Introduction

This chapter introduces the main concepts and main arguments of the book. Briefly, the book focuses on the exigent need for postcolonial Africa to re-inscribe the transformative value of cultural policy into its progressive decolonial cultural politics of the twenty-first century. It argues that national cultural policies, and by extension culture itself, remain a key part of the puzzle for decolonizing African media, cultural industries, and societies. While there have always been moral panics that the instrumentalization of cultural policy can trigger the moral policing of society by the postcolonial state, I argue that the re-politicization of cultural policy in postcolonial Africa is a necessary moral and political project because culture defines, situates, and anchors the idea of African personality as a resistance imaginary in a time and space that are structured by the modern empire. The chapter also unpacks the theory of decolonial cultural policy studies which contends that the colonizer and the colonized cannot use a similar understanding of culture and cultural policies without the colonized running the risk of creating cultural industries and cultural systems that are in service of the colonizer in their own spaces. Since decolonial cultural policy studies regard the postcolonial problem as primarily lying in the need for the reconstitution of the cultural, the theory calls for a deliberate valorization of cultural policy as a decolonial approach to mitigating the cultural problems faced by post colonies. Cultural policy is used here primarily as a socio-political process by which a progressive postcolonial nation-state develops inclusive democratic processes for the participation of citizens to unthink and rethink the role of culture in constructing the kind of society they need for their well-being. From this perspective, national cultural policy in post colonies must be central to building a deeply decolonial, but also democratic and cosmopolitan national culture and identity.