| Chapter 1: | Introduction—Surveying the Cyberterrain of Developing Country Head of State Web Sites |
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The melding of these concurrent problems led Van Leuven and Pratt to note “there is little opportunity for practicing public relations in the Western sense of the term” (p. 95). Petersen, Holtzhausen, and Tindall found in a 2002 study that South African public relations practitioners do not work in the traditional Western-based division of roles, such as those identified by Broom and Smith (1979), and instead merge their roles as they increase their level of seniority. These studies suggest that public relations practice in Africa is subject to non-Western issues and challenges. According to Heath (2001), economic conditions in Africa must improve for public relations to develop. How technologies such as the Internet relate to the development of public relations on the continent has not been studied in detail. At the Group of Eight (G8) Summit in 2000, the head of one African non-governmental organization told an Argentinean journalist: “We can’t eat computers. People are dying.“8
Although the study of public relations practice in Africa might be an immature academic area, there are signs the continent is moving toward a greater recognition of the benefits of public relations. The literature is still heavily weighted toward the study of propaganda in many countries, with often only a peripheral recognition of how—if at all—public relations relates to propaganda. Rensburg (2002) believes South Africa, the continent’s most developed country, should take a leadership role as the “trendsetter of the African continent in the area of public relations education and practice” (p. 2). Perhaps to more uniformly share this responsibility, however, a Federation of African Public Relations Associations (FAPRA) formed in 1976, with a goal of intertwining development initiatives with public relations practices (Van Leuven & Pratt, 1996).
Literature by African scholars suggests that Western intervention has stinted the perception of the continent, and the media are largely to blame (Mutua, 1997): “[these foreign agencies] tell the Africans what the west thinks of Africans and what Africans think of the west and subsequently what Africans should think of themselves” (p. 1). The end result, according to Mutua, is the creation of African citizenry who are “puppets in the mesmerizing world of propaganda” (p. 1).