Ladybrille in the comments below wrote: "the real issue for me is not why White media tells African stories. It is when will Africans unite as one and tell their own story. UNITE
being key. As much as it is great to love your own, there is power in
numbers and solidarity."

It seems to me that’s a key issue that is embodied in the rise of media efforts like the business channel CNBC Africa and MTV Base Africa lauded in "Hope and Profit in Africa" in the current issue of Forbes (Yes, another US magazine devoting its cover story to Africa this month!)   

Are these initiatives uniting Africans merely as consumers rather than as citizens?  As market groups instead of political constituencies?   And what does that mean in the long run for this new generation? 

CNBC Africa has just launched, so we don’t know its impact yet. But MTV Africa is a couple of years old and already said to attract 50 million young African viewers.  Both are aimed at audiences in the same place: Anglo Africa:  Ghana,  Kenya, Nigeria, South
Africa, Uganda
and Tanzania.  Together, these are said to include half of the
continent’s GDP and nearly as much of its population. 

Forbes argues the MTV channel is a
"significant marker of the many changes–and a new kind of hope–that
capitalism and technology are bringing to a land of heartbreak and
broken economies." Now they’re talking of Nickelodeon Africa and who knows what else.

In a way, these channels do what Ladybrille calls for — they seek to unite Africans.

But this unification also means commercialization, consumerism, and homogenization.  There is a telling little detail buried in the Forbes story:
When Africans first started submitting music videos, Western producers
had to  coach them on "professional" production values going so far as
to send materials to copy.  So much for originality! 

The article goes on to provide this nugget:

MTV Africa’s Nigerian born executive "organized an all-night
dance party in Luanda, Angola, a country just out of civil war that’s
now in the middle of an oil boom. Nokia sponsored the event, which cost
$60 a ticket, or 16 days of wages for an average Angolan; 4,500 people
attended, and 2,000 had to be turned away. MTV filmed the sold-out bash
for broadcast and created radio features, phone messages and other
brand-building plays around the party."

Forbes is gaga that these sorts of events are happening all over Africa with MTV audiences. On the one hand, this is a great example of an Africa that is seldom
seen in the Western media: Young, wired hipsters.  But on the other, Angola seems to have a lot of
other more pressing needs than luxury product-themed dance parties. (In a similar vein, Emmanuel K. Bensah of AfricanLoft writes about hopping into a share taxi in Accra recently and watching  a guy using his blackberry, and wondering about the nature of so-called modernization.)

So I ask again: Who is being united and for what reason or cause, if any (other than profit)? Will Africans come together merely as a target market, engineered by Western companies who shout stage directions from the not-so-invisible sidelines? I wonder.