Can Africa tell its own stories? Simon Allison One of Africa’s biggest problems is that it is not allowed to tell its own stories. There are imperfect solutions such as content-sharing agreements among journalists but ultimately Africa must set its own news agenda. There is not a lot of money in African journalism. As an African journalist, I know this all too well. An illustrative example: I was in South Sudan in November 2012, on a trip I was financing myself. Weeks in flea-ridden hostels culminated in a four-day stay at a refugee camp near the border with Sudan. I was the only reporter there and pleased with myself for getting a story that no one else had. Not so fast. On my last day there, a small plane descended unannounced on the tiny airstrip and disgorged four foreign correspondents in their khakis and combat boots. They represented two of the biggest and best-known international media outlets. They spent a total of two hours in the camp. One of them had filed his story even before he left. As they hijacked my interviews, I chatted to their fixer who whispered to me that they had spent $8,000 to hire the plane for the morning. To me, this was an unimaginable sum: their morning cost more than four times my entire two weeks in South Sudan. And, of course, they missed the story. In four days I barely scratched the surface of what was going on in the camp, but in their two hours, they could not even get beyond official statements. For aid workers and the camp’s refugee leadership, this was a common complaint: journalists, invariably foreign, screeched in for a few hours and got the story wrong. This echoes a common lament among African journalists, politicians, policy- makers and civil society activists, which goes something like this: one of Africa’s biggest problems is that it is not allowed to tell its own stories. The agenda for African news is decided in far-off Western capitals—London, Paris, New York—and written by dashing foreign correspondents who do not understand the local complexities and base their narrative on sweeping, misleading generalisations. Sometimes the reports are wrong or distorted. Sometimes their depictions and analysis are borderline racist. (Sometimes, foreign reporting on Africa is excellent; but in general it is hit and miss.) The broader point remains that Africa is not setting its own news agenda. The end result is that Africa continues to be defined by stereotypes: it is poor; it is conflict-ridden; it is starving and dangerous. It is the helpless continent, or—if those invariably white editors are in a good mood—it is “Africa rising”, the positive generalisations just as sweeping as all the negative ones which came before. The potential real-world impact of all this is obvious. Policy is determined, money is spent and decisions are made at all levels based on an outsider’s view of Africa. If the image is wrong, then the policy will be too. And if the vision is formed by often clueless interlopers, then chances are that the representation is wrong. This has implications when it comes to protecting freedom of expression in Africa, particularly press freedom. Usually, there is a lot of emphasis on governments to guarantee freedom of expression. This is as it should be: censorship and media manipulation are widespread, and the powers-that-be are overwhelmingly responsible for imposing these types of restrictions. It is easy to forget, however—and it is all too often forgotten—that there are other ways in which this right is undermined, and it is not always the fault of authoritarian rulers. In this case, the failure of Africa to tell its own stories for its own audience is curbing the continent’s freedom of expression. The solution, then, is simple, and oft-repeated—we need African stories told by Africans, for Africans. The only problem is that these stories are hard to come by. In the overwhelming majority of news- papers across the continent, news about the rest of Africa comes via the usual sources, principally Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France Presse (AFP) and the BBC. It doesn’t matter if you are reading South Africa’s The Star in Johannesburg, Ghana’s Daily Graphic in Accra or the Gambia’s Daily Observer in Banjul: the African section will be a cut-and-paste job from Western news sources writing for Western audiences. “It’s true,” said Frederick Kebadiretse, a reporter with Botswana’s Mmegi (Reporter) newspaper. “Most of our African articles we get from the internet.” There are a few beacons of continent-wide journalistic excellence, but these are few and far between. East Africa’s Nation Media Group, bankrolled by the deep pockets of the Aga Khan, has an excellent network of foreign correspondents across the continent. It produces much of its own news about Africa for its stable of newspapers, television stations and news sites. South Africa’s e-tv has a bureau in Nairobi, Kenya. For the most part, though, the African press is lacklustre and passive. We need to question the role it plays in perpetuating the image of Africa that is created by Western media. And we need to remember this when discussing freedom of expression in Africa: sometimes, even when newspaper, television and radio outlets are theoretically free, they are either unwilling or unable to express themselves due to a deficit of funds and skills. In this case, it’s mostly about the money. “I think the thing is most newspapers here are under-resourced,” Mr Kebadiretse said. “If you say something happens in a place like Marikana [South Africa], for us to send a team of journalists to cover it directly it would be too expensive. I do think it’s a problem. When foreigners come here they may paint somehow a different picture from the way Africans can see things happening.” The full Article can be read link below. pambazuka.org/en/category/features/88860
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 14:21:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015