The Africans

by David Lamb

  Idi Amin regularly used to appear at his 50-kilowatt station, wave the announcer aside and take over the microphone to read what he considered urgent national news. Once he announced that he was setting up a human rights commission. In the next breath he said that since there were no human rights violations in Uganda, he was freeing two policemen charged with beating twelve prisoners to death at Naguru Prison.

  Many African countries have both internal and external broadcast services, the former to mold their own people’s opinions, the latter to reach dissident groups and other governments outside the country. Somalia, for instance, broadcasts propaganda an hour a day to Ethiopia, a traditional enemy, then turns its transmitter southwestward and broadcasts to Kenya, another none-too-friendly neighbor. The United States and Britain monitor between them every government station in Africa around the clock and exchange the transcripts daily. Despite an abundance of half-truths and outright lies, the African broadcasts often give important clues to government thinking and new policy directions that are helpful to intelligence gatherers and foreign journalists.

  “I think we’re incorrect and naïve to assume our people swallow everything we dish out on the radio,” Kenya’s former attorney general, Charles Njonjo, said. “Have you heard the nightly commentary ‘That’s the Way It Is’ on Voice of Kenya? Well, it’s nonsense. It’s just fodder for the people. It doesn’t reflect what that government is thinking or doing at all. We ought to call the program ‘That’s the Way It Isn’t.’ ”

  Where, then, does Africa get its news? Ironically, it turns to the West—namely, the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC, affectionately known as the Beeb) and the Voice of America. Both maintain resident Western correspondents in Africa and both cover, say, Tanzania, more accurately than Tanzanian journalists cover their own country. For any African who can afford a shortwave radio, the world is only a kilohertz away.

  During the annual Organization of African Unity summit, delegates hurry back to their hotel rooms each evening to see how the BBC and VOA are covering the conference. In Somalia, government offices come to a standstill at five o’clock each weekday when the BBC broadcasts its news and commentary in the Somali language. President Kaunda of Zambia has been known to excuse himself from interviews so he can tune in the BBC six o’clock news from London. And in Zaire, President Mobutu Sese Seko monitors the BBC and VOA so closely that he frequently calls the British and American ambassadors to complain about particular news items, not quite convinced that the envoys are unable to take the correspondent to task.

  When the Nigerian head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, was overthrown in 1975 while attending an African summit in Uganda, he learned about his downfall not from a diplomatic note or cable from Lagos, but only after the BBC headquarters in London—which had been monitoring Nigerian radio broadcasts—telexed its correspondent John Osman at the conference, asking for African reaction to the coup. The message was intercepted by the Ugandan secret police and turned over to Gowon. His immediate response was to rush back to his shortwave radio at the hotel and turn on the BBC.

  Before being transferred to Moscow, Osman had bounced around Africa for twenty years, and traveling with him was something of a treat. He was as well known in Africa’s English-speaking countries as Walter Cronkite was in the United States. Doors would open, presidents would vie for his ear (or more appropriately, for his microphone), surly bodyguards would become gentle and respectful in his presence, knowing that the BBC had more clout than all the stations and newspapers of Africa combined.

  Once, a few days after President Amin had been overthrown in Uganda, John and I traveled up a dirt road to St. Teresa’s mission outside the town of Bombo. As our Land-Rover went by, villagers dashed inside, to the safety of their huts. Then they would reappear cautiously, look again and break into wild cheers, waving and dancing joyously. For them, the sight of white men driving without a military escort was their first confirmation that Amin had been overthrown.

  From the door of the little mission, Father Emanuel Mbogo stepped unsurely, squinting in the sunlight. John introduced himself. The priest threw his arms around him, then stepped back and, star-struck, repeated, “John Osman, John Osman. It is really you?” For three years, the priest said, he had listened to Osman’s reports about Uganda on a shortwave radio he kept hidden under his pillow; if Amin’s soldiers had caught him listening to the BBC or had found the radio, he surely would have been killed. “All this time,” the priest said, “you were the only way I had of knowing what was going on in my own country.”

  The fact that Africa relies on foreigners for African coverage, not trusting its own journalists to do the job, raises some interesting problems. The flow of communications through the Third World is largely controlled by the West, primarily the so-called Big Four agencies: the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Africa believes, not without some justification, that the Western press portrays the continent in generally unsympathetic terms. The West, so the reasoning goes, seeks out the sensational and the peculiar at the expense of serious analysis of nation-building difficulties. It confirms old stereotypes rather than examining new national directions. It covers Third World stories in the same way it would a four-alarm fire in Brooklyn, as a single isolated event rather than as a slow, integrated developing process based on economic, political and social goals.

  Let’s set the record straight here. First, the Third World’s complaint that it is singled out for special, negative treatment is not true. Africa’s coverage, for example, of the United States—which governments receive via the Western wire services—is considerably more sensational than the West’s coverage of Africa. The story, say, of a Nebraska farmer who goes berserk and murders his family may, for reasons unknown, get a prominent display in an African newspaper. Stories that reflect positively on the United States, such as one on the advancement of minority groups, generally are ignored.

  Second, Western journalists, often to the point of becoming apologists, continually emphasize that the genesis of Africa’s problems are imbedded in colonialism and the newness of the independence experiment. But Africa’s real grievance, though unspoken, is that it can’t control the outgoing flow of news the way it can the news inside the continent. In 1977, for instance, Ethiopia expelled its only resident American journalist, David Ottaway of the Washington Post, whose thoughtful analysis of the revolution there represented some of the best Western reporting in Africa; within weeks Ethiopia was complaining that U.S. newspapers were not interested enough in its revolution to keep a full-time correspondent in Addis Ababa. Nigeria once barred all American reporters from entering the country, and six months later lodged an official complaint with the U.S. State Department about the lack of Nigerian coverage in American newspapers.

  And third, the contention that American reporters write only about the bizarre side of Africa is erroneous. The most authoritative study I’ve seen on the subject examined all the stories for a one-week period that moved on the Big Four’s Asian wires.* The results, I believe, are fairly typical for any part of the Third World: 62 percent of the stories fell under the headings of foreign relations, economics or domestic governments; 22 percent covered a range of subjects from sports to health and human interest; only 16 percent dealt with military matters, terrorism, violence, disaster, crimes or judicial news.

  The countries that have made the most economic progress and are the least repressive—such as Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Senegal—are the ones that are the freest in issuing visas for Western reporters. But most governments still view foreign correspondents with a high degree of hostility, considering them at best a necessary evil, at worst an enemy of the state. The journalist’s job becomes a trying one, and at times a dangerous one. He learns quickly to avoid filing all but urgent stories from the country he is writing about, transmitting them instead to his home office from a neighboring country where officials monitoring the telex and telephone wires won’t be
offended.

  Michael Goldsmith, a veteran reporter for the Associated Press, violated that principle once and was lucky he lived to relate his experiences. Writing about the Central African Republic, he filed a report from Bangui that displeased the emperor, Bokassa I. Worse yet, Goldsmith transmitted the article via public telex to the AP bureau in South Africa, asking that it be relayed to the Paris office, which he had been unable to raise on the telex. The report came back garbled so that Bokassa, in addition to being angered about some unflattering remarks in the article, now thought Goldsmith was a South African agent sending coded messages.

  Goldsmith was taken from the Rock Hotel late one night to meet Bokassa, who had secluded himself in one of his nine palaces in preparation for his coronation. Bokassa greeted him warmly, raised his club and struck him across the forehead. Bokassa’s bodyguards then kicked Goldsmith unconscious and tossed him in prison, where he was kept with unattended wounds. A month later, after intense diplomatic negotiations, Goldsmith was again summoned by the emperor. Bokassa hugged him, kissed him on both cheeks and had his henchmen put him on a plane to Paris.

  Almost every country in Africa has a list of Western journalists barred from future entry because of allegedly offensive stories. Stanley Meisler, who covered Africa for the Los Angeles Times in the sixties and seventies, ended up after seven years being blacklisted by thirteen countries, even though he was one of the most respected and brightest correspondents on the continent. When he could no longer get visas for any significant African country, the Times had to transfer him to its Madrid bureau. The final straw came when he wrote a story about Upper Volta, an impoverished West African country he greatly admired. Meisler said that Upper Volta wore its badge of poverty without shame and suffered from neither the illusion of grandeur nor the expectation of false hopes. Two days after the story appeared in print, he was denounced on the government radio for being hostile to the country.

  Nigeria is less subtle in its reaction to outside comment and criticism, still being resentful of what it believes was pro-Biafran Western reporting during its civil war. When the Reuters bureau chief in Lagos filed an incorrect story in 1976, soldiers picked him up, along with his wife and eight-year-old daughter, took them to the river and pushed them off in a dugout canoe without paddles in the direction of neighboring Benin, which they managed to reach safely. The New York Times resident correspondent, John Darnton, was expelled the next year on twenty-four hours’ notice for writing a story about a poor Nigerian family who could not get proper medical attention for their dying child. It was a very moving story. No one questioned the accuracy of the article, just the choice of subject matter.

  Like other African countries, Nigeria contends that all it wants from the Western media is objective reporting, and given that, it will accept exposés along with favorable stories. The argument is not convincing. What Africa really wants is boosterism, a style of advocacy journalism that concentrates on the opening of civic centers and ignores the warts. It wants a new set of guidelines for covering the underdeveloped world, one which, if used in the West, would tell journalists to disregard the Watergates and Charles Mansons and concentrate only on the positive and uplifting. It wants to be covered by historians, not journalists. Africa says it needs this respite from criticism during the early, troubled days of nationhood, but I am not sure who would really benefit if foreign correspondents wrote about Africa as some people wish it were rather than as it is. To write about only what is good does not mean that what is bad will simply evaporate. To contend that truth is only that which promotes national causes is to deny the validity of other causes and the necessity to re-evaluate them. It leaves a people in need of hearing a voice other than their own.

  Not surprisingly, most African nations have lined up with the Communist bloc in demanding the endorsement of a UN-sponsored “new world information order.” The effect of the Orwellian resolution would be to restrict the free flow of news on the premise that journalism is too important to be left to journalists. One of the draft declarations debated in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—for which the United States pays 25 percent of the budget—would endorse the governmental licensing of journalists and would compel news organizations to print official replies to stories a government considered unfair. “It is the duty of states …” one article says, “to ensure that the mass media coming directly under their jurisdiction act in conformity” with the UNESCO declaration. Western critics contend that this is nothing less than giving the United Nations sanction to censorship and government control of the press.

  What Africa does not seem to realize is that it can have total control over the news emanating from its countries under the existing ground rules: all a government has to do is deny visas to foreign correspondents and then there is no news to write. Also, Africa seems to have missed the point that government-dictated news is no more credible in the Third World than it is in Europe or the United States. If Africa wants its journalists to write news that is believable to the rest of the world, all it has to do is remove the shackles and let them be journalists.

  Two countries, Nigeria and Kenya, deserve special mention in any discussion about the African press. Despite Nigeria’s sensitivity toward Western reporters, both countries have produced some distinguished journalists and both have maintained, often against great odds, a perky, pesky press full of critical comment and relatively free of censorship. Even through thirteen years of military rule, Nigeria’s fourteen daily and twenty-four weekly papers—including black Africa’s largest paper, the Daily Times (circulation 300,000)—managed to remain nettlesome and, to a surprising degree, independent-minded. For failing to pay homage to their soldier rulers, journalists risked jail or having their heads shaved by army punishment squads, but it was a price they paid willingly to keep alive one of the last vestiges of a gadfly press in Africa.

  In Kenya, the two English-language daily papers combine some intelligent editorial comment with a great deal of sex, crime and scandal. The result is a healthy circulation for each and an X-rated product. The Daily Nation (circulation 80,000) offered its readers these page-one stories one morning: “Boy’s Body Eaten by Dogs in Hospital Mortuary,” “Armed Gang Storms Hotel,” “Gangster Shot Dead,” “Manager Denies Fraud.”

  The same day the other tabloid, the Standard, led off a lengthy story with this paragraph: “After sleeping with a ten-year-old girl … a man pleaded with the child’s mother not to report the matter to the police because he was possessed by the devil.” Readers were also titillated by a story about a dwarf who turned into a cannibal because of “bad eating habits.” And the same readers were no doubt surprised to see John Vorster, the South African prime minister, referred to as a “white friend.” The next day the paper ran a correction, saying it had intended to use the word “fiend,” not “friend.”

  Kenya’s dailies are unique for more than their unpredictability. For Kenya is the only country in black Africa where the national press is privately owned, one of the few where there is no covert censorship, and probably the only one in the world where the major dailies are owned and controlled by nonresident foreigners. (The Daily Nation is owned by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, the international businessman and spiritual head of the Ismali Moslems, the Standard by the powerful British conglomerate Lonrho.)

  Even in Kenya, though, freedom of the press is deceptive. It is not so much that journalists have no restrictions as it is that they understand how far they can go. They know which cabinet ministers are out of favor with the president and can be attacked with impunity, which African countries can be criticized without drawing official scorn. They also know that members of the General Service Unit, a state-police force working directly for the president, will come knocking at their door in the night if they question national policy or suggest that the government is not working or criticize the president and his family.

  “When you talk about freedom of the press, sure, we have
it if you’re writing about sports or traffic accidents or the courts,” a Kenyan journalist told me. “But I’m not going to write anything that would embarrass the government and I’m not going to question anyone in high places even if he is a crook. It’s all relative. You understand what you can say and what you can’t say, and if there is any question in your mind, you don’t say anything.”

  Self-censorship is often the most restrictive kind of censorship, but before anyone writes an obituary for journalistic integrity in Africa, let me introduce you to a remarkable man named Hilary Ng’weno. He works out of a cluttered, hot second-floor office overlooking Moi Avenue in Nairobi. Now in his forties, he was born in the Nairobi slums, educated in physics and mathematics at Harvard University, which he attended on scholarship, and is considered by those who know him to be a man of great intelligence and little business sense.

  In 1975 he confirmed his friends’ doubts about his financial savvy by starting a weekly news magazine that promised to report critically on events in Kenya and elsewhere in black Africa. Ng’weno started with a deficit balance in his bank account, a staff of two and, it seemed, not much chance of making the Weekly Review a success. Half the original press run on the first edition went unsold, and the advertising community (which was and still is controlled by Europeans in Kenya) stayed away in droves, unwilling to support any publication that might raise the government’s ire.

  Ng’weno worked eighteen-hour days. He borrowed and begged money. He and his wife, Fleur, did the reporting, the writing, the editing, the bookkeeping, the ad-selling. Ng’weno’s political analysis was so astute that some diplomats in Nairobi based their reports to their governments almost exclusively on what they read in the Weekly Review. The publication examined issues usually left untouched in Africa—income distribution, tribal rivalries, rising unemployment, the performance of parliament—and it went to the brink on challenging the government on some issues, always stopping just short of a dangerous confrontation.