The Bright Continent

On World Press Freedom Day, I found this recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review (“Hiding the Real Africa”) to be illuminating:

Reporters’ attraction to certain kinds of Africa stories has a lot to do with the frames of reference they arrive with. Nineteenth century New York Herald correspondent Henry M. Stanley wrote that he was prepared to find Zanzibar “populated by ignorant blacks, with great thick lips, whose general appearance might be compared to Du Chaillu’s gorillas.” Since the Biafran War, a cause célèbre in the West, helped give rise in the late 1960s to the new field of human rights, Western reporters have closely tracked issues like traditional female circumcision. In the 1980s, a famine in Ethiopia that, in fact, had as much to do with politics as with drought, set a pattern of stories about “starving Africans” that not only hasn’t been abandoned, but continues to grow: according to a 2004 study done by Steven S. Ross, then a Columbia journalism professor, between 1998 and 2002 the number of stories about famine in Africa tripled. In Kenya, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s and where I returned to live four years ago, The New York Times description of post-election violence in 2007 as a manifestation of “atavistic” tribalism carried echoes of Stanley and other early Western visitors.

But the main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on convincing people how much remains to be done. As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures create incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep attention and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.

This times 1000. I have some built in resistance to this dynamic simply by virtue of having an experience of Africa that is apolitical and longstanding—that is, personal life. And I am not sure that NGO interests are so much more to blame than those leaders and actors responsible for some of the bad news out of Africa. But this mutually agreed upon narrative is still destructive. I feel strongly that slanted reporting tends to skew outcomes not just in print but in reality.

This recalls an essay by Columbia professors Joseph Stiglitz and Anya Schiffrin, who think about globalization as an economist and a journalist, respectively:

One of the ways in which developed countries differ from developing countries is in ‘information density’: in developed countries, there are a large number of channels through which information flows between government and citizens, between markets and consumers, between individuals in one part of the country and those in another. With so many channels underdeveloped or blocked in developing countries, it is all the more important that those channels which work well disseminate information which is accurate and unbiased. The absence of think tanks puts additional burdens on reporters to interpret the information. Thus, reporters need to get the information that will help them become more informed and think critically about this information.

To fully disclose: I’ve done reporting with and through a number of NGOs on the continent. But in development circles, local authority matters—and this presumption extends to information dissemination. There are a number of awesome reporting projects in Africa—Sahara Reporters, Global Voices, NEXT Media. Nevertheless I wish there were a more robust pipeline for creating journalists and editors in lean economies, where their work is much more necessary than in hothouses like Washington, DC.