Rogers Orock is a senior fellow of MIASA and a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. His scholarship focuses on elites, leadership, and political imagination in Central and West Africa. He is most recently the co-editor (with Wale Adebanwi) of Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa.
MIASA Project: Infowars: Rumours, Media, Popular Politics and Anti-French Sentiments in Cameroon’s War on Boko Haram
How do rumors and conspiracy theories intersect with different kinds of media to inform and affect populist narratives and responses to the war on terror in West African states? How do such populist responses to the war on terror, in turn, affect relations between Western governments and African states? Using data from a recently completed research project on rumors and the politics of suspicion in French-Cameroon relations, Orock will write and publish two articles on the subject. These will focus on how rumors and conspiracy theories frame a populist politics of nationalism and decolonization in the context of Cameroon’s war against the Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram, within its northern regions. The articles will examine how rumors and propaganda (“fake news”), circulate in the forms of text, audios and videos on “traditional” media (press and TV) and new media (internet and social media) platforms. He will underline how these work to mediate a politics of rumor-mongering and conspiracy theories about this local war on terror.
The significance of this project lies in its potential contributions to ongoing scholarly and policy debates on the proliferation of media platforms as well as their effects on populist and or extremist politics. Orock’s project demonstrates how a vibrant political culture of rumor-mongering is enlivened by all forms of media, with significant implications on French-Africans relations, particularly in the area of security and development cooperation.
