An Introduction to Communication, Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

because it comes at a time when communication scholars from the global South are increasingly challenging the dominance of Western modernity in communication and media studies. Many scholars have decried the U.S.–UK duopoly of communication and media scholarship as a colonizing ideology (e.g., Asante, 2011; Thussu, 2009); and some journalism programs in Kenya and other sub-Saharan African countries undoubtedly still use texts that are wholly American in content, theory, methods, and examples. At the International Communication Association’s (ICA’s) October 2016 regional conference in Nairobi, Kenya, numerous speakers encouraged Africans on the continent to produce their own textbooks, with contextually relevant and current examples and highlighting the work of African communication scholars. While many are quick to lament the lack of locally relevant texts, Rahab Nyaga, Dorothy Njoroge, and Charles Nyambuga deserve accolades for taking matters into their own hands and doing the work to produce a Kenyan text for Kenyan and other East African students. The three authors are all Kenyan scholars based at universities in the Nairobi vicinity. Nyaga, Njoroge, and Nyambuga’s text is also timely because sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, is grappling with the revolutionary impact of the Internet and the consequent digital divide, which the authors address. They effectively merge Western concepts and local perspectives in their text. In a brief statement (on the back cover of the book), they underscore the importance of communication as an academic discipline “in an increasingly connected and democratic world.” This is “a timely foundational book for students” because “students of communication require focused, practical and contextually appropriate books to ground them in the discipline.” The authors also stress the advantages of studying communication by asserting that it is “effective communication that puts individuals and institutions ahead of others” (back cover)