Africa constituted publics
during colonialism, these could be referred to as civic publics which mainly
targeted settler audiences. Africans were fundamentally excluded from these
publics, and hence forced to establish their own spaces in what Ekeh refers to
as the primordial public. A focus on a unitary public sphere such as Habermas
recommends then prevents us from appreciating alternative publics that emerged,
for instance, both during Rhodesia’s settler regime and in postindependent
Zimbabwe. It is, therefore, more useful to speak of publics in the plural sense
than to construct a single public as it will bring to light the different
publics which contest each other.
Apart from Ekeh’s work, scholars working on popular
culture have also – albeit implicitly – addressed the issue of publics in
Africa (Ellis 1989; James and Kaarsholm 2000; Schulz 1999, 2002; Spitulnik
2002). An advantage of conceptualising sites of popular culture as publics is
that it avoids Habermas’ elitist connotation of his concept of the public
sphere. Popular culture often engages, interacts and responds to official
debates. The concept is frequently defined in terms of its opposition to power,
as is apparent from Stuart Hall’s definition: ‘The people versus the
power-bloc: this, rather than "class-against-class", is the central
line of contradiction around which the terrain of culture is polarised. Popular
culture, especially, is organised around this contradiction: the popular forces
versus the powerbloc’ (1981:238). Hall derives his definition from Antonio
Gramsci who considers popular culture as the arena where hegemony is contested.
In this regard, popular culture can be seen as a
public space where ordinary Africans are able to debate issues and bring up
matters of concern. Karen Barber (1987:2) has argued that the most important
attribute of popular culture in Africa is its power to communicate because ‘for
the majority of Africans, the arts are the only channel of public communication
at their
22
disposal’. And as Barber (1987:3)
points out, this is especially so in a climate where the ruling elite dominate
public space:
In Africa, ordinary people
tend to be invisible and inaudible. In most African states, numerically tiny
elites not only consume a vastly disproportionate share of the national wealth,
they also take up all the light. Newspapers, radio and television offer a
magnified image of the class that controls them. Not only does the ruling elite
make the news, it is the news – as endless verbatim reports of politicians’
speeches, accounts of elite weddings and birthday parties, and the pages and
pages of expensive obituaries testify.
Hence, the importance of songs, jokes
and drama as important channels of communication for people who are not being
granted access to official media. Barber sees popular culture as a space that
is dominated by ‘a pervasive sense of "us" and "them", even
though the boundaries between these categories may be highly porous and
shifting’ (1997:4). However, this is not to suggest that popular culture is
necessarily class-based. It is not per se related to a particular stratum of
society. Barber considers the ‘popular’ more as a field of exploration rather
than as a stable identity. Popular culture is defined in its opposition to
‘them’, often political elites.
A central problem with studies of popular culture,
however, is that these sometimes end up naively celebrating agency. As Lila
Abu-Lughod has argued, they begin to read ‘all forms of resistance as signs of
the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of
the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated’ (1990:41). But, as she argues,
‘[b]y reading resistance in this way, we collapse distinctions between forms of
resistance and foreclose certain questions about the workings of power’
(Abu-Lughod 1990:42). In many ways, the study of popular culture and resistance
should be seen as a response to the privileging of elite culture as worthy of
studying and the ignorance of working class culture. Also, it was a response to
Marxism which considered popular culture as escapist and as a repository of
false consciousness. Cultural studies opposed these ideas and argued that
popular culture was something worth studying and could even form the basis for
social change. But to some extent, this point has now been made: the study of
popular culture has been placed firmly on the agenda and cultural studies has
almost become institutionalised as Johannes Fabian (1998:139) points out in his
book on popular culture in Africa:
As I look back on this
project […] I conclude it is, or should be, both. It is a manifesto in that the
conclusion can only be a plea for more attention to and better understanding of
elements that, so far, seem to have been revealed mainly with the help of the
concept of popular culture. It is an epitaph in that popular culture studies in
Africa should probably be thought of as 23
belonging to those
self-liquidating disciplines, the need for which disappears to the extent that
they are successful in accomplishing their work.
Similarly, Mbembe is concerned about
what he calls ‘the rediscovery of the subaltern subject and the stress of
his/her inventiveness’ which has ‘taken the form of an endless invocation of
the notions of "hegemony", "moral economy", "agency"
and "resistance’" (2001:5). Mbembe has also been critical of the
hydraulic models of domination and resistance that have long dominated
historiographies within African Studies. Instead, he proposes a deconstruction
of these oppositional models and draws attention to ‘popular’ rituals of power
and subordination that seem to simultaneously ridicule and reinstate state
power. Unlike Bakhtin’s notion of carnival as a ‘popular’ site of the inversion
of hierarchies through ridicule and parody, Mbembe’s postcolonial subject enthusiastically
participates in state power through its rituals of ratification. As an example,
Mbembe mentions how during a political rally, Togolese poached the meaning of
the party acronym RPT making it synonymous not with Rassemblement du Peuple
Togolais (RPT) but subverting the acronym’s meaning to ‘the sound of a fart
emitted by quivering buttocks which can only smell disgusting’ (2001:6). So
Mbembe argues that the relationship between those who rule and those who are
ruled ‘is not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but
can best be characterised as convivial’ (Mbembe 2001:104). This relationship
then robs both the dominant and those dominated of their agency and makes them
both impotent. Mbembe speaks of an ‘intimacy of tyranny’ which according to him
inscribes ‘the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme’ (2001:110,
128).
While Mbembe does not explicitly claim to build up
his theoretical framework around concepts of ‘public sphere’ and ‘popular
culture’, both implicitly play an important role in his account of the
post-colony. In his book, Mbembe shows how the rulers make attempts to claim
public spaces through their extravagant state ceremonies which display the
grandiosity of their power but at the same time, he demonstrates how the ruled
manage to carve out a space for themselves, therefore constituting their own
alternative popular publics next to official publics. Mbembe’s work is also
important because it does not uncritically celebrate agency but provides a more
complex and nuanced account of power.
Conclusion
In this article, I have highlighted
the problems and opportunities that the concepts of civil society, public
sphere and popular culture offer when used in African Studies. First of all,
the concept of civil society as policy prescription and Habermas’ concept of
the public sphere should both be
24
seen as highly normative and
idealised notions which have often been used to demonstrate Africa’s lack, i.e.
the absence of a civil society or the presence of an inadequate public sphere
tightly controlled by government. These notions have, therefore, not always
contributed towards a richer and fuller understanding of associational life and
publics in Africa. Hence, it may be necessary, as Appadurai and Breckenridge (1995)
have suggested, to determine the meaning of civil society and public sphere in
the specific African context and to remove these concepts from their European
baggage:
[…] to loosen the link
between the word public and the history of civil society in Europe, and to
agree that it be used to refer to a set of arenas that have emerged in a
variety of historical conditions and that articulate the space between domestic
life and the projects of the nation-state – where different social groups
(classes, ethnic groups, genders) constitute their identities by their
experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday
life. Public in this usage ceases to have any necessary or predetermined
relationship to formal politics, rational communicative action, print
capitalism or the dynamics of the emergence of a literate bourgeoisie. Thus the
term becomes emancipated from any specific EuroAmerican master narrative and
indicates an arena of cultural contestation in which modernity can become a diversely
appropriated experience.
A major problem with Habermas’ public
sphere is its prescription of rationalcritical debate as a precondition for a
‘good’ public sphere. This assumes that there is somehow a clear definition of
what this would involve and it presupposes that it is possible to move from a
situation characterised by power and conflicting interests to a consensual
sphere. In line with Foucault, I prefer to see the public sphere as spaces of
conflict and contestation. The notion of popular culture has been useful in
understanding how this process of contestation evolves. However, sometimes,
accounts of popular cultures have ended up in uncritically celebrating agency
and resistance. Mbembe, in this regard, has offered a more complex account of
power that moves away from the dichotomy between domination and resistance
which has characterised a lot of work in African Studies. While this article
merely aimed to offer a preliminary evaluation of work on the public sphere in
African Studies, it has made an attempt to outline some ways in which a more
engaged dialogue between political scientists and cultural studies scholars
could potentially contribute towards a fuller and richer understanding of
publics in Africa.
25
Notes
1. See:
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/funding/gtf-guidelines07.asp (last accessed: 15 September 2008).
2. See:
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/funding civilsocietyguidelines08.asp (lastaccessed: 15
September 2008).
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