THESE days no self-respecting western reporter dares to describe anything potentially ‘primitive’ in Africa without a sophisticated disclaimer. John Humphrys’s warning, as he dispatched the BBC Radio’s Today programme from Bong county, Liberia, was: “You can’t come here with European eyes.”
Christopher Hitchens’s 1994 essay on his trip to Zaire, and current editions of the Economist — still reeling a decade on from its ‘Hopeless continent’ front page on Africa — are examples of similar introspection.
And with good reason. Western eyes do not have a good track record of seeing what is really going on on this continent. In 1963 the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper captured the still prevalent tone of western thinking. “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach,” he wrote. “But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.”
Much has been done to prove that western reporting of Africa has moved away from this paradigm. Most international news outlets now have programmes specifically designed to champion positive news stories in Africa.
The BBC runs African Dream, a series about successful African entrepreneurs, CNN has African Voices. But the media’s tendency to run an ‘Africa season’ has its own flaws.
After the season is over, little in the mainstream coverage has changed. And the BBC, in particular, has its own Africa service that delivers excellent news coverage of the continent by local journalists and a mainly African-staffed team in London. Yet instead of driving the decision to produce a BBC Africa season, they are confined to a ‘research’ role.
Even worse is the situation when an impromptu Africa season is triggered by newsworthy events in Africa. A dramatic climax in a long-running war, preferably with the close involvement of a western power, usually leads to an African country being ‘discovered’ by the international media.
At the height of Liberia’s civil war in 2003, for example, as rebels surrounded the capital Monrovia and US troops were drafted in, Liberian journalists looked on as the complex conflict they had spent the past decade covering was scooped up by western reporters. In Mali, the same thing is happening now.
Calling for better African news coverage is not the same as advocating sugar-coating. Yes, there are food crises, wars and coups. In west Africa, the region where I report, two democratically elected governments — in Mali and Guinea Bissau —have been toppled in the last month.
The latter is essentially a narco-state and the former has a conflict that has triggered a refugee crisis. Bad stuff, obviously, happens in Africa just like everywhere else — and no one is denying that those issues should be reported. Yet Africa is not, as the New York Review of Books reported recently, “plagued by countless nasty little wars”. — The Guardian, London
