By BATE BESONG
ENOH TANJONG has brought new insights into campus relationships while challenging the unspoken temptation that the tribal gaze was a distinctly University of Buea phenomenon.
His national and trans-tribal outlook and commitment has no parallel in the Cameroon University system.
It is scholars like Professor Tanjong who have de-mythologized the atavistic, clannish gorgon, on campus.
His well-researched, ground-breaking and exhaustive Africa in International Communication (Design House, 2006), adumbrates propriety, originality and authenticity.
An insightful, intellectually courageous and informative scholarship with a most impressive pulling together of bibliographical, journalism and communication glossary; it seeks to get Africa out of the international communication knowledge gap by constructing a new road-map for critical knowledge production and human capacity building.
Divided into ten chapters, with a glossary, references, and an index, Tanjong’s deeply relevant and valuable research tool for undergraduate and graduate work, carries a foreword by John W. Forje (Fil. Dr.), eminent Cameroonian academic, and Archile Mafeje Fellow, who commends this pioneering study and important milestone in the warmest terms.
Africa in International Communication, is based on courses given by the author as seminar lectures that have “been examined and re-examined by past and present students of International Communication” (J.M.C) of the University of Buea, Cameroon. The research provides a persuasively argued, splendid survey, and overview of Ideological and Cartographic Maps in International Communication, New World Information Order Debate, Domestication of International Media in
Africa, Third World Images of First World, First World Propaganda Strategies in International Communication in Africa, as well as Conclusions in Old and New Challenges in international communication in Africa.
Tanjong’s book is a most impressive, well presented and above all professionally produced volume bringing a very large amount of information into a compact whole.
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One of the obviously tempting ways to start this review essay on the construction of a grammar of communication and journalism legitimacy is to make the following declaration: Enoh Tanjong is Associate Professor of Journalism and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs in the Faculty of Social and Management Sciences at the University of Buea, Cameroon.
As the pioneer chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, for over twelve years (he lasted this long because HIERARCHY had to groom one of its clones), Tanjong, not only transformed JMC into a robust mecca of journalism, but being, I expect, you the reader, to recall this; multi-cultural in perspective he, forged, a much needed alter-native, forum for serious analysis
and discussion by proffering eclectic paradigms to the problems facing the media today.
Icons of that challenge such as Wamba Ngu Sob Tayong, Bernard Manyo Besong, Abel Akara Ticha, Clovis Atatah, Edwin Eselem, Leslie Ngwa, Nukwa Quinta, Esapebong, have, appropriated a new language of journalism and mass communication, and fashioned it with delicacy and strength, infusing it with indigenous Cameroonian metaphors, rhythms and expressing the politics and economics, the history and culture of contemporary, post-colonial infractions.
Africa in International Communication is a monument to the initial vision and subsequent perseverance of Professor Enoh Tanjong sustained over a decade to bring into fruition.
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