THE PLACE OF TRADIONAL MODES OF COMMUNICATION IN A MODERNIZING AFRICA.

THE PLACE OF TRADIONAL MODES OF COMMUNICATION IN A MODERNIZING AFRICA.

Communication, or the act of eliciting a response from one individual by another, is on great continuous activity among humanity today. It is process involving the transmission and reception of information, ideas and attitudes from one individual to another. What are actually transmitted are symbols representing these ideas, information and attitudes.

Every society has its own media of communication designed and operated te who make up that society. It is the people who determine the way such media should operate. The media, too, to a large extent, determine the way society is administered through their determination (or facilitation) of the operations of the other social institutions in the society. The place of the media, therefore, is paramount in the scheme of things in the socirty as whole.

In this connection, Africans, as a people, have their own media systems or modes of communcation which are traditional and have developed from their own experiences. These media systems continue to be in operation today and it will be naïve or irrational for anybody to wish that they be museumized as fossilized details of our acient past. The word tradtional relates to their being culture – based, as a result of their origin and situation. Thw word is not a consequence of their age or design.

The objective of this chapter is not so much the history of thses traditional modes of communication as the justification of their existence and actual relevance in the social milieu of presnet dday Africa. There is a present craze for modernization which, to many, invariable cannotes Westernization. This is characterized by technological advancement in virtually all spheres of life, including communication. But the pace of development in this sphere (communication) is much too slow to realize the goals of modenization which include socio-political development and integration into the mainstream of world affairs. The major focus, then, is the exposition of the obvious mendacity in the axiomatic d feeling  that Africa traditional modes of communication are old and should be regarded as mere evidence of the way our ancestors lived. The ultimate aim, therefore, is the exposition of the priomodial functions of these traditional modes as tools of development which ensure social balance in the society’s quest for intergration into the world socio-political system.

Africsn trational modes of communication were designed according to the dictates of tribal life. The way of life of the people determined the establishment of these modes of communication. The structure, form and content of the media were invariably determined by the various occupations of the people who made up the various communities (and, by extension, societies) at the time these communication modes were established. The people were homogenous in virtually everything, from occupation to soci0-political life. As a result, each mode of communication was not sharply separated. These processes conformed to the traditional media system, the face-to-face kind of relating to each other. This was, and still, is the pattern of life in traditional African codmology. These modes are still very relevant and they serve the communication needs of most African people.

It is necessary to stress here, that those who still rely on these tradtional modes for their information needs are the rural dweller who still experiences difficulty in their attempt to satisfy their information needs via the modern mass media. Thus, this traditional media system continues to sustain their information needs, as they trust and believe what they get from it, only supplementing it with whatever information they can get from other sources regarding events in other areas quite remote from their immediate environment. These rural dwellers make up over eighty per cent of the whole population Africa.

Traditional modes of communication were developed in Africa before the alphabet age of man. At that time the alphabet had not been developed and man was a creature in an acoustic space who knew and believed only what he could see, hear, touch, smell or taste, depending on the circumstances of the moment. Anything outside his environment was as good as non-existent. The world then, to man, was small and comunal, a world that was administered by the group or tribe. The tribe or group’s concern of the moment was usually predicated on natural changes and their consequences on man himself. There was no writing of any kind at the time, with man interacting with what was in his immediate vicinity. It was as if no one else existed and everything, every consideration, was centred around the tribe or group. It was a complex world governed through communal participation.

Everybody was closely knit. Everybody was involved in the affairs and decisions bothering on the concern of the society. The society was greater than the individual. Each man formed the daily reality of the others as everything was communally acquired, from very personal effects to the community’s property.

As result of this close relationship, nobody was separated from the tribe. It was a closely concatenated world in which whatever happened to any individual become public knowledge and, invariably, the concern of everyone else in a very short time.

The very nature of the environment, therefore, and the way the people related to themselves did not provide for the need to send information to far places. The longest distance information was required to travel was probably not more than a few kilometers.

The prevalent social and environmental factors, thus, compelled the African to evolve a way of communicating that best suited the circumstances in which he found himself. In response to the demands of these prevailing factors, these invented traditional modes of communiation, thus depended on the biological senses of man. The major demand of communication in the prevailing circumstance was for the sources to transmit his message or information in such a way that the receiver would see or hear it. In this way, the information needs of the African were fully served.

The rural communities of Africa today continues to operate their social system in this manner and the effective dissemination of information in these areas must obviously take cognizance of these factors, in which case the traditional modes of communication problems in progrmmes aimed at rural development stem from the failure to note the place of these traditional communication modes in the life of the rural people.

The place of traditional modes of communication in African cosmology can best be determined through the examination of the socio-cultural rerrain of present day Africa, vis-à-vis the world of communication. Perhaps it is necessary to state, at this point, that the purpose all mass communication activity in the rural areas is the response  of t people changes which threaten the established norms and values these societies.

But the ultimate aim of communication for development is the facilitation of the exchange of information for increase pruductivity and development (Goldhaber, 1983: p 426). This involves the facilitation of the exchange of information that engenders the cultivation of new attitudes, norms and values.

GARBA UAMAN

  KUW/U14/MCM/2016