The smearing of African media as disinformation tools is an old imperialist tactic, designed to maintain control of the narrative about our continent. We’re accused of disseminating propaganda when our perspectives challenge imperialist geopolitical interests.
While these accusations serve to delegitimise and silence African voices, they also conceal deeper fears. Independent African journalism shines a light on neo-colonial exploitation and practices on the continent.
This week’s Facts of the Week highlight African media outlets that became a headache to global powers – leading, in some cases, to censorship… cloaked as a crackdown on disinformation.
Sources
https://theappendix.net/posts/2013/12/radio-freedom-underground-radio-in-south-africa
https://www.news24.com/news24/radio-freedom-comes-home-20190516
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/the-mozambican-civil-war-1977-1992/
https://www.blackagendareport.com/us-shooting-itself-foot-info-warfare-africa
15 Comments
Heya! I’m at work browsing your blog from my new iphone 3gs!
Just wanted to say I love reading your blog and look forward
to all your posts! Keep up the fantastic work!
If some one wishes to be updated with most recent technologies then he must be pay a quick visit this site and
be up to date everyday.
Keep this going please, great job!
What i do not realize is in reality how you are now not actually a lot more neatly-favored than you might be right now.
You are so intelligent. You recognize thus significantly in the case of this matter, made me individually consider it from so many varied
angles. Its like men and women don’t seem to be fascinated unless it’s one thing to do with Girl gaga!
Your own stuffs nice. Always handle it up!
Hey exceptional blog! Does running a blog similar to this take a
lot of work? I’ve absolutely no knowledge of programming but I
had been hoping to start my own blog soon. Anyhow, if you have any suggestions or techniques for new
blog owners please share. I understand this is off subject nevertheless I just had to
ask. Appreciate it!
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good.
I do not know who you are but certainly you’re going
to a famous blogger if you aren’t already 😉 Cheers!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on leobet. Regards
I really like it when folks come together and share opinions.
Great website, stick with it!
I was curious if you ever thought of changing the page layout of your blog?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little
more in the way of content so people could connect with it better.
Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or
two images. Maybe you could space it out better?
We must not forget that global and national information control is built-in across many so-called democracies. The recent banning, shadow banning during the genocide reveals the truth about global power structures, complicit democracies in the Global South and how the powerful keep the full truth or any truth from reaching the minds of ordinary people, the voting or working class. Author Gabriel Rockhill shared some interesting insights on how the machinery works: “we have monopoly capital that controls the majority of what everybody sees and hears. The mindscape, not only of US citizenry, there’s a cultural imperialism that’s operative. It’s blasted all over the broader world. These cultural industries also work hand-in-glove with the bourgeois State. At certain levels there is distinctions between the private and public realm, but the way in which the US state operates, a large part of its intelligence services work in propaganda, that’s their principle function…The bourgeois State works hand-in-glove with these culture industries and with the internationalisation of these culture industries in order to pump out as much as possible an image of the United States that inverts reality…The culture industry is a product of the bourgeois cultural apparatus, I simply mean the entire system of production, circulation and consumption of culture. It is not individual newspapers, book publishers or universities, it is a systematic framework that is driven by the capitalist base because those are the funders. It includes things like universities and the mainstream press, but it also includes the universities, the system of knowledge production that goes into universities, the think tanks, the NGO world for that matter. All of it needs to be seen as a system that manages the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge.” If we look at South Africa, much of our so-called independent media (included those funded by the US’s Biden budget) normalise the system, a capitalist trickle-down system, emphasising criticism of the system’s management and incidental corruption but never showing honest review of the structures and domestic and foreign control of the system. The system as a whole is deemed good, if only for a few tweaks and new managers but we have lived in austerity for years, have no real control over our resources, allowed localism, reliance on private suppliers (privatisation) and self-enrichment to entrench racial and class inequities (in our country pretty much one and the same thing) and still argue for the privatising of sectors like energy. We have pro-system supporters (increasingly black and upper-middle class like Phumlani Majozi ) branding Venezuela as a failure “run by despots” (Politics Web opinion piece) but ignore the John Oliver propaganda annhilation done by Mr Prysnor on Empire Files on 7 June 2018, Because when you’re pro-system you repeat global propaganda without critically question it. These are the same so-called black lives matter people who never mentioned the Bilderberg group, never pushed back on foreign military bases across Africa, most American and French, never called out below-inflation wages or frozen salaries or the high gap between executives and average workers and have never declared themselves to be liberal capitalists while pushing those policies since 1994. As someone who was shadow banned for using the word neoliberalism twice, I know when Anne Applebaum says global information needs to be better controlled, while saying “genocide is an overused word” she is talking about retrenching the “bourgeois cultural apparatus”. Obedience through manufacturing of consent is what this is…but South Africans are too busy fantasizing over empty words like non-racialism to see they’ve been played.
Wow that was odd. I just wrote an incredibly long comment
but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr…
well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyway,
just wanted to say excellent blog!
Please let me know if you’re looking for a author for your
weblog. You have some really great posts and
I feel I would be a good asset. If you ever want to
take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love
to write some content for your blog in exchange for a
link back to mine. Please shoot me an email if interested.
Thanks!
Thanks in favor of sharing such a good thought, post is nice, thats why i
have read it fully
I always used to study article in news papers but now as I am a user of net thus
from now I am using net for posts, thanks to web.
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you design this website yourself or did you hire someone
to do it for you? Plz answer back as I’m looking to design my own blog and would
like to know where u got this from. thanks