Keeping Up with Cartography: A Call to Study African ...

10 Keeping Up with Cartography: A Call to Study African Communication ANN NEVILLE MILLER •

University of Georgia

Back in elementary school I can remember being confused that the twodimensional maps I saw in my schoolbooks presented such a very different picture of the world than did the globe in our living room. On the maps. North America and Asia were colossuses, greedily gobbling up the northern latitudes. South of the equator everything was small, unassuming, and drowning in ocean. Afriea appeared no larger than Greenland, though I could have sworn it should have been ten times as big. Shifting your gaze from a map to a globe was a sort of Alice-in-wonderland experience where the size of everything either blew up or shrank alarmingly. The maps, as I later leamed, were Mercator projections, designed in the Sixteenth Century to preserve the shape and direction of landmasses for navigational purposes, but at the expense of accuracy in size. In the days of sailing ships when distances were relative depending on the strength of the wind, direction was the more important issue, so the map was a valuable innovation. By the time I was saw them in my textbooks, though, critics were beginning to charge that they perpetuated the perception of the Southern hemisphere, particularly Africa, as inferior to the more developed North. In 1989, a group of seven North American geographical groups passed a resolution condemning the use of Mercator and similar projections as display maps (Mercator, 2004). Cartographic conventions have changed. Interestingly, however, the representation of the world available in intercultural communication research and theory bears a striking resemblance to the top-heavy maps that confused me as a child. A wildly disproportionate number of studies on North America and Asia inflates the significance of those cultures until they loom gargantuan over the rest of the world. Europe and the Middle East are regularly subjects of investigation. With the exception of Australia, the 214

A CaR to Study African Communication • 215 Southern hemisphere is scarcely represented in current literature, especially the continent of Africa, whose prestige as a source of knowledge or as a site for research and cross-cultural exchange is shrunken to insignificance. Admittedly, communication patterns of African nations are more frequently examined than those of Greenland, but not by much. This imbalance in intercultural communication scholarship has not gone unnoticed. In his survey of intercultural studies published in national and regional communication journals in the U.S. from 1980 to 1990, Shuter (1990) found numerous research reports on East Asia, but not a single investigation of African, Latin American, or Southeast Asian cultures. The situation was no different when he updated his review to encompass articles published from 1990 to 1995 (Shuter, 1997). Landis and Wasilewski (1999) made a similar critique as they assessed 22 years of publications in International Joumal of Intercultural Relations. Estimating that 75% of intercultural studies published over the previous two decades had dealt with just three nations—the U. S., Japan, and Israel—they urged the expansion of research efforts to previously under studied areas. In the field of crosscultural psychology, too, several voices have called for the extension of theory to less researched regions (Berry & Sam, 1997; Triandis, 2001). This is not to say that Africa has been altogether ignored in communication studies. Valuable contributions have been made in such areas as rhetoric (e.g., Albert, 1972; Keenan, 1975), language and identity (e.g., Dahl, 1995; Goody, 1982), and intergroup relations (e.g., Foster & Finchilescu, 1986). But these efforts are all too rare.'

A BRIEF CONTENT ANALYSIS OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION JOURNALS Exactly how distorted is our coverage of communication across the globe? Could Landis and Wasilewski possibly have been correct in estimating that three-quarters of intercultural studies in one journal examined just three countries? To get a more accurate idea I conducted content analyses of two sets ofjoumals. The first analysis was an extension of Shuter's consideration of general speech communication journals published in the U.S., both regional (Communication Quarterly, Communication Studies, Southern Communication Joumal, and Western Joumal of Communication) and national (Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, and Quarterly Joumal of Speech), picking up where he lefr off in 1996 and continuing through 2003. (For this analysis only journals on Shuter's

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original list were coded in order to make a direct comparison to his earlier figures, thus Joumal of Communication, Communication Research, Communication Research Reports and several other journals that might have fallen into the categories of national or regional speech communication journals were not included.) The second analysis examined the content of three U.S.-based journals whose focus is explicitly intercultural, and in which intercultural communication researchers are likely to publish: International and Intercultural Annual, Joumal of Intercultural Communication Research, and Intemational Joumal of Intercultural Relations, and one, Howard Joumal of Communications, that regularly publish intercultural papers. (For purposes of this paper only intercultural journals with a general readership in the discipline were included. Thus material from more specialized sources such as Africa-based journals, although it may indeed have implications for intercultural communication, was not part of the analysis.) In examining the general communication journals, Shuter's template of coding only those pieces that could be classified as falling into the category of intercultural communication was retained in order to facilitate a direct comparison to his earlier counts. Therefore, articles investigating differences between U.S. co-cultures were not coded at all, and articles in which U.S. culture was compared to another culture were considered to be investigations only of the latter. In other words, the present content analysis excluded any category for intercultural investigations of cultural contrasts within the domestic U.S. In both analyses cultures are equated with nations, not because I believe the terms to be equivalent, but because by far the greatest number of articles coded operationalized culture in that way. Since Shuter's most recent count ending in 1995, regional and national speech communication journals have published around 47 specifically intercultural articles. This is slightly higher than the publishing rate for the ten and five-year periods previously examined. Five of these recent articles were multi-nation studies that could not be assigned to a single culture in coding. Among the remaining 42 pieces, there was a slight increase in diversity of world regions studied over previous time periods. Although Shuter does not give exact numbers, he indicates that from 1980 to 1995, "the overwhelming majority" of intercultural studies concentrated on East Asia. From 1996 through 2003, in contrast, a total of 23 of the 42 studies addressed East Asian cultures: a majority but not an overwhelming one. Seven additional studies examined central and south Asian countries and the Middle East, bringing the total of intercultural studies about Asia to 30, or 72% of the total. The next most frequently studied region of the world was Europe, with eight articles, or 19% of the total. Six studies

A Call to Study African Communication • 217 included investigations of cultures in Latin America, and three focused on Oceana, comprising 14% and 7% of total studies respectively. Africa was subject of just two studies, one a case study of witchcraft accusation in a cultural group in Kenya (Westerfelhaus & Ciekawy, 1998) and the other including South Africa in a cross-cultural comparison of the ability to interpret facial expression in others (Swenson & Casmir, 1998). Even though there appears to be a gradual trend in national and regional speech communication journals toward expanding the range of cultures studied, Africa lags disproportionately behind as a locus of scholarly effort. Because it is not the mission of these journals to focus explicitly on intercultural communication, the total number of cross-cultural pieces in them is naturally small. A much larger sample of research reports is available in journals oriented specifically toward intercultural investigations. This paper considers the last ten years of four such publications: Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, a quarterly journal in the speech communication discipline explicitly devoted to intercultural study; InternationalJoumal ofIntercultural Relations, amulti-discipUnaiy journa] associated with the Society for Intercultural Education and Research; Interna-

tional and Intercultural Communication Annual, a yearly publication devoted to advances in intercultural communication theorizing; and Howard Journal of Communications, a journal carrying a large number of cultural investigations, particularly regarding U.S. co-cultures. It should be noted that International and Intercultural Communication Annual was examined in Shuter's (1990,1997) pieces, but because its stated mission is the exploration of communication across cultures, it was included here among journals of like purpose, and coded accordingly. In order to code the content of each journal, all articles in issues from 1994 through 2003 were first examined to determine whether they reported empirical research findings that examined either participants or texts from a specific culture (as opposed to pieces focused on arguing theory, presenting pedagogy or method, or discussing some aspect of the state of the discipline). All pieces that were identified as research reports were then coded according to the identity of cultures investigated, using journal articles as the unit of analysis (see table 1). Articles examining two cultures within a region were counted a single time, as containing information regarding that region. Articles comparing two cultures in different regions were counted twice, once for each culture they addressed. Because of this the combined counts for all regions is inevitably larger than the total number of research reports, and percentages in table 1 all add up to over 100. Reports about international sojoumers from a variety of cultures living in

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Table 1

Cultures studied in interculturally focused journals from 1994-2003

Number of studies investigating each region North America Asia Europe Middle East Latin America/Caribbean Africa Oceana Multi-nation studies Total number of Intercultural research Reports**

Int'l & Jnl of Intercultural Int'l Jnl of Comm. Intercultural Intercultural Comm. Res. Annual Relations 32 (.64) 62 (.53) 108 (.46)* 17 (.34) 45 (.38) 76 (.33) 5 (.10) 22 (.09) 17 (.15) 2 (.04) 29 (.12) 3 (.03) 2 (.04) 13 (.06) 12 (.10) 2 (.04) 4 (.03) 17 (.07) 4 (.03) 0 (.00) 18 (.08) 6 (.05) 0 (.00) 6 (.03) 50 117 233

Howard Jnl of Comm. 151 21 2 3 8 13 1 0

(.86) (.12) (.01) (.02) (.05) (.07) (.00) (.00)

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* Proportion of total studies investigating region in question. ••Because some articles investigated cultures from more than one region of the world, the numbers assigned to each continent necessarily add up to more than the total numher of articles.

a particular host culture were recorded under the host culture. In cases where investigations considered immigrants, refugees, or ethnic groups within a larger culture, they were counted under the majority culture only. Thus, an article about Japanese Americans was considered as studying U.S. culture, but an article about Japanese businesspersons doing business or living temporarily in the U.S. was counted under both Japan and the U.S. This decision was made in order to be consistent in the focus on nondiaspora cultures as the subject of investigation. The most striking aspect of the distribution of studies in these interculturally oriented publications is that by far the largest percentage address North American and Asian cultures. In all journals except Howard Joumal, over one-third of studies involved Asian cultures, and studies of Asian cultures were more than twice as numerous as the next most frequently studied region. In Joumal of Intercultural Communication Research especially, the trend Shuter (1997) noted of cross-national studies in which two or more East Asian cultures were compared to one another is evident. At the other extreme, Oceana is little researched across all journals, but being much less populous than the other regions (less than 5% of the population of either Latin America or Africa [United Nations, 2002]), it is relatively well represented in the research articles examined.

A Call to Study African Communication • 219 Table 2

African cultures studied in all joumals surveyed from 1994-2003

Nation Africa in general Botswana Burkina Faso East Africa Egypt Ethiopia Kenya Lesotho Madagascar Morocco Nigeria South Africa Tanzania Total

Number of studies 5 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 5 16 1 38*

* Total includes 36 articles from interculturally focused joumals and 2 from national and regional joumals.

Beyond their overwhelming attention on the U.S. and Asia, the jotirnals differ in emphasis. With the exception The Howard Journal of Communications, however, they are consistent in one other respect: Africa comes out at the bottom of all lists. The Howard Joumal of Communications alone gives more equitable attention to Africa, where it is the third most studied region after North America and Asia. Out of the 36 studies across all joumals that examined African cultures, fifteen involved South Africa, seven of which were in a single special issue of Intemational Journal of Intercultural Relations devoted to post-apartheid race relations (see table 2). The other 50+ countries on the African continent were subjects in fewer than 4% of papers published over the past ten years in the joumals analyzed.^ The paucity of inquiry into cotnmunication in Africa is also manifest in the treatment of the continent within communication scholarship as essentially homogeneous with respect to communication practices. Although several recent articles make comparisons among cultures of multiple East Asian nations, and Western nations are compared to one another (e.g. Kim, 1994; Park & Levine, 1999; Singelis & Brown, 1995), African cultures are so little distinguished from each another that the names of African nations rarely even appear in literature reviews of cultural practices. Whereas individual cultures in Europe and East Asia may be singled out, African cultures are often lumped together under the continental moniker

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(e.g. Andersen, Hecht, Hoobler, & Smallwood, 2003, p. 80), if indeed they not simply omitted from discussion (e.g. Lim, 2004; Ting-Toomey & Oetzel, 2003). Even in Hofstede's landmark study (1980), data from African nations were aggregated into two regions—East and West Africa—whereas value orientations of all other nations were reported individually. Africans themselves, on the other hand, are acutely sensitive to cultural differences in communication both regionally and locally, and shape both their expectations and communication behaviors accordingly (e.g. Angogo & Hancock, 1978; Mazrui & Maznii, 1996). Admittedly, the totalizing of African experience is meaningful for some purposes because of the shared history of colonialism and post-colonialism across most of the continent, just as it is appropriate to aggregate nations of Europe and of the Pacific rim for particular purposes. However, the common practice of essentializing of Africa and erasing its intraregional diversity—especially in the midst of discussions of cultural distinctives—betrays at best a cultural naivete.

REASONS THE IMBALANCE Why is a continent second only to Asia in proportion of world population assigned to the fringes of a discipline avowedly global in scope? Much of Africa has been egregiously exploited and colonized, and some believe it continues to be victimized by economic imperialism in the guise of development (Airhihenbuwa, 1995; Amin, 2003). Were we to assign the blame to a politically and ideologically motivated devaluation of all that is African—apparently shared by mainstream scholarship no less than by global economic institutions—it would perhaps not be unreasonable. Availability of funds is another possible explanation for the uneven distribution of cross-cultural research (Landis and Wasilewski, 1999). From a purely practical standpoint, the economic strength of Asian nations have made it imperative for U.S. individuals and companies to communicate competently across East-West cultural boundaries. In contrast, national economies in Africa have stagnated and even declined in recent decades. Only recently has Africa become more important economically as traditional petroleum sources have begun to dry up. With the continent accounting for less than 2% of total world trade (World Bank, 2000, p. 9), learning about communication patterns there may not have been seen as essential. Thus in certain areas ofthe field, such as development or health conimunication (e.g. Airhihenbuwa & Obregon, 2000; Diop, 2000; Obregon, 2003; Singhal & Rogers, 2003), studies situated in African contexts are more

A Call to Study African Communication • 221 numerous, because it is understood that the knowledge of the means, for example, of constructing effective public health campaigns in the face of mounting HIV/AIDS prevalence rates is crucial (Kalipeni, Craddock, & Ghosh, 2004). In the realm of interpersonal communication—for example business negotiations, employer-subordinate relations, or small group decision making—such a need is not yet felt by the North American scholarly community.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE IMBALANCE The scarcity of intercultural communication research on African cultures is more than a problem of inequitable geographic distribution of academic effort. It jeopardizes research and theory across the entire field in several ways. First, the failure to include African cultures in cross-cultural communication studies leads to untested generalizations of statements regarding cross-cultural validity of U.S.-originated theory. A common type of study published in intercultural communication literature remains theory validation, in which culture functions as ' 'a research laboratory for testing the validity of communication paradigms" (Shuter, 1990, p. 238). In the past ten years, U.S. communication journals have considered culture as a variable affecting such outcomes as predisposition to verbal communication (Kim, Klingle, Sharkey, Park, Smith, & Cai, 2000;), integrative and distributive bargaining in international negotiation (Cai, Wilson, & Drake, 2000; Drake, I. E., 2001), conflict styles (Cai & Fink, 2002; Ting-Toomey, Masumoto, Yokochi, Pan, Takai, & Wilcox, 2001), preferred forms of requesting (Kim, Shin, & Cai, 1998), and student response to instructor non-verbal immediacy (McCroskey, Fayer, Richmond, Sallinen, & Barraclough, 1996) , among other topics. The generalizability of some of these findings may well be less than what is attributed to them, by virtue of the fact that they are so rarely extended to African contexts. For example, no construct has had greater impact on cross-cultural psychology and communication research than individualism-collectivism (Matsumoto, 2001). Promulgated by Hofstede (1980) in his study of IBM employees in 40 -I- nations, the concept is seen as providing an explanation for a constellation of systematic differences in communication behavior across cultures (Gudykunst, 1998). However, the evidence cited to support the claim that, for instance, persons in collectivistic societies are more likely than those in individualist societies to prefer indirect requests to direct ones, to be unconcerned with clarity in conversation, and to be careful

222 • SECTION V: UNDERTHEORIZED PLACES to avoid hurting others (see Ting-Toomey, 1994), is based primarily on research comparing U.S. with East Asian cultures. As Triandis (2001) acknowledges, we do not yet know exactly what collectivism in Africa even looks like. Several illustrations of the unpredictable—at least within our current state of knowledge—character of collectivism in Kenya may be instructive. These examples are drawn from the author's experiences living over nearly a decade as a U.S. citizen in Nairobi, and from discussions with Kenyan colleagues. On the one hand, privileging the needs of the group over those of the individual, a defining component of the collectivist orientation (Triandis, 1990; 1995), is a feature readily identifiable in daily life in Nairobi. Weddings and funerals of relatives, no matter how distant, require attendance at all-day celebrations and frequently overnight journeys by bus to and from; extended family members regularly take in needy nieces and nephews and assume the cost of schooling and clothing them for years on end; practices such as payment of bride price by the family of the groom bespeak the union not of individuals, but of families through a set of longestablished rituals, etc. Communicative outcomes of this orientation, however, do not always align with theoretical predictions. Whereas theory would lead us to anticipate that collectivists would be inclined toward self-effacement and deference, and individualists toward self-aggrandizement (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sakamoto cited in Triandis, 1995), many Kenyans seem as comfortable as are U.S. Americans with self-aggrandizing behaviors. Educators with experience in teaching both Kenyans and East Asians are likely to note the striking difference in self-presentation of academic capabilities, with East Asian students adopting a much more self-abasing persona. In applications for both jobs and promotions, Kenyans may claim for themselves what could appear to an outsider to be unrealistic capabilities. Their doing so may be tied to a number of circumstances including the high unemployment rate in Kenya, or paucity of highly trained personnel for certain positions. Nonetheless, this type of self-differentiating, self-insistent talk is a cultural trait theoretically expected from members of individualist rather than collectivist societies. Indirectness, another discourse quality often linked to collectivist societies (Triandis, 1995), is also not consistently in evidence within Kenyan communicative practice. To be sure, an elder giving advice to a youth may speak in proverbs and metaphors, and a tourist inquiring when his shoe will be repaired may be told for multiple consecutive days that it will be ready "tomorrow.'' On the other hand, many an American exchange student

A Call to Study African Communication • 223 in Kenya has been nonplussed at the unsolicited opinion from a female friend that the outfit she has chosen to wear that day is not flattering, or that she should add some make-up to hide a particularly noticeable blemish. Even more startling may be the blunt statement of a male acquaintance that he is interested in a sexual relationship. Much Kenyan speech is direct indeed. Collectivists are also presumed to be more likely than individualists to employ confiiet management techniques that build upon strong concern for other-face, such as avoiding, integrating, and obliging (Ting-Toomey, 1994; Ting-Toomey et al., 2001). Urban Kenyans who find themselves in confiiet with their superiors—whether bosses, parents, or civil authorities— may well exhibit a degree of the predicted preference for these strategies and even obtain the assistance of intermediaries. When it comes to disputes among equals, though, assertive strategies are frequently enacted. Siblings and friends confront one another over disagreements; shoppers bargain aggressively with merchants. Eace negotiation theory admits the possibility of culture-level variation in confiiet styles, but little is known about confiiet patterns in Africa. A recent review of literature by Ting-Toomey and Oetzel (2003) included sections on Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American confiiet patterns, but no studies specifically focusing on African cultures. These observations suggest that considering face needs strictly within the individualist/coUectivist orientation may not be a sufficiently nuanced approach (Suedo, 1995). At the very least, the possibility of an array of interactions between individualist/coUectivist orientation and topical, contextual, and relational factors in African cultures needs to be explored. Beyond this, sampling from a range of cultures may suggest rather profound refinements to existing theory (e.g. Starosta, 1976). Individualismcollectivism, power distance, hi-low context communication have each been presented as comprised of distinct, oppositional categories, or at best bipolar continua (Gudykunst, 1998). It may be that this perception is due to the fact that they have been primarily studied in two regions of the world. That is, an East-West continuum has been created in a sense by connecting just two geographic dots. A close scrutiny of African patterns of communication may well indicate that these concepts could be more usefully construed as multiple configurations. The diversity in communicative behaviors among cultures labeled as collectivist could signal that rather than attempting to associate cultural differences in communication with the one-size-fits-all explanation of individualism/collectivism, it would be more useful for researchers to consider more specific values orientations separately. Alternative conceptualizations are already available (e.g. Chinese Culture Connection, 1987; Condon & Yousef, 1975; Kluckhohn &

224 • SECTION V: UNDERTHEORIZED PLACES Strodtbeck, 1961; Schwartz, 1992), but scholars who approach African societies from an emic perspective, rather than depending upon Western, or even East Asian, originated categories (Mudimbe, 1988) may identify new constructs altogether. Foundations for such conceptualizations, particularly in the area of political communication but also with respect to interpersonal and development communication, might be located in part within the rich literature available from the first post-independence generation of African scholars and statesmen like Nkrumah (1964), Cabral (1970), Fanon (1966), Kenyatta (1965), and Diop (1966), among others. Afrocentric scholars have already proffered the idea of nommos—the centrality and power of language within African cultures—as a potentially distinct characteristic of African communication (Asante, 1987; Jackson, 1999). (Would the broad field of intercultural communication benefit by considering high nommos/ low nommos as a dimension upon which to array and analyze cultures from around the globe?) Other possibilities await conceptualization. Finally, an understanding of African communication has ramifications for the periodic attempts of thinkers both within and outside the communication discipline to envision the ultimate intercultural communicator. The individual who could comfortably transverse cultural boundaries—call him/her "multicultural man" (Adler, 1982), "universal person" (Walsh, 1973), "international person" (Lutzker, 1960), or label this state of cultural convergence "intercultural personhood" (Kim, 1987)—has been portrayed as managing to incorporate the most positive features of the contrasting Eastern and Westem cultural traditions into a single, supracultural, personally satisfying whole. The contradictory assumptions of these two worldviews— the material, linear, dualistic approach of the West vs. the spiritual, cyclical, unified perspective of the East—are creatively synthesized in this global human. Scholars who sketch the possibilities of this meeting of East and West (e.g. Kincaid, 1989) are not necessarily denying the existence of African (or other Southern Hemispheric) vantage points from which the ultimate questions of life may be answered, but the persistent focus on East/West dichotomies discounts the possibility of variation across ndimensional space, rather than just across a one-dimensional continuum. Rather than negotiating a midpoint between the poles of East and West, many Africa worldviews leap out in an orthogonal dimension (Eze, 2000). The orientation of African cultures toward God, humanity, nature, existence, the cosmos, life, death, sickness, and other philosophical issues that infiuence their members see the world (Samovar, Porter, & Stefani, 1998) requires a different set of descriptors. It is not within the scope of this paper to explore this proposition extensively, but several examples of

A CaR to Study African Commimication • 225 the way some African cultures paradoxically combine what appear to be oppositional East-West tensions may serve to illustrate the point. First, in many African societies, the world is saturated with the spiritual as in the Eastern perspective, but is at the same time material and non-illusory as in the West (Gyekye, 1987; Idowu, 1973). There is no separation of the sacred and the profane; the whole of existence is a religious phenomenon. Objects, places, names, illnesses, weather patterns all have religious significance. Spirits, ancestors, and the supreme God are as real as the solid, material world. Furthermore, knowledge is acquired through the metaphorical and contextual experience of life on the land. The individual is seen as inextricably linked to the earth and to the space about him/her in a way that neither the detachment of the West nor the oneness of the East adequately captures (Wiredu, 2000; Zahan, 1970). Mythical symbols and ritual acts impact this space in that they "not only 'say' what reality is, but they also shape the world to conform with this reality" (Ray, 1976, p. 17; see also Goody, 1995). Finally, time, for some African peoples, is construed as neither cyclical like Eastern time, nor indefinitely linear like Western time. Rather, it has been proposed that African time may be conceived of as two-dimensional, including zamani (past) and sasa (present), but with future virtually absent (Mbiti, 1971). Humans draw their understanding of the meaning and responsibilities of life from looking back to the wisdom of the ancestors (p'Bitek, 2000), and eventually, upon death, slip into the same realm themselves. All of this raises the possibility of one final reason for the omission of Africa in communication research. Western culture and scholarship at the Millennium may well have a greater degree of affinity with Asian thought than ever before (Newbigen, 1986). The rejection of dichotomistic thinking and recognition of alternative voices renders recent scholarly perspectives compatible with Eastern views of the illusory nature of apparent contradictions. In contrast, the extent to which the post-structuralist metaframework is can coexist with African worldviews, at least those south of the Sahara, has scarcely been explored. It may be that the frank acceptance by some African perspectives of a concrete but invisible spiritual reality that exists alongside the visible material one—whether that reality consists of witchcraft, magic, or traditional Christianity and Islam—is an orientation that neither modern nor post-modern cultural trends can comfortably accommodate. Africa is earthy, different, difficult. METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES How, then, should research on Africa be conducted? The criticism by p'Bitek of the research efforts of another field is pertinent: "Western

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scholars have never been genuinely interested in African religions per se. Their works have all been part and parcel of some controversy or debate in the Western world" (t970, viii). There is, of course, a tremendous risk in issuing a call for the study of Africa to a discipline at large. Even if non-African communication scholars do recognize the value of its cultural modes of expression, Africa may yet again become an "other" in need of being spoken for, a "them" that " w e " need to explain. There is the chance, too, as in all cross-cultural research, that even well intentioned researchers viewing its practices with a Westernized gaze will inadvertently misrepresent cultural codes and meanings (Achebe, 1975; Airhihenbuwa, 1995; Ngugi, 1986). The risks of exoticizing or just plain misunderstanding African communication are real. But the costs of continuing to ignore Africa are too dear not to challenge the collectively lopsided view of the world that currently characterizes the discipline. The question then becomes what research methodology is most appropriate for studying Africa. Some proponents of an Afrocentric worldview assert that African communication is most appropriately studied humanistically, or perhaps ethnographically, and call for specific methods (e.g., Asante, t999; Jackson, 1999; Taylor & Nwosu, 2001). The empowering, participatory method of Brazil's Paulo Friere (1972, 1978), who worked in both Tanzania and Guinea-Bissau, has been applied across the developing world including Africa. From the field of cross-cultural psychology, rigorous guidelines offered by van de Vijver (2001) for establishing construct, structural, measurement unit, and scalar equivalence in cross-cultural research provide a lofty standard for quantitative research. In fact, his discussion of bias is useful for guiding an eclectic assortment of research methods as they address African communication. Construct bias, for instance, notwithstanding the association of the term with quantitative techniques, is a concern whenever a researcher transports a definition across cultural boundaries—whether that construct is gendered communication or nonverbal immediacy. Method bias, too, may be seen not only in the different connotations assigned to Likert-type scales, but to the culturally determined dynamics of focus group interaction. These are realities, biases if you will, that researchers from every methodological camp will encounter if they attempt to investigate communication in African societies. Nevertheless, the attempt at cross-cultural research must be made, and a number of issues ripe for exploration by a variety of methods come readily to mind. Racial reconciliation in South Africa, for instance, an area on which rhetorical scholars have begun to focus but which intercultural communication scholars have been slower to address, is a topic that has

A CaR to Study African Communication • 227 deep significance for study of race and rapprochement in other nations. Peace and reconciliation in Rwanda and Burundi is less studied but no less important. The impact of development and communication policies on Africa is another issue that, while briefly considered by communication scholars interested in the New World Economic and Information Orders, has generated little interest from intercultural communication scholars since the t980s. Perhaps most obviously, on a continent that is home to over two-thirds of people currently living with HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS, 2003) but where only two percent of those who need it have access to anti-retroviral therapy (lUSfDP, WHO, UNAIDS cited in Panos, 2004), understanding health communication at both mass and interpersonal levels is critical to combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic through behavior change. At present, however, Africa is apparently so far from the center of intercultural communication literature as to be beyond the margins. The currents of research occasionally stray briefly near the continent's northern and southern edges, but the remainder of that vast and richly cultured people remains virtually uncontemplated. That this indicates undervaluing of African people and cultures is perhaps obvious. That it represents a weakness in the understanding of communication across the globe is less obvious but equally true. It is time for the field of intercultural communication to emulate the example of cartography and discards its distorted representations of the planet. It is time we studied Africa.

NOTES 1. It should be noted that within the field of communication, adherents of the Afdcalogical, or Afrocentdc, paradigm are vocal in decrying the relegation of people and societies of African origin to the forgotten edges of inquiry. In response to the systematic minimizing of African contributions to knowledge and history, these scholars propose an altemative world view, one that revolves around the transcendent themes of human relationship to community, to the supematural, and to the self (Asante, 1987). These themes are understood to be common to millions of members of African, or African-descended, societies. This paper strongly affirms the critique by Afrocentric theorists of the marginalization of African cultures and worldviews, but stops short ofthe assumption inherent in some Afrocentdc writings (e.g. Asante, 1987; Asante, 1999; Baldwin, 1980) of the essential unity between Afdcan source and diaspora cultures. Although commonalities undoubtedly exist, absent specific findings of overlapping communication patterns, isomorphism between continental Afdca and the Afdcan diaspora cannot be presumed. Thus,

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the focus of this paper is on the state of communication research regarding source cultures on the African continent. 2. To some degree this invisibility in current quarterly and annual intercultural communication research publications is applicable not only to Africa, but to Central and South America as well. At least in the journals coded, the entire Southern hemisphere—with the exception of Australia—is but meagerly researched. However, unlike Africa, which has seemingly never captured the imagination of the field, Latin America has historically been of interest to a number of researchers beginning with Hall (1959, 1976) and his foundational work in the 60s and 70s, and continuing in the writings of Condon (Condon, 1985; Condon & Yousef, 1975), and others. Much of that research has already been integrated into the canon of mainstream intercultural theory, especially in the area of non-verbal codes. The fact that there has been relatively little follow-up within communication studies in recent years may be due to the assumption that U.S. Latino cultures experience considerable population exchange with the source nations, and thus studying US Latino/as is tantamount to studying the source cultures. Whether that is an accurate assumption may be open to question, however it is clear that the level of population exchange between African Americans and source cultures in Africa is dramatically lower. Had the coding scheme even allowed for coding of studies on first generation Latino/a immigrants under their heritage cultures, the proportion of studies relating to Latin American cultures would have approximately doubled. The invisibility of Africa in intercultural communication research seriously diminishes the generalizability of current theorizing, prevents the development of more sophisticated understanding of human communication worldwide, devalues an entire continent.

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