The African Global Village

Marshall McLuhan predicted a Global Village of interdependence based on new communication technology in the 1960s. Since then the concept has taken on new connotations with the advent of the internet and its assumed ubiquitous. However, the negative connotations of McLuhan’s Global Village have largely been forgotten.

Moreover, from an African geographic perspective the Village is less coherent than assumed in current global discourses and the negative aspects are all too prominent. To stick with the metaphor of a Global Village, however, Africa lives as a squatter on that Global Village. A slightly unwelcome, grubby presence of glaring poverty, the worst kind of depredations, but serving the demands of the wealthy and replicating the images and ideas of the wealthy on a smaller, twisted scale. Africa exists as part of the Village through its subordinated economy to global demands, as well as the mass-mediated images that McLuhan was talking about.

The Global Village and globalisation are often celebrated as miracles, but like most miracles they are smoke and mirrors, designed to obfuscate. There is no turning back and the fight over the image of Africa is also a very real fight for survival. Just as Africa’s squatter camps become permanent, there are signs that Africa is playing a larger role in the Global Village.

How can Africa play a substantive role in the Global Village?

Some signs are heartening as eco-tourism boosts a failing economy and supports the conservation of rare species. One success story from what I thought was an unlikely place is the gorilla tours in Rwanda. While South Africa was celebrating democracy in 1994, that country was in a bloody civil war and genocide was occurring on a scale usually only seen in Europe. (I am being cheeky here. The Europeans also decimated the Americas on an even larger scale). South Africa has its successes in the saving of the white rhino and many other species and distinct ecosystems.

African conservation is carried out on a massive scale with huge tracts of land set aside in Kenya and Tanzania to name but a few. While these may cater to largely foreign tourists, there is an increasing number of jobs to be had and opportunities that were unheard of ten years ago. It is lazy analysis and racist stereotyping that denies these very real successes.

The development of further communication infrastructure to facilitate trade, investment and, well, communication can only be a good thing. I met a man who was building cellular telephone towers in the Congo for MTN. They see a future market opening up and are preparing for that.

Of course technologies may be double sided and the Congo is an area rife with conflict. Communication technologies will be used by all sides of the conflict, as well as by opportunists involved in the mining and export of diamonds. As communication technologies become more common across all of Africa I hope to see more of an active engagement by Africans (of all hues) about the imaging of Africa. As long as we can keep these from being hijacked by the elites as they replicate global inequalities on a local scale for their own through propaganda and lies.

The elites are already part of the Global Village and they have moved to Umhlanga (posh suburb/edge city of Durban) out of the slums. But it is through their own greed and selfishness that they maintain the slums and ghettos just as the global elite keep Africa as a squatter camp of the Global Village.