Modern Empire and the End of Cultural Policy in Africa

This chapter argues that the marketization and corporatization of national cultural policies in postcolonial Africa precipitated the collapse of the resistance cultural policies that were informed by the ideals of liberation and freedom and the revitalization of culture industries for the agency of colonial and racial subalterns. The modern empire, impressively protean in form and savagely colonial and capitalist in purpose, regarded the decoupling of national culture from decolonization struggles as quintessential for its survival as a reconfigured cognitive, metaphysical, and commercial entity in the twenty-first century. To neutralize the threat from resistance cultural policies coming from the Black/Pan-African/cultural/socialist/decolonial nationalist liberation movements of the 1970s, the modern empire quickly sought to re-align the idea of culture with that of subjective expressive consumption in the marketplace. It recast Africa’s struggles for cultural freedom from colonization as struggles against the African state for individuated lifestyle choices such as feminism, naturism, homosexuality, vegetarianism, and environmentalism. These internal sub-cultural and perspectival differences in the post-colony are important but should not overshadow the collective struggles for social and economic decolonization of the continent. The chapter also unpacks the mutating nature of the modern empire and how cultural policy has become one of its major political technologies for the control of postcolonial Africa. Most significantly, the chapter also takes the reader through the cultural recolonization of Africa through the imperial institutions and processes of the GATT, WTO, and GATS which form the colonial matrix that enforces a capitalist, free-market-based global neoliberal cultural order. The order deepens Western cultural flows through new forms of cultural imperialism that emasculate the postcolonial state from independently implementing cultural governance policies that protect the cultural freedoms of the people within its borders.