D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 5, September/October 2000, p. 24-26)

At their summit in Okinawa, the G8 states have started a major initiative to promote the spread of information technology in developing countries. Japan has promised US$15 billion in aid for this purpose. But who will benefit from this Internet offensive? Africa, argues this article, is not ready for the new and costly technology.

Nothing expresses the anachronism of our time more crassly than the concurrence of globalisation and marginalisation. Not even the new millennium will be able to free itself of this stigma. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it last January: "Globalisation does not lead to 'cultural unity', but most probably to a technical standardisation, a uniformity without real unity. Culture as an identity-creating frontier is increasingly being lost due to cross-border political and economic processes and the new information technologies. This applies in particular to the Islamic and still archaic cultures in Africa. The culture of today is not a culture of a place; it is the culture of an age."

A virtual network is spanning the entire planet, from which not even the countries of Africa can escape. It appears they cannot evade the mania for modernisation. The advance of the new media raises questions about their implications for traditional culture:

1. Has the imported new technology helped to solve the African problems? In other words, to what extent do the new media suit African society?

2. Should one adapt the modern media to one's own needs, rather than accept them without demur?

True, the hope that the Third World would follow the trail blazed by Europe and America is now often called into question. Nevertheless, this trail is influencing life around the world. At the beginning of the new millennium the people of Africa face the challenge, which is not to be confused with expecting too much of them, of defining a new way for their existence. Their questions are about the signs of the new times and where the path to the modernisation of Africa will lead.

Gap between North and South

The explosive development of media technology and its breathtakingly fast leap across borders allow no scope for delay or cautious choice. The Canadian philo- logist and media analyst Marshall McLuhan predicted back in the 1960s the world would become a global village in which the democratic conditions of all times would prevail. Doubts can be cast on this optimistic forecast if one takes into account the yawning gap between North and South. Günter Möller, of the Professional Association of Information Technology, notes that the developing countries' shortcomings in access to information and computing power are greater than they ever were in terms of raw materials and finance. However, that the development of media technology has positive impacts on Africa's so far insufficient links with the rest of the world is not an established fact.

The sweeping change in ways of life and work demands growing readiness to 'get with it' and lifelong learning. The ability to acquire up-to-date knowledge from the Internet at any time is becoming a key qualification. For the business world in an information society, knowledge is at the same time becoming its most important product factor and sought-after commodity. New services in the information and communications (IT) sector are replacing former economic activities. In future, only the national economy whose captains of industry and commerce can handle the new technologies masterfully will be competitive and its society achieve a high standard of living. Global relaxation of trade barriers benefits the worldwide sales of IT technologies, which, however, create new dependencies.

Even if the political clock in some African countries is at present running backwards, there is growing interest in exploiting technological resources and opportunities such as the Internet, e-mail, online conferences, databases and online banking.

Foreign companies are seeking to gain a foothold and dominate the Internet market in developing countries with a market economy. Leading companies such as CompuServe, AOL and Global ONE are already active in Africa as Internet service providers (ISPs). Germany also is showing interest in cooperating with Africa in the IT sector. The West African Internet (WAIN) initiative was founded under the sponsorship of Deutsche Welle, the German international public broadcasting service.

Also worth mentioning in connection with the Internet is the project Africa ONE. This involves the laying of 35,000 km of fibre optic cable around the African continent, with spur links to the coastal countries and from there to the inland regions. The cable is to be linked to the existing RASCOM satellite system and the PANAFTEL landline system. As the African countries cannot afford such projects, the World Bank, together with the United Nations organisations UNESCO, UNCTAD and UNDP, the US government aid agency USAID, and the European Union, will give them technical and financial support. The US$ 600 million project, with a capacity of almost 5 million simultaneous telephone calls or more than 800 digital television transmissions, is to meet Africa's needs in this sector for at least 25 years. A total of 40 countries are taking part in the project. The South African network operator Telkom expects it to deliver a reliable, fully digital and secure link from Portugal to Malaysia via West Africa, Cape Town and India.

Western financial backers, who see Africa as an important market in this beginning millennium, are also buzzing around other telecoms sectors there. The continent headed the online service providers' global growth rates in 1998 and 1999. Leland, a five-year, US$ 15 million project financed by the US government, is to link 20 African countries to the Internet. The World Bank is involved in the project Infodev for the IT sector of development programmes. The UNDP has participated in IT projects in Africa since the 1992 Rio Summit, and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is running, among other things, a rural telephone programme there.

The transition to the information society will change customary links in a way not yet imagined. What is decisive here is to recognise new job opportunities quickly and counter possible dangers to existing business sectors in good time.

Internet equals development?

Those who recommend that Africa should embrace the Internet and connect to the global network as soon as possible justify their stance by citing various advantages, such as:

• a computer enables more reliable and resource-sparing planning. Political processes are optimised and decisions more just because they are taken on the basis of sound data. If the people have access to much more information, it is hoped, relations between citizens and state will change fundamentally. The coming democratisation process in many countries demands that preconditions for general participation in the networks be created.
• A 'basic supply of information' must be available. Small steps can then be taken to test what further developments make sense. Modern communications technology enables people to do their official business at one contact point, such as a municipal citizens' centre, for which previously several offices were responsible. The government and municipalities can improve the flow of their internal information, cut costs and work in a customer-friendly way.
• The Internet facilitates the business world's access to products and services. The search for customers and suppliers, making offers and transacting business is done many times faster than by conventional channels. Many potential transactions at present do not take place because initiating business takes too long. Direct marketing via the Internet can help accelerate economic growth. The Internet also offers access to more than 6,000 online databases in which the world's current body of knowledge is stored. Initial and advanced training in the form of distance learning courses can be completed via the Internet at reasonable cost. Not least, the Net facilitates emergency aid in cases of natural disaster.
• The Internet also offers opportunities for grass-roots groups and citizens' initiatives. Such groups in some African countries long ago discovered the new media technologies for themselves. They use the media when, for example, they want to build bridges to far-distant other groups or mobilise solidarity when a dam project or timber company threatens the habitat of the local people.
• African Internet enthusiasts also cite another decisive factor: that communication via the Net emulates in some respects the familiar form of direct contact. It is much more direct than exchanging letters, and therefore could meet social needs and suit political conditions, especially in Africa.

The rapid advance of appropriate technology means that handling of the new media will become an elementary cultural technique like reading, writing and arithmetic. New forms of self-study and distance learning by computer will become more important and compete with customary ways of teaching. Africa is often urged to grasp the opportunities presented by the new media and the redesigning of the traditional media systems. As a positive example, the enthusiasts often point out how IT expertise helped the East Asian threshold countries to leapfrog entire industrial development stages.

Controversy over the Internet

The optimistic assessment of the Africans' entry to the international data highway outlined here, however, comes up against considerable reservations and criticism that emphasises the seductive nature of modern media. The negative points listed against them include users losing touch with reality and suffering from a poverty of direct experience, being inundated with information along with growing self-passivity, wasting time, and fleeing real life into games to the point of glorification of war and violence.

The doubters also say the well-known dominance of American culture via films, television and videos could become even stronger in the global information society. Most of the world's databases are located in the USA (70 per cent) and Europe. In 1993, there were only 10 databases in Africa against 5,094 in the USA. The concentration of data in the hands of a few companies is seen by many critics as a path to renewed dependency for the Third World. But experience shows that fears that the Internet in particular could become a tool of cultural dominance must be qualified. African entrepreneurs themselves have so far shown little interest in the new communications technologies. Telecommunications fail to reach large areas of Africa because of a lack of commercial interest in it.

Outside Africa's major cities, one is still a long way from the western-style eruption of the information age. Most Africans cannot afford to buy the computers needed to access the Internet. They not only lack the money for hardware and software, but also do not know how to operate a computer. Often, they lack even the elementary prerequisites for being able to write and speak in English. Thus the Internet retains its elitist character in Africa. The fashionable mobile phone may triumph, but much more infrastructure is needed for use of the data highway. The cost of supplying electricity in the sparsely-populated areas of the Sub-Sahara would be prohibitive. Where annual per capita income is not much more than US$ 100, saturation coverage by the new media is unthinkable. A family there could live for a year on what it costs to access the Internet. So the market is not lucrative enough for foreign investors. We are thus facing a vicious circle of poverty and technological backwardness. This means the current wave of innovations in the media sector will most likely pass by Black Africa.

Will the African elite sit in front of flickering computer screens procured at the cost of more urgent goods? Will that widen the gap between town and country instead of bridging it? Many villages do not even have electricity. What can an African smallholder who has no English do with the Internet? He could keep a computer in his hut, fed from the solar installation on its roof - a toy. But would not the technically more modest option of, say, a radio broadcasting in the national language including local news be better suited to disseminate information of practical use and encourage citizen participation?

The question is, should one regret this situation and try to prevent it? Would Africa's entry into the data highway really promote development or result only in further waste of already sparse financial resources? If in a poor society only a small elite have access to the new technologies, this would enlarge the distance between the elite and the masses rather than reduce it. A communications gap within that society would be added to the growing North-South gap.

The triumphant advance of the new media has begun to falter after proving to be a boomerang. Instead of the haughty claim to power for the Internet, namely being able to learn and achieve everything, doubts are now growing about the controllability of the electronic media. There is still uncertainty over whether the Internet's proneness to breakdowns, and especially the possibilities of manipulating it, can really be remedied. That means whether people can subjugate their own aims to the bitter end. Terms such as 'virus', 'blockades', 'hacker attacks' and 'advance of the anarchists' are warning signals now making headlines.

'Is the Internet still a subject (or tool)?' is the worried question which, given the abundance of its offers, tends to be overlooked, like small print. In Germany, too, the voices of those who also see a threat in the new technologies are growing. "The entire social structure of society will be negatively affected," said a reader's letter to the Wetzlar Neue Zeitung in February this year. "The (Internet's) massive influence goes as far as into the family. That can result in people having nothing to say to each other. What will happen to communication between people if one can do everything from home? No-one can evade it any longer. That presents two particular dangers: on the one hand the isolation of people within society, and on the other their manipulability. One is only a part of a great mass of consumers - individual character is lost."

The new media, however, are also criticised from a quite different angle. Leading German media critics such as Herbert I. Schiller expose the dual character of 'information' as a commodity and vehicle for ideologies, and point out the one-sidedness of the information flow as well as the inequality in access to the electronic media. The MacBride Report, sponsored by UNESCO, dealt in particular with the structural dependence in the information exchange sector. It noted:
- the present information structures in Africa were set up by global media concerns such as Germany's Bertelsmann;
- the more modern the media or IT, the more it is dependent upon the big cities; and
- the new media imported into Africa are in very few cases designed for the needs of Africans.

What should we reject and what would we like to put in its place? Since the drums have long been silent, the culture of memory and passing down of folklore is losing its mystique because it can be stored in a computer, the palaver under the baobab tree and the bazaar gossip is being strangled by the noise of machines, and the bush telegraph and caravan news are being drowned out by transistor radios, the question of new solutions arises. Pomp and glory are things of the past. But the future calls for sacrifice, risk-taking and vision.

"If we want a 'second liberation' in the real world we must change our standpoint radically," said a speaker at a pan-African conference. "We must reassess the direction of our development and reset the rankings of our priorities."

Whatever course the coming technological development takes, it will not be free of a certain western character, which Africans must accept. But no few people that see the new communications structures as a danger and do not want to sacrifice Africa to modernity are making themselves heard. Direct personal contacts between individual Africans and their lively exchanges, such as in the bazaar, make importing such 'sophisticated' media unnecessary.

African opinions are divided on the best solution. On one side are those who are sceptical about modernisation, on the other those who see no other alternative than to adopt the new technology. One wing warns against decadence and a drop in standards and sees in the western way only the continuance of Africa's misfortune in other forms and at other levels. In their view, the modern world is moving at an insane speed of development towards an abyss from which Africa should distance itself as soon as possible, and preferably right now. They question the whole purpose of the breathtaking progress and recall the old African saying: "The higher the monkey climbs, the better you see his behind."

For the pro-wing, it is clear that Africa now has the opportunity to use today's modern technology for its own needs. So, they urge, it is worth getting going and having the courage for radical reforms. What is necessary are critical faculties so that the undesirable trends of Africa's lost decades can be corrected by better transparency and control mechanisms.

The year 2000 also challenges Africans to surpass themselves, therefore reforms and maturing processes must be accelerated. Acceleration in this sense does not mean a 'Salto mortale', a death-defying leap, but paying attention to following a set pattern. "Cows are born with ears - horns come later."

The independence of former colonies has not made the search for solutions easier. Can the African intelligentsia become a guide there? More than ever, hope disappears behind the clouds of Afro-pessimism, although enough fallow resources are available. This pessimism finds the donors at a loss with regard to the internal and external general conditions for Africa's development. There is even talk of Africa being in 'free fall'. That view goes so far that even the much-needed cooperation with the entire African continent is being called into question. No prospects can sprout from that point of view. We are challenged to refute the prophets of Africa's downfall. The African people are willing and capable of surviving. Their latent strengths and hopes are the building blocks for the future.

Africa's stamina or dynamism is shown by the concurrence of the drum and mobile phone.

"I admit I cannot say if it will be better when it is different, but I can say this much: it must be different if it is to be good."