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| by Nadra Kareem Nittle Special to the NNPA fromt he Maynard Media Center on Structural Inequality |
| April 25, 2012 |
That’s how Western mainstream media often portray nations of Africa. Rarely do broadcast and print news agencies report uplifting stories, instead favoring sensational tales that frequently depict Africa as a continent in ruins.
Rather than show Africans working to improve their villages, cities and countries, Africa scholars say, Western journalists usually report on outsiders’ efforts to improve living conditions there. This reporting perpetuates the idea that the continent needs rescue by others.
The quality of reporting on Africa could be vastly improved, experts say, if the media consulted and interviewed more African activists and organizations. Broader reporting would add needed depth to coverage of African issues and help to avoid clichés about the continent.
“I think there’s a longstanding theme about ongoing famine and starvation, of chronic misgovernance, of Africa as a continent that needs to be saved,” says Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, an international community of citizen bloggers.
“I’m not saying that every portrayal plays with those particular themes, but those are fairly common. Those clichés aren’t just sloppy writing. They’re sloppy thinking. They reflect Africa as helpless, Africa as a place where nothing good happens.”
TMS Ruge, cofounder of Project Diaspora, a Uganda-based development organization, said via email that his major concern with U.S. media coverage of the African continent is the emphasis on “a central heroic Western figure” trying to save nations there from crisis. “The more dire the situation, the more likely that [New York Times columnist] Nicholas Kristof, [CNN’s] Anderson Cooper, will be deployed in their brown khaki pants.”
The video “Kony 2012” by Invisible Children, a nonprofit group with offices in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and exemplifies this trend. It features the crusade of Invisible Children’s co-founder, a white American named Jason Russell, to stop Kony from kidnapping children and, among other crimes, enlisting them as child soldiers.
Critics have said the video misrepresents the situation in Uganda, but its focus on a bloodthirsty warlord preying on the innocent may well have led to it becoming the most popular video in YouTube history upon release in March. A follow-up by Invisible Children has been postponed.
Ruge says sensational stories about Africa have skewed the public’s views and led to generalizations about countries there.
“That single perennial thread is so synonymous with the continent that it is hard for people to accept that there’s another side to the story,” he says. “If a coup breaks out in West Africa and I am going to East Africa, I get cautionary emails from colleagues telling me to be careful. That story has shrunk Africa to one country full of every piece of bad news the mind can think of.”
Zuckerman says mainstream news stories of the military coup in Mali in March have suggested that coups are typical in the region. Actually, he says, political upheavals of that nature are out of the ordinary for Mali.
Semhar Araia, founder and executive director of Diaspora African Women’s Network (DAWN) in Washington, says mainstream media outlets can improve coverage of Africa by featuring perspectives of Africans themselves.
“The biggest hurdle for media is representing African countries through the lens of Africans on the continent and abroad,” Araia says. “It’s always hard to find that quote and the sound bite in the right time, but there’s a wealth of African journalists and organizations on the continent who are available.”
Zuckerman shares this concern. He says journalists may overlook Africans as sources because they haven’t researched who the experts on a particular country are. The fact that they’re often on tight deadlines adds to the problem.
Ruge says the list of African experts is endless, and he singles out the work of Ugandan Okello Sam, founder of Hope North in Northern Uganda, which rehabilitates former child soldiers; Kenyan Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, a girl’s education advocate; and Ethiopian Solome Lemma, who concentrates on philanthropy in the Horn of Africa.
While dissatisfied with Western media portrayals of Africa, Araia says Africans also have a responsibility to improve the coverage. Although African journalists may not reach as wide an audience as CNN, for instance, they can use social networking sites or viral videos such as Kony 2012 to raise awareness about issues.
Talking and commenting about issues, for example, Global Voices’ blogging network highlights people on the ground.
Despite criticism that Kony 2012 oversimplified the situation in Uganda, Ruge says concerns about it marked a turning point in Western mainstream media coverage of Africa.
“For the first time, we as Africans were courted for our voice in Western media to counter the Kony 2012 video.” Ruge says. “There were Ugandans on BBC, New York Times, CNN and Al Jazeera. There were Eritreans and Ethiopians on NPR and the Guardian. It was a massive sea change that I hope was not a fluke, but hopefully a newly emerging trend. I think Western media got it right here in covering the whole saga.”
What else has the Western media done correctly in its coverage of Africa? Araia says she most appreciates stories that have focused on Africans working to improve conditions on the continent. She cites reporting on The Elders, a group of international leaders focused on peace building and human rights brought together by Nelson Mandela in 2007 and chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Araia also praised coverage of the late Kenyan Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Nobel committee called “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace,” and of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office as modern Africa’s first female elected president in 2006.
These stories, of course, highlight the good occurring in Africa. But there is far too little emphasis on positive developments on the continent, say experts consulted by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
“Each one of our countries has a rich thread of positive stories — economic, personal, cultural and inspirational,” Ruge says. “All of these are worth telling because they balance out the negative, expected themes. . . . We have to grab the microphone and begin the hard work of reversing the single narrative.
“This is easier said than done. It is going to be a really long struggle first to be able to get the microphone.”
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