The notion that some races are superior to others soon turned around to haunt its Western proponents when German Nazis waged war on everyone except their own “master race” – everyone including Europeans of other kinds – whom Nazism considered subhuman and who must be subjugated at best and annihilated at worst. If Hitler was fought on account of his racial chauvinism, it followed that White supremacy could no longer be sustained as a basis to deny African-Americans their rights and to rule over people of other races.

Thus the end of the Second World War marked the start of the end of the racial justification for oppression and domination. Another justification for the domination of Africans was invented: yes, Africans are not biologically inferior to Whites, but African culture is inferior to Western culture.

Suddenly, African culture, rather than the African race, became the obstacle to the modernisation of the continent. It was therefore in the interest of Africans to be ruled by the Whites, for this rule provided the Blacks with the opportunity and the motivation to overcome their inferior traditional cultures and embrace superior western cultures. And even after independence, the Whiteman would carry on the burden of civilizing Africans through all possible ways.

One such way was – and continues to be – indoctrination through mass media propaganda. In The Passing of Traditional Society, Daniel Lerner convinced the West that the people of the Middle East, and by extension all ‘uncivilized’ peoples of the world whose traditional cultures hampered their modernisation, would be westernised and hence modernised through constant exposure to western media propaganda. To Lerner and indeed to the West, westernisation equals modernisation and development; any other culture equals backwardness and barbarism.

These backward and barbaric cultures would attain ‘social transformation’ through constant exposure to media propaganda, cosmetically coined as Development Communication. This approach has since supplemented military action and sanctions in spreading western culture and entrenching western hegemony. These and other methods of subjugation have now been joined by the programmes of western-based NGOs.