The stories people tell: are they part of the democratic process?

This article offers some reflections on the locus of peoples' stories, or their Sitz im Leben, i.e., leisure time. It explores this concept briefly from the perspectives of social anthropology and mass media studies. It then draws a political typology of peoples' stories which are of some significance to Africa's modern story-tellers, the mass media. •Dr. Michael Traber is editor of Media Development, a journal of the World Association for Christian Communication, based in London.