Thursday, October 4, 2007

IDEAS Boston -- Emmanuel Akyeampong

Emmanuel Akyeampong is a professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He serves as the president of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (US), a partnership of academic researchers, African broadcasters, and African producers dedicated to the production of development-oriented programs for broadcast on television, radio and the Internet.

Akyeampong tells us about how the 1980s were a "lost decade" for African Studies, during which scholars left African universities for greener pastures. He went to college and graduate school in the 1980s, so he was always aware of a "crisis in knowledge production," he says. Africa is "a continent in need of knowledge." Meanwhile, development became something that the West did for Africa, instead of with Africa. African voices were ignored in the West.

African broadcasters, meanwhile, also had problems. Broadcasting became important in Africa during World War II, as a propaganda effort; and radio and television remained government-controlled in Africa after the war. In the 1990s, the World Bank began to insist that media be privatized, but Africa's broadcast industry remained weak. Akyeampong points to a lack of accurate media information (credible market and audience research), not to mention poor physical infrastructure and human resources.

Enter the African Public Broadcasting Foundation, which aims to provide sub-Saharan Africa's 500 million people with "an efficient and sustainable public broadcasting infrastructure that consistently transmits programming which inspires, entertains, informs and educates and with which audiences can easily identify," according to its website. In addition, "APBF will utilize the audio-visual power of television to stimulate Africa's social and economic transformation."

Akyeampong admits that he asks himself: What is a social historian doing in the broadcasting game? He says that when he visits Africa, and Africans ask him questions about pressing everyday matters, he's embarrassed to tell them that he doesn't know the answers. Akyeampong is the author of "Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times" (1996), and "Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times" (2001). But his publications fail to impress: "You? A professor at Harvard? You don't have an answer to these questions?" So... he's stretching in new directions.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:20 PM

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