Africa between History and Hyperlocalism

by Guy Berger
World Editors Forum, June 2007, Cape Town. 
Session: Reporting Africa for Africans and the World

1. Introduction

History has gave Africa great resources, but also dealt it a raw deal in terms of people. Part of this today is the relative marginalisation of information about the continent in other parts of the world. Africa is relegated to a minimal quantum of news, and even that is too often of one-sidedly negative quality.  Exacerbating all this, many newspapers outside of Africa are turning even more inward with a focus on “hyperlocalism”. Can we blame them? Can we change them?

To start, consider four typical African stories casting negative light which may have made it into international coverage in recent years:
•	Dynasty politics: son of former president steals election (Togo).
•	Natural disaster: pictures of poverty after floods (Mozambique).
•	SA won’t stop a heavy-handed state (Zimbabwe).
•	Footdragging on financial scandal (Uganda). 

Poor Africa – once again, a victim, you might say. But now consider four similar stories that have indeed made it into international news:
•	Dynasty politics: son of former president steals election (Florida, 2001).
•	Natural disaster: pictures of poverty after floods (New Orleans).
•	USA won’t stop a belligerent, heavy-handed state (Israel).
•	Footdrag on financial scandal (World Bank). 

Not much different, are they? In fact the similarity gives the lie to “Africa” inevitably being a place of bad things happening. It also highlights the problems of generalising. In both the African and the US case, it is clearly incorrect to draw a wider picture from these kinds of stories – wrong to allow the negatives entailed to colour the whole. The trouble with coverage of Africa, unlike that of the USA, is that it seems – to speak in general – that it’s primarily the negative news that gets the coverage. In the absence of other stories, it look – especially to people without firsthand experience – as if only bad things happen in Africa. 

But most of all, the two examples show that the problem is not in the news, which was clearly correct to report ALL these negative stories. Instead, the problem lies in historical perceptions – that Africa unfairly plays overly negatively in the news. That’s only half right. We need to visit these perceptions afresh and inspect their validity more closely. As I will argue, they need to be consigned to history – and instead both better practice by African governments, and better practice by African journalists, will lead to more rounded perceptions. I will criticise the standard critics who like to complain about coverage of Africa, but this is not to deny that there are problems in the coverage. The problem is that the usual complaining doesn’t diagnose the problems or help us address them. 

To examine these issues involves taking a long view, and looking at three transitions. 
•	From mainstream to marginal
•	From moaning to making history
•	From mourning to mesmerising

2. From mainstream to margins

Colonial interest in Africa was a disaster, and the legacy still has many echoes – in repressive laws and border disputes, for instance. But that period has since given way to the continent suffering something that is arguably even worse – marginal interest as all. No longer as a Cold War battlefield, not even as an object of real charity. There is also a decline of the continent in terms of international trade and investment. Africa’s share of total FDI to developing countries fell from nearly 4.5% in 1970, itself a minor figure, to under 2% by 2003. Even China’s interests have not raised Africa in the global limelight.

The relative invisibility of the continent is also evident in the “Info under-load” about it, especially in cyberspace. Do a Google search on “Africa newspapers” in comparison to the UK and US. Try the same with “Blog Africa” and add in India and Australia, and see the disparity in the number of returns you get. The whole of Africa gets 120m, compared to:

•	India: 247m
•	Australia: 309m
•	UK: 411m
•	US: 1,180m

Dis-aggregating African data to be more accurate, and reflect the diversity of the continent as well, one can do a Google search on countries for information about “Bird flu”. The results are: 
•	Tanzania: 	   529 000
•	Uganda: 	   685 000
•	Kenya: 	   905 000
•	Egypt: 		1 170 000

In comparison to: 
•	India: 		1 290 000
•	Canada: 	1 280 000
•	France: 	1 300 000
•	Australia: 	2 130 000

But you will find some information about Africa if you were to search for Madonna and Malawi. It’s the reflected “glory” when “glamour” gets charitable. It’s not much better than naught. Africa, in short, gets squeezed aside by history – and now, with hyperlocalism being prescribed for the media in developed countries, things could get even worse.

3: From moaning to making history

Classic complaints about international coverage of Africa are that it presents the continent as a: 
•	Vast black hole
•	Dark continent
•	Savage
•	Crocodile-infested
•	Tribalism
•	Aids
•	Conflict-ridden
•	Child soldiers
•	Starvation

The implication of this is that Western journalists are to blame, that they are guilty of prejudicial and racist representation. But is it wrong to cover these dimensions of Africa? After all, a glimpse at World Bank statistics shows that between 1990 and 2004, poverty increased in Africa. And fewer Africans today have access to safe drinking water than was the case in 1990. And, is it wrong to reflect the reality that sub-Saharan Africa is not expected to meet the Millinenium Development Goals?

It is in response to these kind of depressing statistics that the Economist produced its infamous cover in 2000 – “Africa – the hopeless continent”. A representation that generated unprecedented anger in Africa. 

How to analyse this kind of coverage, and what to do about it? Some Africans, like Baffour Ankomah, the editor of the UK-based The New African, expresses a victim-mentality when he blames first Western media agendas, and then Africans for purportedly imitating them. In 2005, he told a conference: “For years, African journalists ourselves have added to the bad reporting of Africa by just repeating what the Western media puts out about our continent. We use the same words, the same style and the same doom and gloom stories!” 

Despite complaining about what he sees as uncritical emulation of the Western negativism by African journalists, Ankomah also then recommends a different kind of parroting. Thus, he argues: “We should begin to do as the Western media does…”, going on to itemise the following: 
•	“they respect and obey their laws restricting press freedom, 
•	“they ‘bat for Britain’ and the West where and when necessary, …
•	“they don't have ‘adversarial relationships’ with their governments, 
•	“they work closely with their intelligence agencies for the good of their countries and people, 
•	“and they work for the preservation and propagation of Western values.
 
Of course, no Western journalists true to their craft would support this model of journalism in the West, although a minority can be criticised for behaving according to these prescripts. But here we have an African journalist who thinks such non-journalistic behaviour constitutes a role model. No thanks, Mr Ankomah! 

In his crusade against negative coverage of Africa, the same individual has gone on to propose that: “When we see an African leader under assault by Western governments and media (such as the current assault on President Mugabe), we should be slow in joining the bandwagon and quick in investigating the matter.” It would be interesting to hear Zimbabwe’s beleagured, bombed, beaten, jailed, banned and exiled journalists respond to such a position – not even they are allowed to investigate in their own country!

Despite Ankomah’s publication being named the NEW African, his own position reflects a trully out-dated position that was originally embraced in UNESCO’s New World Information and Communication Order (Nwico). It is in these Nwico terms that a government minister from Cote D’Ivoire once said: “It is necessary that the information we disseminate not only reflects the truth, but reflects a truth that is not contrary to the superior interests of the people.” This perspective was the foundation of “patriotic” and “development journalism” in Africa – which meant that governments determined what the “superior interests” of the people were, and where media was reduced to being a pet (in fact, a parrot) of political despots. 

Africans ought to have learnt from this history about what journalism is not. And, Africans ought also over the years to have learnt not to reject everything Western. In particular, a quote by Westerner Edward R Murrow, in 1965, should resonate with practitioners on this continent: “We cannot make good news out of bad practice.” In fact, journalists ought not to even try to do so.  Simple. 

Fortunately, unlike Mr Ankomah, we have another African editor, in fact the leader of The African Editors Forum, with a different view. This is Mathatha Tsedu, who demonstrates that history does move on. He says: “The commitment to a true reflection of Africa cannot mean sunshine journalism.  It means vigorous interrogation of our leaders, reflecting the good and the bad, not just the good and not just the bad.” UNESCO itself has moved on from Nwico, and so should we. There’s a fork in the road – let’s take a new direction. There may sometimes be racism in various degrees in international coverage and perspectives on Africa – but blaming bad coverage on this problem takes us nowhere. Rather than ignore or minimise the bad, we need to increase the total flow – including the good. 

Especially when there are good news stories to be found in Africa. The UN Economic Commission for Africa issued a report in 2005, titled “Striving for Good Governance”, and said of 28 countries on the continent: There were still problems with corruption and with human rights violations, but there were also improvements in adherence to constitutions, the independence of parliaments and judiciaries, electoral process and voter turn out, the general space for politics, and economic management.  These kind of developments should enable us to move beyond the Ankomah position, in short to stop moaning and start moving. The point is whether these stories are being reported in Africa itself? And it doesn’t take any ideology, or counter-ideology, for African and other journalists to report on improvements in Africa where they happen. 

It is worth recalling the Commission for Africa report, convened by Tony Blair, which noted that the 1984/5 Ethiopian famine images “fixed the world in its view of Africa as a place of despair and dependency. But, though such scenes still exist, as a norm they are increasingly outdated. Things have changed significantly in the intervening 20 years, both in Africa and in the wider world.” Perceptions, in other words, should catch up – without overtaking to the extent of becoming rose-tinted. 

The Commission further recommended that “Independent media institutions, public service broadcasters, civil society and the private sector, with support from governments, should form a consortium of partners, in Africa and outside, to provide funds and expertise to create an African media development facility.” Arising from this, two important initiatives took place during 2006 – the Africa Media Development Initiative (AMDI), which researched 17 countries on the continent, and the UN Economics Commission for Africa (UNECA) which consulted broadly across every region. Among the very similar findings is a clear recommendation that African content production should be increased. Exactly. 

4. From mourning to mesmerising

A good place to commence, in terms of moving on, is to accept that responsibility for bad news about Africa is not due primarily to the media, Western or otherwise, but to atrocious governance. Somalia and Darfur are obvious cases. But take also two of countries in Africa with major populations living in poverty – Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe, with official inflation of 3700%, is a country going in reverse gear. Its newspapers have declined over five years, not surprisingly with three of them – including the biggest, being banned. Readership has fallen almost 10% over the period. Significantly, this blighted country now has only 1 journalist for every 34 000 citizens. Tanzania, Cameroon, Botswana and Kenya do far better. The moral of the story is: politicians mess up the media, leaving insufficient checks and balances on other abuses which sink a society into the cesspit of history.  

Nigeria is a lot better, with 1 journalist for every 4 300 citizens, and a vibrant newspaper industry. But some newspapers are less than independent of politicians, weak on ethics and strong on fabrication. But even more pertinently, the Nigerian government has ensured that the country has no participatory community radio to speak of. There is one licensed community station – compared to 192 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The significance of this? If Africa’s richest state in terms of oil resources and revenues is to raise its people out of poverty, and provide better news for the media, the politicians there have to lift the lid – and enlist the power of the media watchdog to combat the corruption that bedevils this society.

With that settled, what do journalists need to do? In the Zimbabwean case, those especially in state-newspapers and broadcasting, need to live up their claimed profession and get the authorities to respect some independence. In the Nigerian case, journalists need to reinforce and police their profession’s ethics. But for all journalists, African and non-African, we need to revisit the kind of stories being told about Africa. 

News, unfortunately, turns out too often to be “olds”. It is information based on historical precedent (which in Africa often means negative news), and on obviously disruptive and negative events. That kind of news has to be reported, but if there is only that, it means there is nothing new either in, or out of, Africa. It’s all “same-same” information pretending to be news. It’s news that is being driven by the kind of historically-conditioned perspective referred to earlier. 

The solution of course is to tell Africans what’s new – to report on everything in this category: the interesting, the ugly, and the uplifting. Even Nigeria, for all the bad news, has scored something worth reporting – the first successful election, despite flaws, in a post-independence history with many more years of military dictatorship than civilian misrule. What this means is moving on from the diet of “D”s – disaster, disease, despair, denigration, to include Developments: i.e., what’s new, what’s changing. 

If Africans report in an all-rounded way what’s new, the world will follow. Or will it? History ought to have now brought us in Africa to this point where we report the totality of stories (including of course the many major negative ones). But history has also, in parallel, brought many newspapers in the developed countries to a very different juncture – called hyperlocalism. This means they are narrowing focus to be ever more ultra-local in their contents. With such a concentration on the nearby neighbourhood, stories of dogs biting men are certainly strong news. So too are stories on pets and dog competitions, as at the classic hyperlocal paper, Bluffton Today. 

We can mourn this situation, and feel sorry for ourselves and for those readers being deprived of knowledge of this part of the world. But we also need to figure out how to mesmerise they hyperlocalists with stories that cannot be resisted. The point is that if African stories – of whatever character – are to make the agendas of these hyperlocal papers, they have to be competitive, and that means extremely compelling. 

The key here, is of course, content that resonates with daily lives of readers who do not live in Africa. Yet, those lives are not islands – they are lived by humans who firstly have a heart, and secondly humans whose heads do tell them that “foreign” news is relevant to their communities. An outstanding example of a newspaper that proactively pursued this track is the Star Tribune in Minneapolis – both in print and, even more powerfully, online. This kind of story lends itself to be followed up by news about those Liberians who have returned, and so on.

And there are great stories with universal appeal. Many, many people worldwide will remember the story of a Mozambican woman being rescued from floods by helicopter after she had given birth in tree. “Not an ideal location for a heavily pregnant woman,” said one story at the time (2000). The reportage back then was as follows: “Like hundreds of thousands of other desperate Mozambicans, a heavily pregnant Sofia Chiure climbed a tree to escape the raging flood waters of the Chokwe region, one of the areas devastated by the floods. 
For three days, she hung on not knowing if or when help would arrive. She was into her fourth agonising day, without food or water, when the baby started to come. Racked by labour pains, she clung to the branches and without anaesthetic the infant was born. 
Sofia clung on, the lifeline of the umbilical cord keeping her baby alive.” 

What a story! And, of course, what happened afterwards? Earlier this year, the South African Sunday Times tracked the family down. And interviewed one of the most well-known little girls in Mozambique just ahead of her seventh birthday. And soon after another South African paper angled a story “Another baby in another flood tells of Mozambique’s suffering”. 

Wouldn’t even the Bluffton Post be persuaded that these stories are worth picking up?

A final thought is that if readers – in Africa and outside – want new information from their news, then one universe available for Anglophone newspapers to draw upon is the news coming from Francophone African newspapers. How do you do it? Simple, you use Yahoo pipes to translate a rss feed through Google from any number of Francophone Africa paper. A total of 42 African French-language news sources aggregated at AllAfrica.com, and then run through Google Translate, and visible with a mouse-over on your webbrowser menu. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6rTeaXoL3BGMvOg4yzUFzw&_render=rss
Now, that’s something new! Perhaps even worth a story in Bluffton to anyone there learning French and looking for places to practice on. 

5. Conclusion:

This has been a polemical argument that has tackled some of the conventional wisdom. It critiqued perceptions that only Africa gets a bad press with stories like stolen elections, poverty and corruption. But it has also shown the increasing marginalisation of the continent in both reality and in the representations in the global information universe – as evidenced, for instance, by Google search returns. Then it has argued that negative portrayals of Africa, contrary to the victim-style complaints, reflect less the prejudice of Western media than the bad practises of many African governments. The discussion moved on then to debunk the nonsense that “patriotic” African journalists should rise to the defence of Zimbabwe’s chief wrecker, Robert Mugabe. The pitch has been that all-rounded journalism can and should tell the diverse stories in Africa – both the ugly and the uplifting. And if interesting enough, such stories could dilute the hype about hyperlocalism in developed countries. 

It is now a full 50 years since colonialism began to be reversed in Africa, with Ghana’s historic independence in 1957. After such a substantial period of time, it should be evident that whining about being victims of unfair Western coverage gets us nowhere. It is time to move from a situation of whinge to one of win-win – telling African stories to Africa and the world.