Our Mission

Welcome to the African Voice, a weblog dedicated to a research project analyzing minority media in the Netherlands.

We are a team of international journalists from China, India, Germany, Holland, and the United States currently studying at the University of Amsterdam. We have selected The Voice, an Amsterdam-based news magazine and Web site dedicated to the advancement of Africa, as our focus. The magazine uses English as its lingua franca to reach its global audience of Africans and African migrants in such disparate places as Bulgaria, Belgium, the Gambia, Greece, Russia, the United States, and Zimbabwe.

Over the next several weeks, we will interview the editors, correspondents, and some audience members in addition to analyzing magazine content and story coverage. We will learn about the economics of running an independent, ethnic publication in a western country and try to understand the challenges presented by mainstream media in terms of cultural perception and the promotion of alternative discourse within the elusive “public sphere.”

This weblog serves as a record of our collective experience, providing a more personal interpretation of news coverage and life in Amsterdam as it relates to broader issues and reflections regarding ethnicity, politics, and culture. With four-fifths of the team falling into the “minority” category in the Netherlands, we hope that our observations will amount to more than the sum of individual parts, serving to complement our academic work. Furthermore, we wish to add dimension to our research, and not just reduce our interviewees—and the inspired work that they do—to a position paper.