The Crisis of Normativity in African Cultures: Toward New Higher Order Ethics for Cultural Industries

This chapter argues that cultural industries in postcolonial Africa are characterized by a deep-seated crisis of normativity which undermines their transformative power to deliver substantive cultural freedoms to wider society. Reminiscent of societies that are emerging from protracted histories of slavery and colonialism, and countenancing gripping neocolonial futures, the crisis of normativity in postcolonial Africa points to a multidimensional societal neurosis characterized by a deep, society-wide, cultural paralysis symbolized by a crisis in moral and ethical value systems and the decay of socio-cultural institutions in the culture industry. It is a cultural death of a living breathing people whose cultural values, symbols, languages, spirituality, and cosmologies have been emptied of agency and mummified as meaningless practices that bear no significance to their worldviews, sense of community, and self-determination. This neutralization of African value systems is exacerbated by the wholesale imposition of European value systems and their capitalist, empiricist, formalist, and rationalist ethics across cultural industries and society. Empiricist, formalist, and rationalist ethics entrench the coloniality of ethics in African cultural production. The chapter further unmasks the military and market logic of duty and utilitarian ethics of the news media and journalistic practices as representing hegemonic universals of the value systems of the modern colonial and monotheist order. It concludes by calling for Afri-ethics, an alternate moral and ethical framework that seeks to navigate, counteract, and domesticate hegemonic moral and ethical universals to local social and historical conditions. Afri-ethics anchor Africa’s cultural production on the idea of liberation ethics as an ethics of cultural production that nurtures life (not death), hope (not despair), humanity (not profits), resistance (not domination), freedom (not oppression), empathy (not destruction), peace (not conflict), and dialogue (not drama). As liberation ethics, Afri-ethics criticizes the Cartesian logic undergirding rationalist and empiricist ethics and restores the centrality of re-humanization over dehumanization in cultural industries.