Nowadays
it is no longer a surprise to see almost anyone with a smartphone in Africa,
great thanks to technology hence allowing users
to access the internet at unprecedented levels.
According
to a report published by GSMA on Africa’s mobile economy number of smartphone
connections across the continent almost doubled over the years, reaching 226
million. Selling prices have dropped from an average of $230 in 2012 to $160 in
2015.
It’s
no doubt this immense development has brought access to knowledge on food,
culture, economics and politics. With internet explosion, one would argue that
Africa would eloquently become informed due to availability of knowledge it’s
sad to note otherwise.
But
the question is, what do Africans do on internet: browsing, chatting,
researching or reading? Due to low levels of innovation and information
sharing, one would expect the African culture to find it more fun in reading
and researching due to a wide range of materials the internet provides.
Some
people are spotted spending countless hours on the internet and having one core
business there and certainly one of them is not actually reading. Primarily,
what most people do is engage into mindless arguing and professional trolling.
Even
with the availability of e-magazines and newspapers, the vast majority of
smartphone users continue to remain uninformed.
No
matter how accessible things have become, African culture is not just a reading
culture by evidence of how it preserved history orally and not literally with
barely any written records. This is evidenced by the effect it has had in
future generations.
Although
the twist was there during colonization when Africans begun to imitate the
missionary’s lifestyle of knowledge sharing and acquisition through reading:
the unfortunate thing is that this is no longer considered as a top priority in
modern Africa.
The
last type of reading has mostly remained in formal education of which the use
is not merely for the acquisition of knowledge but entirely to remain current
in the academic system and is wholly abandoned immediately formal education is
over.
Hiding
things to an African in Writing is entirely true, we prefer being told and not
to find out and ask how. Reading is powerful, and that’s the ultimate principle
of modernization.
A
professor of literature,
rhetoric, and writing said ,“The truth is that most of us read continuously in
a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book
reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancient regime (past), we now
read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries.”
Africa’s
illiteracy is indeed in its poor reading culture and not necessarily the
unavailability of information.
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