The purpose of this paper is to construct frameworks, informed by insights from pertinent bodies of scholarship, that can be used to assess the significance and potential of alternative media for political change in Africa. In its construction of these conceptual frameworks, the text takes into account the predisposition of various bodies of scholarship to ascribe agency to different social actors ie. social movements, classes, elites, and protest groups.
The first section constructs a conceptual framework which is informed by development communication theory and practice. The second part constructs a conceptual framework drawn from political communication theory that can be used to explore the potential of alternative media for political change in Africa. These two frameworks are proposed as analytical schemes for an empirical investigation of the significance and potential of alternative media for political change in Africa.
The past 40 years of development communication theory and practice can be conceptualized in terms of four basic models that have at different periods held sway over the discipline:
• Development as modernization and communication as innovation adoption,
• Development as liberation from dependency and communication as cultural action,
• Development as meeting basic needs and communication as social marketing, and
• Development as human development and communication as a support function.
• Development as modernization and communication as innovation adoption,
• Development as liberation from dependency and communication as cultural action,
• Development as meeting basic needs and communication as social marketing, and
• Development as human development and communication as a support function.
In an analysis of the question of development and cultural values in the history of Africa, authors asks if African intellectuals are to answer the call for the re-instatement of culture in development studies, justified as this call is in the context of anti-imperialist and nationalist struggles, where should they begin?
Behind the practice of agricultural extension, was an implicit ideology of paternalism, social control, and non-reciprocity. This ideology was based upon "an unjustified lack of faith in the people, an underestimation of their power of reflection.
The fortunes of the conception of development as one of liberation and the attendant role of communication as one of cultural action were also tied to (a) the political trajectories and successes and failures of post-colonial African nation-states (Davidron, 1992).
The work undertaken by CIESPAL was premised on a recognition of the dependent character of the theory of communication and methodologies of research being utilized in contemporary Latin America. CIESPAL proposed the search for theoretical and methodological alternatives and "prioritized research into two issues: the role of communication in education and in popular organization and mobilization" (Marques de Melo, 1988:441). In Africa, the debate about participatory communication strategies has in part been conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).
The notion of alternative media incorporates a variety of dimensions (difference, independence, opposition, and representation) whose importance is determined by the parameters of particular struggles. Broadly defined, alternative media are "those forms of mass communication that avowedly reject or challenge established and institutionalized politics, in the sense that they all advocate change in society or at least a critical reassessment of traditional values" (O'Sullivan et. al., 1994:10).
"Community media, in reaction to the mass media, attempt to redefine the communication realm (i.e. the relations between informer and informed) and to enhance, through the acquisition of simple technology, the possibilities that people have of intervening in the process of information production" (Council for the Development of Community Media, 1977:397). Alternative media are distinguished by their ownership and management structures, their financing, their regulation, their programming and their policy stances on issues of access and participation.
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