Privacy and data protection in Africa: a state of the art

A literature review is pivotal to any scientific research or writing. Quite often a prudent researcher may not embark on research or writing a scientific piece of work without first reviewing the literature. Yet this literature may sometimes not be readily available, especially in a relatively new area of scholarship, or its availability may be challenging. In this article I survey the major literature on privacy and data protection in Africa as an emerging field of law. I argue that currently this literature is underdeveloped. I offer a modest proposal that efforts have to be directed towards training, researches, networking, the creation of modern libraries, inter-country/ sub-or regional discussions and establishing journals specifically dedicated to privacy and data protection law issues.