Institute of African Studies

This chapter is introductory. It is indistinctly but methodically divided into two parts. The first part, in addition to exposing the fundamentals, particularities and current state of affairs of political communication in Africa slightly relative to its Global North counterparts, analytically catalogues the woes such as tardiness, negligence, conceptual misunderstanding, imposition of Western culture/tenets and media domination thwarting the institutionalization and entrenchment efforts of a theoretico-practically autonomous African political communication and offers some key suggestions useful for prognostications. The second part of the chapter coherently synopsizes the various arguments cerebrally advanced by the contributors of the rest thirteen chapters. The coinage of the word policom by the authors of the current chapter as it appears in the title above was borne out of the need to abridge the phrase " political communication " to allow for a shortened title, a purpose equally servable by a second coinage, afropolicom, that is " African political communication " .

This work philosophically responds to what one could call the domination by the social scientific scholarship, of the discourse of emancipation, in Africa. Using the research methods of critical analysis and reflective argumentation, the work makes two fundamental and justifiable claims. The first claim is that the concept of emancipation is significant in the human history of Africa, given its inglorious past experience of slavery, colonisation, and the existing neo-colonialism. Expectedly, given that emancipation is mainly reduced to a phenomenon of social scientific research, there is a rich and diverse scholarly discussion of emancipation as development from social sciences in Africa. However, the diverse richness of such scholarly discussion is still intellectually impoverished by the limited philosophical angle of the extant literature on emancipation in Africa and insufficient attention to some other central issues in the concept. Consequently, the second claim responds by calling for a well-worked-out, holistic philosophy of emancipation that exposes and addresses core issues in the contemporary plight of the African state, thereby attending to the problematic issue of reductionism and insufficiency of scholarly coverage in the traditional discussion of emancipation in Africa. Therefore, we attempt a discursive articulation of such a philosophy of holism as positive transformation, identifying the metaphysical, the moral, the logical, and the epistemic levels of analysis of emancipation in the post-colonial African state. Sumário Este trabalho, filosoficamente, responde ao que se poderia chamar a dominação pelo pensamento das ciências sociais, do discurso da emancipação, na África. Usando os métodos de análise crítica e reflexiva a argumentação de investigação, o trabalho faz duas afirmações fundamentais e justificáveis. A primeira alegação é que o conceito de emancipação é relevante na história humana na África, dada a sua experiência do passado inglório da escravatura, colonização e do neo-colonialismo existente. Sem dúvida, dado que a emancipação é, principalmente, reduzida a um fenómeno de pesquisa científica social, não há discussão académica rica e diversificada de emancipação como o desenvolvimento das ciências sociais em África. No entanto, a riqueza da diversidade de tal discussão académica ainda é intelectualmente empobrecida. Na perspetiva filosófica, é limitada pela literatura existente sobre emancipação na África e atenção insuficiente para algumas outras questões centrais no conceito. Consequentemente, a segunda alegação responde propondo que haja um trabalho bem