One example of a harmless example of the effects of mediation and cultural flow (and a quite interesting story at that) is the adoption of the African Pagne. The pagne is a type of garment made of brightly coloured wax-print fabric, or imitation wax-print when the genuine article is too expensive or not available. Pagnes are so popular and so intimately identified with Africa that if you have seen more than a few pictures of African women, you’ve almost certainly seen one. The reason that this is true is not because they are an African invention or because of any utilitarian reason. Rather, pagnes are popular in Africa because of European marketing. Originally, the pagne was conceived by Dutch manufacturers as a mass-producible, and therefore less expensive, version of the Javanese waxprints known as Batik. Imperfections in the machine process for making this cloth made it unacceptable to the javanese market. Left with no customer base, the cloth makers had to find a new one. They chose to market the cloth heavily in Africa. In this case, marketing was the force of mediation rather than schooling, and the object of mediation was fashion rather than overt racism. Interestingly, pagnes have become a way in which African women mediate their own identity and culture, representing themselves using clothes which were originally a Dutch imitation of a Javanese product, but have now become distinctly representative of African women. As such, the different gradations of quality and various patterns allow them to use pagnes to mediate their individual identities, with newer patterns and more expensive Dutch versions (as opposed to cheaper chinese knockoffs) demonstrating wealth and fashionability, as well as creative new cuts and garment designs made from the cloth.
All of this is not to imply, as I might unintentionally have done, that cultural flow and mediation is something which only happens between Africa and ‘the west’. Mediation happens everywhere. Every time we choose what to wear in the morning, or how to say (or not say) something we are thinking, or choose one method of display or communication over another, these decisions mediate others’ perceptions of us. Our language use is one important and everyday force of mediation we use to manipulate how we are seen in the world. Proper language use can indicate cleverness, or knowledge, or any number of other personality traits or situational cues that are not explicitly stated in what we are saying. Language mediates perception, and nowhere is that more obvious than in a place where multiple languages are used in conjunction with each other. 
The Giriama of Malindi, Kenya, use three or four (depending on whether you count sheng) different languages in their communications with each other. Janet McIntosh in 2010 published an article detailing the ways in which these people use the languages they speak within the context of text messaging. Each of the languages used denotes something about what is being said, the person who is saying it, and why they are saying what they are. 
