Activity 1: Introduction

Function

Contradicting

Emphasizing

Regulating

Complementing

Subtituting Example

Your face is contorted into a grimace. Your eyes are narrowed and eyebrows furrowed. Yet, you are yelling, “I am not upset!” You are sending a mixed/double message.

You wave your finger accusingly and raise your voice to demonstrate your anger as you say. “It is your fault, not mime.”

After explaining your stance on an issue, you raise and then lower your intonation as you say, “And that’s why I feel the way I do.” This, together with your silence, signals you are finished speaking and another person may comment. Your behaviour influences the flow of verbal interaction.

Your head is bowed and your body posture is slouched as your boss tells you how unhappy he or she is with your job performance. Your nonverbal cues provide clues to the relationship you and your boss share; they also help convey your attitude toward your boss.

You run into a friend who asks, “So, how do you like your new job?” You just roll your eyes, using nonverbal cues in place of words.

Social Media Demonstrates how social media is transforming political engagement in Africa using unique case studies from across the region.

The smartphone and social media have transformed Africa, allowing people across the continent to share ideas, organise, and participate in politics like never before. While both activists and governments alike have turned to social media as a new form of political mobilization, some African states have increasingly sought to clamp down on the technology, introducing restrictive laws or shutting down networks altogether. Drawing on over a dozen new empirical case studies; from Kenya to Somalia, South Africa to Tanzania, this has aim of exploring how rapidly growing social media use is reshaping political engagement in Africa. But while social media has often been hailed as a liberating tool, the book demonstrates how it has often served to reinforce existing power dynamics, rather than challenge them.

ICT and African Politics

Africa, where digital communications infrastructures have transformed hitherto weakly connected societies, the stakes seem particularly high. Digital communications are bringing about profound changes and providing opportunities for pervasive surveillance and new extractive commerce while also supporting vibrant publics and political action. Who wields political power, as the capacity to structure, control, and manipulate connectivity becomes digitized? What role are data analytics firms, telecommunications companies, and surveillance firms playing in identifying, ordering, and acting upon citizens? How are the nature and possibilities of protest changing as they unfold over networked digital infrastructure, bringing the diaspora into local politics and changing forms of action and inaction?

Recruitment Propaganda

The ongoing need for recruits soon led the Entente powers to explicitly direct their propaganda efforts at non-Muslim Africans in hopes of inducing them to enlist. In Nyasaland, the British government widely publicized the threat from nearby German East Africa in an effort to boost enrolment. Government officials and local chiefs convened mass meetings where they told those present that, if the Germans took Nyasaland, they would seize all the land and kill or enslave the locals.

Similarly, Igbo men in Nigeria were told that they had to go fight the Germans in Cameroon to keep them from coming to Nigeria and burning it. Those chiefs and emirs who supported the war effort were publically recognized with salutes and the presentation of ceremonial staffs during Empire Day celebrations. In South Africa, recruiters seeking men to serve in France as part of the South African Native Labour Corps (SANLC) routinely painted lurid pictures of the coming oppression, cruelty, and slavery if Britain lost the war and the Germans took over instead.

The Cape government also held a series of special meetings where African and British dignitaries addressed the crowd in speeches stressing loyalty, patriotism, and the material benefits of service in the form of good food, pay, clothes, and the educational opportunities inherent in overseas service. At the end of 1917, the South African government published a pamphlet by Francis Zaccheus Santiago Peregrino (1851-1919) called His Majesty’s Black Labourers: A Treatise on the Camp Life of the South African Native Labour Corps in hopes that it would drum up more recruits by promoting the conditions in France. Peregrino echoed local black newspapers, which argued that service in the SANLC would give Africans recognition as subjects of the crown and bolster demands for better treatment, while simultaneously counselling that if they failed to step up they would be displaced by Asians and would thus forfeit the opportunity to prove their manliness.

The South African government also used letters from Africans at the front for propaganda purposes, censoring them heavily to portray good conditions in France. These letters were then widely distributed in African communities in the vain hope they would prove more persuasive