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Africa, Sub-Saharan

Among the 48 sub-Saharan African countries, the liberalization of the media has been at the center of debate since a wave of democratic reform swept through the region in the 1990s. Within this wave of democratization, authoritarian one-party regimes yielded to multiparty systems in most African states. At the onset of democratization, a wide range of media reforms surfaced with countries opening up and deregulating their media sector. Moreover, legal frameworks emerged to restore press freedom. One key feature of the newfound media freedom has been the proliferation of independent media.

Despite these developments, sub-Saharan Africa receives only a tiny percentage of global news coverage. Furthermore, the region forms a complex cultural and ethnic tableau of 788 million people who speak approximately 2,000 languages. Although rich in natural resources, most of sub-Saharan Africa falls behind the rest of the world in terms of economic development due to poor infrastructure, government instability, natural disasters, vagaries of international markets, and the impact of HIV/AIDS. Situated in this environment is a complex political structure. In 2007, the region was home to several electoral democracies—for example, Cape Verde, Botswana, South Africa, Ghana, and Namibia—having held competitive, multiparty elections. Newspapers and the electronic media in these countries are relatively free to report and comment, and to expose corruption. As for the rest of the sub-Saharan African countries, there are emerging democracies, such as Senegal and Togo; a one-party state, Eritrea; a monarchy, Swaziland; and two transitional governments, Sudan and Somalia, where the leadership was installed through a nondemocratic process.

Given the varying degrees of political systems along with the region's diversity and economic variabilities, the media face insurmountable odds in order to operate. Some of the difficulties are historically situated within the legacy of colonialism.

Colonial Era

With the exception of Ethiopia, almost all African countries were colonized by one of seven European powers (Britain, France, Germany before 1914, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Italy). Out of this colonialism and missionary activity, the region's first newspapers evolved. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries three press systems had emerged: one was owned by churches and was expressly intended for spreading the Christian gospel and reaffirming colonial rule; the second, a local or foreign-owned press; and the third, an African-owned and -financed press—sometimes with missionaries' financial support. In an interesting way, the colonial structure (especially in the British colonies) allowed a free and independent press, though not one without government control. In addition to laws controlling sedition and defamation, the British colonial administration, fearing the rising anticolonial press, began to codify press laws that required, for example, newspaper registration and the posting of a bond to publish a single newspaper. And although each colonial power established its own method of administering its colonies, they shared a common view of Africans. In line with the pseudoscientific racial thinking of the nineteenth century, colonial governments saw Africans as simple, and even subhuman. Without careful control, newspapers might easily excite this semibarbaric population that greatly outnumbered whites and lead to a backlash against colonial authority.

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