The Post-Bandung State and African Cultural Freedoms: Cultural Policy Initiatives from 1957 to 1994

This chapter takes a historical approach to contextualizing national cultural and media policies in Africa in the first four decades after the Bandung Conference (1955). The timeline is based on Ghana’s independence in 1957 and South Africa in 1994, the former representing the first Sub-Saharan African country to get independent while the latter representing the last. In decolonial cultural policy approaches, the Bandung Conference is an event of moral, conceptual, and political significance because it represents a historic moment in the conception of the decolonial state in Africa and its subsequent political, economic, and cultural decolonization vision and projects. Cultural decolonization, used here broadly to include media decolonization, was an important part of the African decolonization process. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses the role played by the early African states and liberation movements in the development of national cultural and media policies for the completion of the national decolonization project in the post colonies. The chapter brags a diverse mix of case studies drawn from North African Arab states and Sub-Saharan Africa, all demonstrating the resourcefulness and versatility of the early African governments in the initiatives for decolonizing cultural industries and wider society in the 1970s. The role of the African state is studied in tandem with that of the UNESCO, a very key international advisory agency in global cultural governance especially during the turbulent years of the 1970s and 1980s. The idea behind the study of the role of UNESCO demonstrates how national cultural policy and cultural governance was never a simple process, but a site of ideological contestation between the North and the South, the state and global cultural institutions, and the everyday people and the elites. This complexity was further compounded by the fact that the African state and state elites were often an appendage of colonial structure and ideologies, thus making real cultural freedom the most difficult ideal for the African people to achieve.