Though depicted negatively by foreign media,
Africa is not the first continent in the world to suffer. China is awakening
giant even after the military aggressiveness of Japan on its population.
Japan itself picked up after the devastating
effect of atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Aborigines of Australia were
executed and discriminated upon. The Nazi German’s treatment of Non-Aryans (not
only Jews) is amongst the most horrific historical event and culminated to
WWII.
The mighty USA has its own bag of mysteries.
The northern states fought relentlessly with southern conservatives to abolish
slave trade. The African-Americans suffered discrimination akin to apartheid
with the FBI campaigning to drive The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jnr to
suicide. Biological weapons were used to exterminate Red Indians from the
Colorado gold rash.
The bottom line is that blood has to be split
for nation building. It is a catharsis. The land is turned red mud with blood.
The mud then binds the nation together in a common cause like independence,
peace (formation of Southern Sudan) and industrial revolution.
War is an opiate to a solution or a break up
like former Yugoslavia.
Always the foreign journalists may depict
Africa negatively. Their audience and editorial policy may dictate. But at
times it borders in sheer ignorance. A bleak nth Africa for the Western world.
Two cases exemplify, firstly Ori Brafman the
New York Times intelligence columnist wrote of Al Qaeda job opportunities
in African slums. Brafman gave example of Kenyan Mathare and Kibera slums
(biggest in Africa after Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa).
“The poverty in those slums-no running water,
no electricity, sewerage flowing- is difficult to describe. As a small group of
us walked down the street, our guide pointed to some men in an alley ‘See, over
there?’ he said almost nonchalantly, ‘that’s is al Qaeda’’ Roots of
Extremism (Sunday Nation, March 22nd 2009)
This is far sited; there are organised crimes
in Kibera, like in all ghettos similar to Harlem, but the idea of an Al-Qaeda
cell nauseate!
I’m a Kenyan, there is Al-Qaeda encroachment in
Northern coast at Lamu and around Somali border, but a cell in the capital city
in farfetched.
The second case standing out like a sore thumb
is Washington Post former Nairobi bureau chief Blaine Harden’s Africa:
Dispatches from a fragile continent, (Harper Collins Publishers, 1990)
The book raises the thorny issue on how Africa
and Africans are portrayed in the western media. The title dispatches from a
fragile continent espouses the idea. The author ‘weeps’ for Africa not out of
pity but due to lack of understanding.
Blaine Hardens quips in introduction that
people in his home town, Moses Lake in Washington DC die properly. When old or
in a car wreck but not by famine, leprosy and cholera like Africa.
While meeting together with other journalists
in Addis Ababa at the ‘first world famine watcher’ harden writes: “(we) dined
together over discussions of the advisability of repeated shampoos to get germs
out of our hair….we warned each other to be careful: keep your fingers away
from your mouth while in the camps. The children who want to touch you do not
use toilet paper. Their little cute hands carry all kind of disease.”
I wasn’t smiling while reading the lines.
The negative coverage is echoed too by Dr. Kofi
Annan, Ms Graca Michel and Mr., Michel Camdessus, members of Africa Progress
Panel.
“The remarkable progress that Africa has made
in the past decade is not widely recognized. Across the continent, there are
numerous success stories. We have seen the spread of free and fair elections, a
rise in school enrolment rates, and determined effort to combat
malaria…..recently, the Africa Progress Panel, on which we sit, launched its
2009 state of Africa report in Cape Town. We recognize that the root of
development crises always begin outside Africa” (
http://www.africaprogresspanel.org/)
The forth estate illusions
Intellectually how western media cover African
news boils down to the fourth estate issue. For the state’s affairs to run
smoothly both estates must work with one goal.
The four estates including the media are
executive, judiciary and legislature.
In reporting the fourth estate always places
the states interest first.
UK Times Martin Meredith in The State
of Africa: A history of fifty years of Independence. (Free Press, London.
2006) writes of the ism-schism of capitalism and communism. The elephants- USA and
USSR- descended on the African grass for the struggle of world supremacy.
The cold war, Otiose to Africa, was triggered
by emergence of sovereign states which could topple the scales at world scene.
At its peak in ‘60s US supported Mobutu Sese
Seko to plunder Zaire and aided in usurping Liberia’s resources. American
firestone controlling rubber plantations helped prop semi-illiterate Samwel
Doe. Liberia and Zaire become the largest information centers for CIA spy
information. VOA turned the other way since it was broadcasting from Liberia to
Africa without paying a dime!
On the other hand Russia, in association with
Cuba, propped Major Mengistu Haile Mariam red terror in Ethiopia and thwarted
west influence in Angola against rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in a blood bath.
In his book Blaine Harden gets abrasive at the
United States involvement in Zairian crises. The blame is placed on Mobutu Sese
Seko. President Eisenhower regarded Patrice Lumumba; Mobutu’s rival a mad dog
and personally ordered his assassination. Mobutu answered directly to CIA
Kinshasa chief Lawrence Devlin while being on the CIA payroll even when he was
the president!
On 20th August 1965 President
Eisenhower gave orders to CIA to use
$100,000 to eliminate Lumumba so as to avoid
‘another Cuba.’ Mobutu was thus propped even though Zaire was collapsing.
Within 23 years Mobutu’s regime received $860 million aid for the CIA to
operate base in Zaire and supply UNITA guerrillas under a one Jonas Savimbi in
fighting Marxist forces in Angola.
To digress, the US at this age still hold on
the Cuban embargo when they could finance Mobutu, don’t you feel the irony?
The two authors, Meredith and Harden, give
insight on the state affair stance when they tackle Sudan civil war.
Meredith treats Sudan with velvet gloves; he
argues the war started after the introduction of sharia laws.
This is far from Blaine Harden, placing
the problem on British rule. Harden, an American, writes that by the failure to
effectively colonize the Muslim North the Britons segregated the Christian
South.
The segregation brought two distinct cultures.
At independence the ‘suit’ wearing Christian South considered the northern
Muslims with suspicion. The Arabs had sold them as slaves.
The passing of sharia laws just exploded a simmering
volcano and turned the fissures into a mountain of a problem.
With otiose cultural misgivings Anglo-phone and
Franco-phone flex their muscles to neo-colonize their former colonies with
devastating effects. French propped and turned against Jean Bedel Bokassa of
Central African Republic because he was a French soldier during the WWII.
In a bid to suppress the spread of Anglo-phone
influence in central Africa, French propped and maintained a genocide regime in
Rwanda against the Tutsi and moderate Hutus. The effect was the 1994 Rwandan
genocide which spread towards DRC and Northern Uganda causing the fall of two
‘Anglo-phone’ leaders, viz. Mobutu Sese Seko and Milton Obote.
BBC and UK press inclusive of Meredith’s book
relished in the coverage of above stories! My gripe with The State of
Africa: A history of fifty years of Independence is casting of French as
villains in expense of the Britons.
The BBC hardliner stance on Zimbabwe is a state
gimmick against the retaking of white farms by the government.
May I not be misunderstood. The foreign press
should not be wholesomely criticized for writing negatively on Africa. Impact
of a story is what makes news. The foreign media in Africa is always free from
influence and threat in news reporting.
This has helped Africans to get news above
partisan reporting.
When the Kenyan government during the 2007-08
election crises banned live broadcast, Kenyans got the news from CNN, BBC,
Al-Jazeera and Sky News.
The tribal tension forced people at home,
including me, to shun all radio stations and newspapers and gather for the
evening Swahili BBC broadcast!
That is why foreign journalists are always
banned from some countries. BBC’s John Simpson rubbed Zimbabwe’s government the
wrong way by his reports. He was forced during the tension between Robert
Mugabe and Morgan to report from Johannesburg, South Africa.
Blain Haden was almost thrown out of Kenya for
accurate reporting when the government’s crackdown on the media was rife.
Kenyan media houses were forced to self regulate to skirt around the
government’s shears.
