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African Journalism Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recq21
Participatory Journalism in Africa: Digital News
Engagement and User Agency in the South
by Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara and Admire Mare, New York, Routledge,
2021, ISBN: 98-0-367-19729-2, £44, 99.
Glenda Daniels
To cite this article: Glenda Daniels (2022) Participatory Journalism in Africa: Digital News
Engagement and User Agency in the South, African Journalism Studies, 43:2, 90-92, DOI:
10.1080/23743670.2021.1962635
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2021.1962635
Published online: 27 Aug 2021.
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BOOK REVIEWS
Participatory Journalism in Africa: Digital News Engagement and User Agency in
the South, by Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara and Admire Mare, New York, Routledge,
2021, ISBN: 98-0-367-19729-2, £44, 99.
It is now becoming a trend, especially in the journalism, media and communications fields, to
write textbooks that are both scholarly, that is, based in theory and clearly referenced, but
which are also readable and context-specific, politically and culturally.
Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara and Admire Mare’s book Participatory Journalism in Africa:
Digital News Engagement and User Agency in the South (Routledge Focus, 2021) is part of
this genre of being these three things: academic, readable and context-driven. Written and
delivered as such ensures students from first-year to post-graduate level can grasp the con-
cepts and deploy the methods in their own research. The book discusses how journalism’s
hegemony is threatened not just because of technology in and of itself, and therefore disrup-
tion to newsroom practices, but centrally, how the use of technology by audiences, who have
access, disrupts journalism.
Mabweazara and Mare capture the essence of the digital disruption in the media world, par-
ticularly for those in journalism, with a focus on how citizens participate, in the new ecosystem
—when they have access to the Internet—as not all are full participants. So this is about the
use of new technology, for communication, in the context of inequality.
Digital disruption refers to the radical changes afforded by digital technologies that disrupt
traditional ways of interacting and communicating, socially and professionally, says Routledge
Focus Series editor Bob Franklin in the foreword to the book. This disruption has affected
business models and newsroom practices, but also “prompts reconsideration of research
methods and analyses, and responses”,hereflects.
These disruptions have been documented everywhere and from different angles; for
example, the book The Gig Economy: workers and media in the age of convergence, edited by
Brian Dolber, Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Chenjerai Kumanyika and Todd Wolfson (Routledge,
2021) deals with the issue from a critical political economy lens. Another book, Journalists
and Job Loss (Routledge, forthcoming 2021) edited by Timothy Majoribanks, Lawrie Zion,
Penny O’Donnell and Merryn Sherwood scrutinises, in particular, journalists’precarity in the
journalist industry and trauma from their job losses around the world. In South Africa, the
issue of digital disruption has also been researched by Glenda Daniels from the first State of
the Newsroom volume: State of the Newsroom South Africa, 2013: Disruption and Transitions
(Wits Journalism, 2013), to the book: Power and Loss in South African Journalism: news in the
Age of social media (Wits Press, 2020) but both these works did not examine the twists and
turns of audience engagement.
This book, Participatory Journalism in Africa:Digital News Engagement and User Agency in the
South, takes up the challenge that Franklin speaks of, that is, reconsiderations of methods and
analyses. It also locates the study specifically in the sub-Saharan African region with the focus
on “participatory journalism,”i.e. citizenry engagement, blogging, social media, humour
among other genres of media and voice. Examining this other kind of communication, “allow-
ing other speak,”if you like, is a way to rethink methods of research. It also shows a different
kind of political power exercised by audience participation. The power of journalism has
always been examined from a mainstream journalism lens up until the technological disrup-
tion of the recent decades.
AFRICAN JOURNALISM STUDIES
2022, VOL. 43, NO. 2, 90–94
The authors explain how audience engagement occurs, who participates and what the
blockages are, and they attempt to deconstruct “participation”, how full it really is in terms
of the broad public sphere. In other words, is it just elites, who have always had access to
the traditional mainstream anyway? The question then is, if it is still the elites in sub-
Saharan Africa engaging with other elites, in English, is the current audience participation
not just another way of expressing, albeit with a slightly enlarged circle?
The book is an explication of how audience engagement redefines, in many ways, tra-
ditional one-way street, journalism, i.e. me the writer, you the reader. The authors describe
their approach in exploring participatory practices and cultures: “we broadly take a communi-
cative ecological approach that considers the interrelationships, and overlaps among the
different technologies”.
The book does the contextualisation of digitisation and the concomitant audience partici-
pation in the global south in a decolonial way, via grounding the cultural, political and econ-
omic conditions in the southern countries. Of course, they do not glibly talk of Africa as a
whole, as a homogenous region. In the continent, there are different political and economic
structures and processes, but there are some commonalities in mediation and communication
as well as expression in the digital age.
For example, participation parity does not exist in Africa, and this is one of the conclusions.
A barrier to enter as a user generator of content is Internet access and the cost of access, low
digital literacy skills and “linguistic capital”. Language is discussed at length as the majority of
voices on the internet and participation are English—a global north hegemony.
However, the optimistic moment in terms of the disruption of old ways of thinking is that
news organisations appear to be embracing digital participatory practices as part of their
everyday news-gathering and audience engagements. Technologies have ensured that jour-
nalism is no longer a one-way street. So, for the authors, there is indeed participation, albeit
in different ways from the old norms of the past.
One of the pessimistic turns in the digital age, known as “the dark side”, is the growing
hegemony of cybermisogyny, or the online trolling, abuse and vilification of women journal-
ists, and other women, who exercise their freedom of expression. This is emerging as one of
the biggest threats to media freedom today. The book unfortunately does not deal with
this terrible anti-feminist backlash in much detail. There is a small section devoted to it. It is
indeed, as the authors pronounce, an illusion of free speech if women are silenced in their par-
ticipation; therefore, this should be explored much more in research going forward. After all,
this is half the world’s population we are referring to.
The “other”forms of expression which are highlighted in this book are interesting.
Mabweazara and Mare discuss “unsolicited forms of participation”in Zimbabwe, which can
take the form of jokes, humour, cartoons and Photoshopped images, which are all becoming
part of the participation in media, as context-specific practices and cultures. They argue that
this is often a way of expression to get around freedom of expression under authoritarian
regimes, citing other researchers who have also written about the issue: Winston Mano
(2007) and Wendy Willems (2013), for example.
In some countries, such as Zimbabwe, where spaces of news engagement and information
flows are restrictive or largely “captured”by political and economic forces, the book quotes
Postema and Deuze (2020) on this, “ordinary”citizens often engage with mainstream news
and information through memes, jokes, gossip, rumours, cartoons, Photoshopped images
and satire circulated via SMS or platforms such as WhatsApp Messenger. “In some cases,
these peripheral communication forms have been used to break news or leak information
deemed to be in the public interest. Thus in contexts where invited space of news
AFRICAN JOURNALISM STUDIES 91
engagements are constrained, digitised forms of popular communication can serve as the
“voice of the voiceless”by offering sublet avenues of expression,”(Mano 2007, 61).
Good examples cited by the authors include a great joke about a goat, school fees and a
minister. I won’t tell the joke here, it would ruin you reading the book, which I encourage
you to do. It tells the story of going beyond the journalism of: I write, you read disruption,
but adds the textured layer of the economic, cultural, political particularisms in the discussions
and analysis of disruption in journalism and audience participation.
There are both universals and particularisms in this book, that is to say, universally journal-
ism is disrupted but how audience participation occurs differs in the sub-Saharan continent. It
is readable, with sparks of humour, but also a significant academic contribution, especially
within the foregrounding of decolonial thinking from the global south.
Glenda Daniels is an associate professor in Media Studies Wits University.
Glenda Daniels
Media Studies, associate professor, University of the Witwatersrand
Glenda.Daniels@wits.ac.za http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5150-5971
© 2021 Glenda Daniels
https://doi.org/10.1080/23743670.2021.1962635
Searching for a New Kenya: politics and social media on the streets of Mombasa,
by Stephanie Diepeveen, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 270 pp.,
$88 (ebook) and £85 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781108919593
Stephanie Diepeveen’s book has 11 chapters divided into four parts. The book emerges from
fieldwork that Diepeveen, a research associate at the University of Cambridge, conducted
between 2013 and 2017 in Mombasa, Kenya. The book investigates everyday talk and engage-
ment between publics both in the street and online on social media platforms. Through a very
thick description, the book brings some insights about the potential nature of and the extent
to which change can happen in publics in Mombasa by tracing stories of the people who par-
ticipate and observe/spectate on everyday forms of public talk with a specific focus on Bunge
La Wananchi, which is Swahili for People’s Parliament, and also focuses on online publics on
social media platforms as potential places for public talks and engagement in Mombasa.
Why is Mombasa important in this study? The city was and still is one of the major entry
points into Kenya since pre-colonial times. Diepeveen notes that the city was tied to external
networks, facilitated through movements around the Indian Ocean. In essence, it has a long
history of invasion and control. The Portuguese controlled Mombasa from the early sixteenth
century, the Omani Arabs took over in 1735, while the British colonial government took over in
the late 1800s. In between, the Indians also came over to construct the railway. In the 1920s, an
influx of people from mainland Kenya also moved to Mombasa. All these contributed to the
ethnic, class, religious and racial dynamics that make up the present-day city of Mombasa.
Diepeveen contributes to the studies on publics, which has been very vibrant and has also
been attracting scholarly interest for a long time, not just in Kenya, but globally. She traces the
emergence of street parliaments to pre-colonial Kenya with a mention of the print culture that
emerged in the coastal town in Kenya where Arabs, Indians and African nationalists used the
print media to articulate their ideas and some allowed readers’queries and reactions and pub-
lished letters to the editors. The emergence of radio stations like Sauti ya Mvita, and the
92 BOOK REVIEWS