Consuming a Foreign Africa: Outsourcing Knowledge Construction About Africa[ns]

Abstract

This paper analyses the extent to which African journalism fields have outsourced the labor of knowledge construction to non-African actors. Focusing on the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and the atrocities in Darfur between 2003 and 2008, it captures the extent to which both news organizations and journalists privileged narratives from Minority World Countries as they constructed knowledge about two of the continent’s well-known massive human rights violations of the last three decades. It argues that this outsourcing is anchored by what Wunpini Mohammed calls an “everydayness of colonization,” highlighting the tension between journalistic habitus and doxa present in any analysis of journalism in Africa.