Conclusion

Indigenous language media in Africa function to meet the communication, social interaction, information, educational, development and entertainment needs of people. They play a significant role in shaping language pride and language choice, in the process of informing communities about various socioeconomic developments. Indigenous African language media are part of the African indigenous communication system including music, drama, storytelling, proverbs and poetry. This book has demonstrated the various uses and applications of indigenous language media such as music, film, radio broadcasts in indigenous languages, non-verbal communication cues, town criers, graffiti and other traditional communication tools in a modern setting. A common message across all the chapters is that indigenous language media in Africa in their various formats occupy a very important role in society by mediating the realities around us, entertaining us through film, music, poetry, etc. and of course supporting the development process by mobilising marginal communities to participate in, for example, public health campaigns and democratic processes such as elections. Specifically, indigenous language films bring a fresh perspective to the cultural and creative industry. The use of indigenous languages is not limited to traditional media as there is interesting evidence on the increasing use of indigenous language media in digitally driven social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. Scholars in this book view social media as breathing spaces for minoritised languages. There are still some challenges in using indigenous languages in social media spaces. This could be attributed to the fact that youths who in most cases constitute most social media users are unable to fully write and read in indigenous African languages because they regard them as lacking in sophistry. Indigenous language media such as African language newspapers remain in a precarious position because of a variety of political economy challenges present in Africa including the digitalisation conundrum. Studies in this book have demonstrated how indigenous language newspapers have migrated to online platforms to continue with the business of providing news and information in a digital era. Even though some indigenous communication forms are seemingly archaic in today's digital society, they still have relevance and can be used with varying success to send communication messages. In Nigeria, indigenous communication forms such as the use of palm leaves, burning of tyres, chanting, and dancing as well as the female gender stripping naked in public have been used as protest communication to draw the attention of the authorities to public grievances. The use of indigenous communication forms is despite the recent diffusion of digital technologies and utopian assumptions that digital technologies can easily usher in democratisation across the whole African continent based on the success of the Arab Spring revolutions of the early 2010s in North Africa. The Arab Spring revolutions were a series of anti-government protests that started in Tunisia in 2010 and spread into Morocco, Libya and Egypt in 2011, disposing authoritarian regimes in those countries. Indigenous communication forms can still be effectively used to inform authorities of citizen discontent and to communicate messages that can impact policy formulation. Radio broadcasts in indigenous languages promote participation and empowerment of minority and special interest groups such as women. The importance of indigenous language media has been heightened during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of the ongoing COVID-19, indigenous language media have been applied to increase awareness of the pandemic among marginal communities to prevent new infections through the adoption of appropriate health and hygiene behaviours. Using indigenous languages to communicate about COVID-19 is part of cultural promotion and preservation as the languages are prevented from further decay or death. Studies in this book also make unique theoretical contributions that gravitate towards the critical tradition to understand the phenomenon of indigenous language media in Africa. For example, radical feminism is used to analyse the content of indigenous language films in Zimbabwe. The study of indigenous language media remains a critical enterprise, and we urge other scholars interested in this field to carry on the work by focusing on themes and topics that were not exhaustively covered in this volume. For example, there is a need for future studies that are strongly founded on the critical theory tradition. Critical theory research is concerned with a critique of society focusing on domination, alienation, social struggles and the attainment of social justice. Research on indigenous language media in African foundation on critical theory will be more concerned with the dominance of Western-styled media of mass communication in Africa and how such dominance can be overturned by prioritising indigenous languages and indigenous language media with a potential of influencing and shaping policy. Most studies on indigenous language media in Africa as demonstrated in this book are still founded on qualitative methods. This is because qualitative methods are best suited to study indigenous language media in Africa as in their nature they seek to describe and understand a phenomenon in greater detail. Another reason for the predominance of qualitative studies in this book is because qualitative research is linked to interpretivism which views social reality as socially constructed and contextual. Therefore, the studies are contextually grounded by providing the unique experiences, uses and applications of indigenous language media in Africa's different geographic locations. Qualitative methods of textual analysis such as thematic analysis, content analysis and critical discourse analysis are predominantly used in data analysis. The case study approach is also frequently used to research peculiar issues about indigenous language media outlets or publications. There remains a need to conduct ethnographically grounded studies that explore how indigenous language media are produced and consumed across different contexts and cultures. Production-based ethnographies may focus on newsroom routines in the context of digitisation, motivations and skill base of African language journalists. There is also a growing need for research on indigenous language media that has pragmatic outcomes and has the potential to impact decision-making or policy shifts. Future research on indigenous language media in Africa should adopt an activist stance that deliberately aims to save indigenous languages from extension and protects such media from unfair market forces which tend to favour the dominant media that publishes in colonial languages such as English, Portuguese and French. For this we call for research that comes with actionable recommendations that function to save indigenous language media from the brink of collapse. There is a need to vary the case studies used to understand indigenous language media or to use the same case studies differently by applying new lines of inquiry and alternative theorising. With regard to film, we encourage more studies that focus on the appropriation of indigenous language films in Africa. As one of the authors has stated, there is a need for more studies on the effects of patriarchy/matriarchy in indigenous language films from the viewers' and the actors' perspectives. There is also potential for indigenous language media to improve the variety of content it offers. There are calls to have context-specific and sensitive programming that addresses the plight of people with disabilities in Namibia. Similarly indigenous language media producers can vary their content to include marginal issues that affect disadvantaged groups beyond health awareness such as food and economic security. Finally, we note that there are still few studies that research indigenous language media from a decolonial perspective. We propose a new research that is critical, policy-oriented, raising vital philosophical questions about the dominance of the English language media and adopting a decolonial approach. Decoloniality must be employed as a theoretical and methodological approach that forms part of a bigger decolonial project to promote a positive disposition towards African languages and culture. It is also important for policymakers to take indigenous media seriously because it is embedded in the culture of the people. By preserving the indigenous media, it means the culture of the people is also preserved.