Paper short abstract:

Through the trope of “the global village” (first inspired by military villagization in Kenya), this paper examines a persistent binary that opposes Africans’ presumed rurality, non-literacy, and magical thought to Europe’s supposedly urban, rational, and literate forms of thought.

Paper long abstract:

It is not well known that Marshall McLuhan's famous coinage of the "global village" arose from his research on African "modernization" in the 1950's. The global village—and McLuhan's related media theories—were indebted especially to John Carothers, an ethnopsychiatrist summoned to Nairobi during the British war against the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army. Carothers' diagnosis of the KLFA hinged on a complex dichotomy linking rurality to Africans' putative episteme of magical, non-literate forms of thought and, conversely, linking urbanism to Europe's supposedly literate, rational episteme. Carothers recommended maintaining the villagization system of detainment camps after the war as de-militarized settlements providing psychological stability and access to communication technologies, effectively integrating tenant farmers into a "global village."

According to McLuhan, the global village would enfold the world's societies into a harmonious rural-urban unity connected by electronic media. The unity, however, was belied by a subtle difference: Electronic media —akin, McLuhan said, to African orality and magical thought— was to "re-tribalize" the "literate West," but the West's legacy of print-culture would, he suggested, instate an enduring epistemic difference between "re-tribalized" and "tribalized" societies. This paper examines the persistence of "the global village" as a conceptual framework which positions Africans as modern but differently modern. In the past three decades, digital technologies—intended to integrate rural Africans into a global market—have been construed as especially appropriate to (what Carothers called) "the African mind," characterized by its putative orality and "magical thought," and thus not requiring educational equity.