"The public sphere and its associated concept of civil society are frequently cited as representative models for media and political communication in Africa, with little critical reflection on their historical and cultural specificity. In this uncritical narrative of “Habermas in Africa”, the public sphere or civil society, and by implication the media, is presented in a binary opposition to the state in Africa: bad state, good civil society. Yet, Habermas himself makes clear throughout his book that he is speaking of the public sphere, not in isolation, but as part of wider and associated political, social, economic and historical developments occurring at a particular place and time, namely Western Europe, and therefore indicating the conceptual difficulties of extrapolating his ideas uncritically to non-Western societies like Africa. Indeed, the Norwegian media scholar, Helge Rønning (1994), raises the urgent question, that: “can you have a civil society or public sphere in an unmodern context?” Thus, building on seminal ideas by African sociologists such as Peter Ekeh’s (Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(1): 91–112, 1975) concept of the “two publics” in Africa and Mamdani’s (Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) nuanced differentiation of “citizen” and “subject” in Africa; this chapter interrogates both the “public” in the public sphere and the “civil” in civil society in order to make them more relevant to African historical and contemporary democratic realities." (Abstract)