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Abdulaziz Dino Gidreta
However, within the global politics of mapping situated in spatial discourses
, there have
been tendencies of ‘othering’, distancing, contracting, and marginalizing the African con-
tinent
.
Africa has been depicted as the land of ‘others’ who have not been part of ‘main
world’, ‘the far land’, and ‘small land ‘separated from the ‘center.
Developmental and Humanitarian Interventions
After the last remnants of European empires in Africa and Asia were crumbled in the
1950’s and 1960’s, a dominant question in policy and academic quarters was how to
address the ‘abysmal disparities’ between the developed and underdeveloped worlds
(Chandra, 2004). Accordingly, development views have their roots in the mid-century op-
timism with the prospects that large parts of post-colonial world could eventually “catch
up” and resemble the Western world. Thus, originally, development meant the process by
which third world societies could ‘look like’ Western developed societies as measured in
terms of the political system and economic growth (Chandra, 2004: 214).
Although plenty of theories and concepts emerged during the past fifty years, studies
and interventions have fundamentally offered three different dialogues and answers to
the problem of underdevelopment. One position has argued that the problem was large-
ly due to the lack of information - modernization model; the other one suggested that
power inequality was the underlying predicament- dependency model and the third one
stresses the importance of cultural identity of local communities and democratization
and participation at all levels - participatory model (Chandra, 2004: 215). According to
Servaes (2007: 93) participatory model views ordinary people as key agents of change
or participants in development, and for this reason, it focuses on their aspirations and
strengths. Here in our case of African image, it becomes helpful to reflect on the impacts
of modernization view regarding how Africa should have developed.
The early generation of development communication studies was dominated by modern-
ization paradigm. Different scholars state their views about this paradigm (Servaes, 2007:
93; Servaes, 2002; Chandra, 2004; and Tomaseilli, 2007). Modernization view sees un-
derdevelopment as a product of internal cultural barriers, rural backwardness and lack of
technology (Tomaseilli, 2007: 300). Servaes notes that the modernization paradigm con-
siders underdevelopment in terms of perceptive, quantitative differences between rich
and poor countries (Servaes, 2002: 19-20). Thus, development meant bridging the gaps
by means of imitation process between traditional and modern, retarded and advanced,
barbarian and civilized sectors and groups to the advantage of the latter. Consequently,
the measures of progress were GNP, literacy, industrial bases, urbanization and the like;
all quantitative criteria.
As the problems of underdeveloped world were believed to be information, communica-
tion was presented as the instrument that would solve it. The emphasis was put on the
