Kasoma immortalised in America

Honour on American soil 

• Kasoma pioneered advanced media studies in Zambia

Late Francis Peter Kasoma was media titan

VICTOR KALALANDA, Illinois, USA, October 23, 2021*

He is clad in a black suit and tie, steely in posture and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. His sideburns neatly cascade on either side of his face as if to compensate for what is clearly a receding hairline.

That is how Zambia’s pioneering media scholar late Francis Peter Kasoma looks like in a black and white portrait, intellectually alert and ready to conquer the world back in the days.

Nineteen years after his death on June 7, 2002, Prof Kasoma’s portrait features on the 2021 list of two other alumni of the University of Oregon in the United States of America, who will be inducted as honourees into the institution’s Hall of Achievement in the School of Journalism and Communication.

Meant to recognise the very best among alumni of the American university, the award re-emphasizes Kasoma’s klieg-lit fame in journalism schools in Zambia, where the dominance of his seminal books and research is still felt and where the mention of his name has blossomed into an enigma on the lips of media students.

Kasoma wrote the first textbooks on journalism in Zambia and led the development of advanced media education in such a passionately driven manner that no one can write a worthwhile journalism monograph in Zambia without quoting the work of the media titan.

According to the University of Oregon, Kasoma earns his place in the Hall of Achievement as a global expert in African media studies, who graduated from the university in 1979 and became its first international student to win the Neil Taylor Award for best graduate thesis.

Kasoma studied at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication

Slated for October 28, 2021 as a virtual gala, the induction ceremony draws attention to Kasoma’s many accomplishments, as an exceptional journalist who became a leading media academic in his own country and continent.

Born on November 11, 1943, Kasoma originally planned to be a Catholic priest and, in order to actualise his dream, went on to study philosophy and theology at the Kachebere Major Seminary in Malawi for three years.

But his chosen career eventually became journalism, and in 1969 he would start work with the Times of Zambia, where he rose from the rank of reporter to that of assistant editor tasked with editorial staff and legal files.

Kasoma practiced journalism at the Times of Zambia newspaper

By 1977 he had joined the University of Zambia, where what would become the Department of Mass Communication was in its early stages with other academic leaders such as the late Dr Juma Nyirenda.

Dr Juma Nyirenda

It was around the late 1970s that Kasoma started blazing a trail of his own, taking up graduate studies in the United States, where he worked on a master’s thesis that would be included in his much-cited book, The Press in Zambia, which has been used as a textbook across Africa and was catalogued by the Library of Congress.

Kasoma took up graduate studies in the USA

Soon after coming back to Zambia, Kasoma became head of the University of Zambia’s Department of Mass Communication, the first of its kind in the country, where he became a vital force in developing undergraduate and graduate degree programmes.

Many Zambians would subsequently be trained in these programmes, with the likes of former ministers Dora Siliya and Charles Banda, including thought leaders like Chibamba Kanyama, being good examples.

Outside the walls of the university, Kasoma added another feather in his cup when he served as president of the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE) from 1984 to 1988, an organisation he tried to propel to continental and global recognition.

Passionate about press freedom and the welfare of journalists in Zambia, he was one of the founders of the Press Association of Zambia.

A reporter for the Tanzania Standard, Kenya’s Sunday Nation and Britain’s Commonwealth Parliamentarian, Prof Kasoma taught journalism and mass communication for over 22 years, during which time he published more than 50 research articles and four books.

As one of the earliest media scholars in Africa, he worked with other highly respected professors such as Finland’s Kaarle Nordenstreng, who had been his tutor, and the indefatigable South African Keyan Tomaselli, who would help review some of his work.

Leading media academic Kaarle Nordenstreng (middle) tutored Kasoma

South Africa's Keyan Tomaselli reviewed Kasoma's work

In his own criticisms of the media, which rings true of social media today, Kasoma in 1996 wrote that the biggest ethical problem of journalism in Africa is “playing to the gallery of political parties as they engage in one political character assassination after another in their jostling for political power. Serious allegations, many of them based on unnamed and dubious sources, are published without the journalists who write them making concerted efforts to establish the truth of the allegations. Consequently, the people defamed are left permanently injured with little or no meaningful redress.”

As journalism was acquiring legal and ethical dimensions in Zambia, it was teachers like Kasoma that dedicated their lives to turning the craft into a profession, and sought to create a theoretical framework for it, though faced with sometimes little or no cooperation.

When Zambian journalists boycotted his Press Association of Zambia (PAZA), Prof Kasoma expressed his frustrations thus: “The majority remained either non-members or non-active members of the association. The few journalists who rallied behind PAZA were very good at talking, making all sorts of demands, but did little or nothing to propagate the aims of the association."

His one-time master’s student, Samuel Kasankha, remembers Kasoma as a committed and determined man.

“I was his student when I pursued the development communication master’s programme and he was the man behind that programme,” says Kasankha, who serves as New Heritage Party vice president. “Although there were other teachers, [Kasoma] was so married to that programme that he took the lion’s share of the lectures. He never missed classes, very serious countenance. When you meet him in the street, he wasn’t a man who would smile anyhow, but in class he was light-hearted and humorous in his own right. He knew the stuff from the top of his head and you could tell he had done a lot of research.”

It was at the University of Zambia that Kasoma became a full professor of journalism and mass communication.

His induction into the Hall of Achievement at the University of Oregon not only immortalises him, but it offers an opportunity for Zambia to celebrate one of its greatest media leaders, who should be canonised as the obstetrician of advanced media studies.

Prof Twange kasoma

His own daughter, Twange, is associate professor of journalism at Radford University in America.

At the time of his death, which happened not long after defending his doctoral thesis, Prof Kasoma is believed to have been survived by a wife and eight children.

*Original copy was first published in the Zambia Daily Mail on stated date

These were live virtual proceedings of the induction ceremony for Prof Francis P. Kasoma