Africa
Development, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1 – 9
© Council
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2012
(ISSN 0850-3907)
Introduction
The
‘Missing’ Concept: What is the ‘Public Sphere’ Good for?
Abdul Raufu Mustapha*
The concept of ‘civil society’ was
introduced into the African political discourse and practice in the 1980s,
following the collapse of the nationalist post-colonial project in many African
countries and the ascendance of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus. As
Willems points out in her contribution to this volume, the term ‘civil society’
sparked an intense debate among African and Africanist scholars about its
appropriateness and applicability to the African context. Regardless of the
issues raised in this debate, these days across much of Africa, ‘civil society’
(or ‘stakeholders’, as it is sometimes referred to) has become an ubiquitous
shibboleth in public policy discourse. Nothing of substance is decided, from
the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to voters’ registration, without
the real, or as is more often the case, contrived ‘consultation’ of civil
society. However, it is important to note that the concept of the ‘public
sphere’, just as important in the liberal political repertoire as ‘civil
society’, was largely ignored in the African discourse. Despite the close links
between both concepts in their original European milieu, why was one ignored
and the other promoted in addressing the problems of failed statist
modernisation in post-colonial Africa?
It would seem that the neo-liberal project in Africa
needed only the concept of civil society, and not that of public sphere.
Implicit in the neoliberal thinking is that post-colonialism was the key
problem holding back
*
University Lecturer in African Politics at Queen Elizabeth House &
KirkGreene Fellow at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, United
Kingdom. E-mail: raufu.mustapha@queen-elizabeth-house.oxford.ac.uk
2
African development, controlled as it
is by predator elites and vested interests.2 The picture of
African societies that emerged was a simplistic bifurcated one with predator
elites on the one hand and hapless peasants on the other. With time, civil
society was conceived as the correcting mediator between these two antagonistic
camps. Needless to say, all three caricatures – blood sucking elites, hapless
peasants, and virtuous ‘civil society’ – are all discursive inventions of
neo-liberalism, bearing only a vague resemblance to African realities. Within
the context of neo-liberal economic reforms, therefore, ‘civil society’ was
seen as providing a societal anchoring for a reform programme that was at heart
technicist and heavily influenced from abroad. However, it is important to note
that the view of society, implicit in the neo-liberal worldview, had little
room for an African whole; no common purpose or collective interests bound the
disparate groups together – states controlled by parasitic elites stood in
opposition to oppressed peasantries and the struggling ‘civil society’. Where
there is no notion of a collective will or social solidarity, there cannot be a
public or a ‘public sphere’. Under such circumstances, shock therapy induced
from outside would seem a more appropriate response to perceived elite capture
of the state.
In the face of the now acknowledged dismal failure of
the neo-liberal project in Africa2 can we afford to continue to ignore the
concept of the public sphere? This question becomes even more important in the
context of the advocacy by some of an alternative development path in the form
of the ‘Beijing Consensus’.3 Proponents of the Beijing Consensus
intend the concept to mean a combination of economic reform, authoritarian
politics, pragmatic adaptation, social stability, and rapid growth as a
potential alternative to the failed Western neo-liberal model built around
structural adjustment.4 This economistic seduction is also
against the background of democratic recession in places like Ivory Coast,
Zimbabwe, and Kenya, where recent elections from 2007 led, not to the
enthronement of the popular will, but to powersharing regimes or sit-tight
losers. Africa’s political and economic future might, therefore, benefit from a
closer examination of the worth and applicability of that long ignored concept
of Western liberalism: the public sphere. In the opening contribution to this
volume, Santos poses the questions: does Africa really need the concept of the
public sphere? What is it good for? Indeed, as Willems points out in her
contribution, Eurocentrism was one of the accusations levelled against the
uncritical transfer of the notion of civil society to Africa. Santos warns
against the repeat of such a blinkered transference. He argues that the
theoretical and cultural presuppositions of Habermas’ public sphere are
entirely European, reflecting the emergence of the bourgeois male citizen at
the start of the eighteenth century. He notes
3
that some of these presuppositions –
such as the presumed separation of state and society – are difficult to sustain
even in the contemporary global north, and are evidently unsuited to African
realities.
Santos, therefore, makes a key epistemological point:
northern derived concepts like the public sphere might claim universal
applicability, but this claim must always be tested against specific realities
in the global south before they are used to explain such realities. He argues
that social theories produced in the global north might not necessarily be of
universal applicability. He traces the complex paths through which theories
specific to the northern experience assume the toga of undeserved universalism.
Santos makes a strong case for epistemological diversity which reflects the
complexities and knowledge systems of the north and south. Knowledges, not just
a universalist all-explaining Knowledge, are key to capturing the complexities
of the real world. Yet, Santos is not calling for epistemological autarchy or
epistemological relativism. Instead of the current universalist assumptions,
which privilege northern-derived theories, he advocates intercultural
translations between knowledge systems which promote open dialogue and mutual
intelligibility across cultures and historical experiences.
In the African context, Santos suggests that this
intercultural translation involves two distinct moments – a deconstructive
moment which critically evaluates the Eurocentric social theories inherited
from colonialism and northern intellectual dominance; and a reconstructive
moment which taps into the indigenous historical and cultural legacies of
African societies. He asserts that this two-fold movement promotes mutual
epistemological intelligibility and responds more directly and appropriately to
African realities. This challenge posed by Santos is taken up by all the other
contributors to this volume, each emphasising both the strengths and weaknesses
of Habermas’ public sphere in the task of understanding Africa’s historical and
contemporary realities.
In my substantive contribution, I explore how
Habermas can be used to improve current economic and political policy making
processes in Africa. I argue that the many criticisms of Habermas within
northern academia by scholars like Fraser and Bolton bring the concept more in line
with African realities.5 These critics raise important issues
around the place of gender, class and race in Herbamas’ conceptualisation, and
also echo Santos’ allegations of Eurocentrism. The deconstruction of theories
internally in the north might, therefore, contribute to similar efforts in
Africa. Furthermore, I highlight the fact that even before Habermas’ work
(1962) became accessible in Africa through its translation into English, there
was already a fascination within African intellectual circles with the Western
notions of
4
the public and private spheres. In
his seminal work on Colonialism and the
Two Publics,6
Peter Ekeh borrowed the Western separation of the public and private spheres to
explain the prevalence of ‘tribalism’ among African elites. His work is,
therefore, more concerned with ‘tribalism’ in African politics, than with the
public sphere as we would understand it today from a Habermasian lens. I offer
a critique of Ekeh and argue that the African public spheres might best be understood
as a multiplicity of publics and counter-publics, rather than Habermas’ unitary
conceptualisation. The rest of my contribution seeks to show how this notion of
a multiplicity of publics can be useful in improving economic and political
policy making in Africa by shifting from the constricting Weberian utilitarian
rationality that informs contemporary policy to a much more Habermasian
communicative rationality that emphasises deliberation and pluralism. This
strategic shift could potentially build common grounds that unite Africa’s
multiple publics and create the moral anchor for a more inclusive and
sustainable public policy. Such a moral anchor would penetrate society more
than the real – as distinct from the neo-liberal ideological construct of – ‘civil
society’ has so far achieved.
Willems continues the deconstructive engagement with
the concept of the public sphere by comparing its introduction into African
discourses with the ways in which the concept of civil society was introduced
in an earlier period. She notes that both concepts derive from the same Western
liberaldemocratic intellectual genealogy. But while there has been a lively
deconstructive debate on civil society in Africa, the same cannot be said for
the concept of the public sphere. Instead, she argues that, woolly conceptions
of the public sphere are often used interchangeably with the concept of civil
society, and very little critical attention is paid to its European roots or
its problematic applicability. Citing Mamdani and the Comoroffs, Willems
highlights efforts made to adapt the concept of civil society to African
realities against the background of its Eurocentric baggage. She suggests that
the same deconstruction can be done for the concept of the public sphere, and
argues that popular culture in Africa holds the key to this adaptation. Willems
argues that Africa’s rich sites of popular culture should be seen as the
relevant sites for Africa’s public spheres. Popular culture, she asserts, is
the public sphere of ordinary Africans. This position helps us to redress the
bourgeois elitism implicit in Habermas’ conceptualisation. Secondly, it opens
important doors for the inclusion of African cultural elements – orality,
songs, stories, jokes, and drama – into our conceptualisation of the African
public sphere.
Willems’ challenge on the importance of popular
culture is taken up by Awasom in Cameroon. Awasom’s contribution highlights how
Habermas’ public sphere can be fruitfully used to explore aspects of Cameroon’s
cultural,
5
social, and political histories – all
through the lens of the palm-wine drinking joints that sprang up in the
colonial town of Bamenda. This is a cultural history centred, not on colonial
proconsuls or important traditional elites, but on the daily rituals of the
lives of ordinary Africans as they engaged with colonial modernity in all its
ramifications. Awasom points out continuities with social practices in the
pre-colonial countryside and the transference and modification of these
practices in the new colonial Bamenda to create new subjectivities, collective
identities, gender roles, and economic interests. Our understanding of the
cultural and political histories of colonial Cameroon is greatly enhanced
through this creative deployment of Habermas in the analysis of a specific
African context.
In understanding the African public sphere, we must
also pay attention to the connections between the public and the private
spheres, as well as between the social and the personal. This is obviously a
deviation from the Habermasian separation of the private from the public, based
on a long established tradition of European thought. In Africa, on the other
hand, cultural and religious values in the private and social spheres impinge
on the nature and constitution of the public sphere. Gendered and generational
exclusions from spaces of religious ritual are often accompanied by exclusions
from public and political spaces, with significant implications for citizenship
rights and the constitution of the public sphere. Furthermore, we must however
cast our gaze beyond the cultural and political limitations to the full
membership of African women in the public sphere. The processes of production
and reproduction also affect the ability of African women to take their full place
in the public sphere. Access to education, jobs, and the enjoyment of equal
property rights are all important constraints on women’s participation in the
public sphere. Also important is the lack of social provisioning – child care,
basic health – such that too many women are too weighed down by survivalist
drudgery to have anytime to partake in public affairs.
The last two contributions by Yau and Manganga bring
us up to the contemporary world of globalisation and the internet. As both
contributors highlight, this brave new world of the ‘twitterati’, bloggers,
Facebook, YouTube, and ‘hacktivists’ has significant implications for the
African public sphere. In late colonial and post-colonial Africa, the radio was
the key instrument of mass communication and the delineation of the public.
Government control ensured that a rigid hierarchical separation of producers of
news and views on the one hand, and consumers of same on the other, was
maintained. Government appointees produced media content that was consumed by a
largely passive audience of peasants and the urban poor. TV
6
broadcasting and print journalism –
both heavily focused on urban areas – did not significantly change the dominant
structure of communication within African states. However, there were some
important changes to print and electronic broadcasting in the era of
neo-liberalism. Particularly, the emergence of commercial and community radio
and TV broadcasting diluted, but did not overthrow, the basic structures of
broadcasting established in the late colonial period. As both Yau and Manganga
show in their contributions, the rise of the internet has overthrown the extant
state domination of the media. The internet has been a privilege to new
individuals and groups – often from educated urban middle class backgrounds –
in the production and dissemination of news and views, at the expense of the
hitherto dominant post-colonial state. This has had significant implications
for the African public sphere, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Cape Town.
Contemporary globalisation has led to the emergence
of a global public sphere – networks, internet-based media and campaigns –
within which the African public sphere must be understood. Yau points out how
the combination of globalisation and ICTs has radically transformed the nature
and reach of the African public sphere – creating an on-line virtual public.
Traditional dichotomies between producers and consumers of news and views have
been overthrown by multi-media formats that unite users and producers in a seamless
whole. Secondly, the media monopolies of the postcolonial state have been swept
aside. For instance, some have argued that ignoring the social networks on the
internet was a major factor in the downfall of the Tunisian regime and the
initiation of the political convulsion that is sweeping through the Arab world
since December 2010. The Tunisian authoritarian regime tightened its grip on
the TV and print media at the onset of the demonstrations, but ignored the
internet-based social networks:
In a way, there is an
intriguing parallel between the failure of the Tunisian regime to spot the
significance of social networking, and mainstream media’s conviction about its
overriding importance. Both camps persist in regarding this stuff as exotic, which
for them it is, which in turn highlights how out of touch they have become with
reality. For the reality is that the net and social networking have become
mainstream, even in societies that seem relatively underdeveloped…7
Within these global processes, Yau is
keen to highlight uniquely African characteristics, dimensions, and
peculiarities. He also points out that the de-institutionalisation of the media
that has resulted from globalisation and ICTs has resulted in both costs and
benefits for the public sphere. One key benefit is that the cost of producing,
reproducing, and transmitting news and views has been drastically reduced by
digitalisation. At the same time,
7
the reach of the average person has
been greatly enhanced by ICT networks. The resulting simultaneity and
interactivity mean that many more Africans and persons interested in African
affairs can now be in constant real-time touch with each other and the wider
world. The downside of this quickening and thickening of communication flows is
the lack of quality control and reliability regarding the news and views pumped
out, and the dubious authenticity of the authors and producers. Both Yau and
Manganga emphasise that despite Africa’s infrastructural and access
constraints, there is increasing cyber mobilisation across the continent,
generating a virtual public sphere that complements the off-line public
spheres. This has important consequences, not just in terms of internal
mobilisation within such countries as Zimbabwe and Egypt, but also in the
establishment of important connections between internal actors and external and
diasporic constituencies. Manganga gives a candid picture of some of the
limitations of cyber mobilisation in Zimbabwe.
Finally, while the contemporary importance of the
internet for the African public sphere is not in doubt, what is the likely
future of this ICT-mediated virtual public? Yau points out the tendency for
participants to recreate offline gender, ethnic, and national cleavages within
on-line virtual communities. Manganga also notes that partisan Zimbabweans
often use the internet to shout past each other, rather than seek to engage in
dialogue. Will the internet, therefore, not affect the values and identities of
those drawn into its networks? Or can it contribute to the emergence of a ‘new
pan-Africanism’ based on people-to-people contact at the individual level, as
distinct from the current pan-Africanism of states? Will this ‘new
pan-Africanism’ be sufficiently robust to undermine the ethnic, national,
gender, and racial intolerance that have plagued many African societies? Will
this ‘new panAfricanism’ advance the communitarian and humanitarian ethos of
Ubuntu? Or will it promote the ‘networked individualism’8 which
we can identify with ‘afropolitanism’: ‘we are not citizens, but rather
‘Africans of the world’ … we choose which bits of a national identity (from
passport to pronunciation) we internalise’?9 The tremendous
powers of globalisation and ICTs on the African public sphere will be felt, not
only in contemporary events like the contagious mobilisation of long-quiescent
populations across North Africa and the Arab world, but also in the ways these
instruments (re)shape the long term values and identities of network
participants.
Contributions in this volume highlight both the
problems and promises of the use of the concept of the public sphere in the
study of Africa. It is a concept whose original formulation has been
substantially and fruitfully reworked by critics in the West. Furthermore, like
all borrowed concepts
8
and paradigms, it has to be
critically adapted to new contexts like those in Africa. Some of the
contributions in this volume suggest ways through which this critical
adaptation might be best approached. Finally, the contributions also explore ways
in which an adapted concept of the public sphere may be useful, indeed
important, in the analysis of African history, popular culture, and political
dynamics.
Notes
1.
Cf. Bates, R., 2005, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural
Policies, University of California Press, Berkeley; Berg, E., 1981, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan
Africa: an agenda for action, World Bank, Washington DC.; Toye, J. 1992,
‘Interest Group Politics and the Implementation of Adjustment Policies in
Sub-Saharan Africa’, in P. Gibbon, Y. Bangura, & A. Ofstad, eds., Authoritarianism, Democracy and Adjustment:
The Politics of Economic Reform in Africa, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet,
Uppsala.
2.
Easterly, William, 2001, ‘The Lost Decades: Developing
Countries’ Stagnationin Spite of Policy Reform 1980-1998’, Journal of Economic Growth, 6, pp. 135 - 157; Stiglitz, J., 1998,
‘More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving Toward the Post-Washington
Consensus’, World Bank; Mkandawire, T., 2001, ‘Thinking about developmental
states in Africa’, Cambridge Journal of
Economics, 25, 3., pp. 289 – 314.
3.
Zhao, Suisheng, 2010, ‘The China Model: can it replace
the Western model ofmodernization?’, Journal
of Contemporary China, 19: 65, pp. 419-436; Lagerkvist, Johan, 2009, Chinese
eyes on Africa: Authoritarian flexibilities versus democratic governance’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies,
27, 2, pp. 119 – 34.
4.
Other readings of the Chinese model which support the
notion of state-leddevelopment, but argue for a democratic rather than an
authoritarian state, are more likely to use the term ‘Bandung Consensus’ or
‘Southern Consensus’ cf. Arrighi and
Zhou (forthcoming) ‘Beyond the Washington Consensus: A New Bandung?’, in J.
Schefner and P. Fernandez-Kelly, eds., Globalization
and Beyond: New Examinations of Global Power and Alternatives, Penn State
University Press, University Park, PA.; Gore, C., 2000, ‘The Rise and Fall of
the Washington Consensus as a Paradigm for Developing Countries’, World Development, 28, 5, pp. 789 - 804.
5.
Fraser, N., 1992, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A
Contribution to the Critiqueof Actually Existing Democracy’, in Calhoun, C.,
ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 111; Bolton, R., 2005, ‘Habermas’s
Theory of Communicative Action and the Theory of Social Capital’, paper
presented at the Association of American Geographers, Denver, Colorado, April,
2.
6.
Ekeh, Peter, 1975, ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics in
Africa: A TheoreticalStatement’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 17, 1.
9
7.
John Naughton, 2011, ‘Yet another Facebook revolution:
why are we sosurprised?’ The Observer,
Sunday, 23 January. Available at: http://
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/23/social-networking-rules-ok.
8.
Cf. Manuel Castells, 2005, ‘The Network Society: From
Knowledge to Policy’,in Manuel Castells & Gustavo Cardoso, eds., The Network Society: From Knowledge to
Policy, Johns Hopkins Centre for Transatlantic Relations, Washington DC.
9.
Taiye-Tuakli, 2007, ‘What is an Afropolitan?’,
http://theafrobeat.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-afropolitan-by-taiye-tuakli.html.
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