Title:
MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE VANGUARD FOR POLITICAL DECOLONIZATION OF AFRICAN STATES

Authors:
Ayo Elebute ,Ewomazino Daniel Akpor and Sam Okeoghene Uyeri ,Nigeria

Abstract:
It was the Europeans that started the campaign for decolonization of Africa by introducing foreign media technologies to Africans who later used them as weaponry for political emancipation. After attaining freedom in the 1950s and 1960s Satellites and the Internet were introduced to Africans in order to make the media technologies truly global in which information are passed across borders within seconds. Then, Americanization of the media system brought cultural colonization. All these aforementioned phenomena have not been given adequate attention in the content of African journals and this has, however, created a yawning gap in knowledge. It is a vacuum that the study attempts to fill. Using Nigeria as a case study, this study established that an indigenous language newspaper: IweIrohin was the first to be launched into Nigerian media space in 1859 by Rev. Henry Townsend; a British born missionary. It was the first medium of communication to fan the embers of decolonization probably in black Africa when it became sufficiently political to attract a protest to the colonial office in 1862. In 1932 a National Radio Station was established in Nigeria by the colonial government as a counterbalance to the rising profile of indigenous print media. A television station, first in the whole of Africa, was established in 1959 by the Western Nigerian government as a cry of protest after a prominent Nigerian politician was denied the use of the National Radio Station to rebut an allegation leveled against him by the colonial office. These various media establishments played significant roles in the campaigns for the new independent Nigeria on October1, 1960