Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa
George Ogola · 2010
As an entry point to this discussion, this chapter finds significant John Street’s thesis about the relationship between politics and popular culture, particularly his argument that this relationship is not just about popular culture ‘reflecting’ or ‘causing’ political thoughts. Street contends that popular culture does not make people think and act in particular ways. Yet this is not to suggest popular culture has no political agency. Street merely cautions that posing the debate in a manner that ‘looks for cause and effect’ may not be useful, arguing that popular culture ‘neither manipulates nor mirrors us . . . [w]e are not compelled to imitate it, any more than it has to imitate us. Instead, we live through and with it’ (1997: 4). A number of scholars of popular culture typically characterize the relationship between politics and popular culture in terms of ‘cause and effect’. Achille Mbembe’s ambivalence towards certain forms of popular culture such as the use of laughter as a means of ridiculing power being necessarily fatalistic is a case in point (1992a). This chapter does not discuss what popular culture ‘causes’. Instead, it teases out how the political, more appropriately how the ‘dramaturgy of power’, is enacted in sites of popular cultural production. The chapter argues that the public face of power in Kenya is ‘a performance’, ‘a drama’, in essence, a ‘dramaturgy of power’. This ‘performance’ is perhaps best captured by Mbembe’s description of the postcolony as a ‘simulacrum’, which he defines as ‘a regime of unreality’ (1992a: 8). Within this per formance, this chapter is particularly interested in how certain forms of cultural pro duction, to paraphrase Street, shed their pleasures and become – through the uses to which they are put and through judgments made of them – forms of political prac tice (1997: 12).