angry folk

Somebody sent me a barrage of criticism in which they insisted that a report I wrote for the Mail and Guardian about Angola’s September elections was ‘folkloric’. The person who wrote the letter is a serious man, a man whose name I know and a man who I’ve somehow always missed making contact with. He accused me of exaggeration, simplification and, in so many words, stupidity. As I read his lette I felt a familiarity with the text, which I could have written myself to another foreign journalist at another time about another country. That recognition is what made it so damned painful.

I replied with an equally long letter, agreeing here and there, explaining in more depth where my positions come from, and defending myself in other parts. But I’m glad he wrote. The letter reminded me why I began walking away from journalism a little over three years ago. I realised that nothing of great value can be written in less than four thousand words, especially if you are writing about a particular place for an audience that is largely almost completely ignorant of it. There is no escape from certain simplification and generalisation. Whatever you write in 800 words will be partial. News reporting is even harder when the place you are writing about is only in the media every few years – either when there are elections, or there is a coup d’état, or hundreds of thousands of people are somehow stranded in a dramatic way, or when there is war. The event itself is unusual, rare and complex – and yet must be written about in a dumbed-down easily-digestible way. The reader must not be required to think.

As my angry letter-writer wrote, if this is the only kind of foreign coverage Angola is worth, it would be better not to write about the country at all. I said almost exactly the same thing two years ago, when I gave a talk at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and I feel overwhelmingly gloomy to think that I allowed my rule to slip because I was tempted to say something public about the Angolan elections. I’m not sure it was a mistake, but it has certainly been a lesson.

The funny thing is, I’m not at all sure that I even believe in the value of so-called multi-party elections – for Angola or anywhere else. The modern democracy is deeply fraudulent, deeply unfair, and deeply flawed. However I might criticise Angola’s elections for its many failures as an allegedly democratic process, I have equally strong criticisms about the US and UK elections to name just two other nations. I’ve come to see elections as a boiled sweet that we, the electorate, are given, with a little pat on the head, for swallowing the financially and morally corrupt and unfair and unequal world in which we live.

The Cambridge talk, which I have tried to include as a hidden extra link but have repeatedly failed, follows here:

I’d like to begin, if I may, in a slightly unconventional way, by asking you all to close your eyes. You don’t have to stay that way for my entire talk – don’t worry – only for the first two minutes. So, please, close them now. I want you all to draw on your imagination a little. Imagine that you are at home, sitting in front of the television, watching the BBC ten o’clock news or perhaps you prefer BBC World.

It’s mid-summer, 2005. You are watching a one and a half minute report about hunger in Africa, specifically Niger. The screen shows a close up on a naked child hanging from his mother’s empty breast. The child’s large eyes, under attack from lots of flies, gaze out from the screen. Three seconds of that. Then the screen cuts to a large cream tent flapping gently in the warm winds of a desert. Two slim European aid workers are inside the tent. Patiently, calmly, they are weighing children. As you watch the sorry scene, you hear the tiny patients screaming and crying. A few seconds of that should do it, and then the cries fade to the solemn tones of the correspondent who starts to tell us of the horrors of a famine she and the team have discovered somewhere on the edge of the Sahara.

OK. You can open your eyes now.

Late last year, I decided to carry out a small survey of the British mainstream media’s coverage of the so-called famine in the West African state of Niger. You may remember – if you were in this country at the time – that the sorts of images I’ve just described became quite common on our television screens from about the end of July 2005, which was when the British media finally woke up to the fact there was a hunger crisis in parts of Niger.

It made a change, some said, from the media’s tireless tirade against the Zimbabwe regime and their obsession with the neatly moustached man some call the African Hitler (President Robert Mugabe). Exaggerated attention on him was swapped for pornographic images of a famine in West Africa.

So how did Niger manage to find its way onto the Western media radar?

BBC DISCOVERY

According to the BBC, it was a mixture of expert instinct and investigative work.[i] In the corporation’s in-house magazine, Ariel, readers learned how a lone television editor, searching for material to illustrate a television feature about Bob Geldof’s Live 8, chanced upon footage of emaciated children at a feeding centre in Niger. Spotting a story, he then asked one of the BBC’s Africa bureaux – notably, the one in Johannesburg, over 3,200 miles away from Niger – to investigate.

The Jo’burg team called up the United Nations food agency, the World Food Programme, who confirmed that some people in Niger were indeed going hungry, adding that an initial “call for help” had been made eight months before, in November 2004. The WFP spokesman, himself a former BBC reporter, said,: “If the media had gone to Niger then [in November] they would have seen people struggling but surviving. It’s only when it’s too late for many children that the images force donor nations to take notice.”

He didn’t say that it is also only when it is too late for many children that their skeletal bodies are judged film-worthy by Western television crews. In this instance, the BBC despatched a television crew from Jo’burg to Niger. The correspondent who led the team, later wrote about her assignment.

She described, and I quote, their “epic journey… all over Africa… through scorching desert” to the “devastated” province of Maradi, Niger. She explained how they were the only foreign journalists around, proof, in her view, that “as far as the world was concerned this was not a famine”. The crew struggled to film the dying Nigeriens: “We would explain with great pain,” she says, “that we were not doctors but journalists – and that all we could do was pass the message of their suffering on to the world.”

Their hard work was not in vain. As a result of the BBC reports, Britain doubled its aid to Niger and the UN praised the power of the screen. Our modest reporter concluded: “We will never know exactly what part we played in all of this, but we were the only television crew there.”

Their reports triggered an avalanche of foreign journalists in Maradi. By the time this first BBC crew were on their way out of Niger, the rest of the international media were arriving. In a strange brush with the Bible, the corporation’s correspondent explained how the Maradi hotel that had been empty when they arrived was now full. “There were no rooms left at the inn,” she wrote. Whether the crew achieved the miracles of Mary or of Jesus is not clear.

This self-congratulating and heroic tone is not uncommon among British and Western journalists, particularly when they – perhaps I should say WE – are covering hunger and conflict in Africa. They like us to know that they have helped save people, an achievement that no doubt gives a greater definition to their work as investigators, reporters and missionaries. Nevertheless, the work they do is often superficial and clichéd. Last year, Niger proved once again, that life in Africa is nasty, brutish and short.

Time and again, it is the European – be he journalist or aid worker – who is required to step in and quite literally save the day. The natives evidently can’t do without us.

But rarely do these same journalists discuss the silence that characterises their work just as much as the noise.

TOO QUIET OR TOO LOUD?

I’d like to take you through a few facts and figures to illustrate this point:

Between the end of August 2004 and the end of August 2005, Niger featured on the BBC Ten O’Clock News 12 times. That might sound promising: an average of once a month on the domestic news is good going for almost any English-speaking African country, let alone a former French colony in the middle of the Sahara. However, eleven of those twelve stories were about the hunger crisis and were run in the space of about seven weeks from the 18^th of July 2005. The remaining story focused on another subject which the Western media tends to either oversimplify or use in a clichéd fashion – that is, modern-day slavery – and was broadcast in February 2005, THREE MONTHS AFTER the World Food Programme had put out its first warning of a hunger crisis brewing in Niger.

I’d like to make a comparison:

From about the year 2000, the British media’s limited appetite for Africa was transformed into a bulimic desire for rolling reports on Zimbabwe. It seemed – and sometimes, still does – as if the former colonial power’s sense of trauma resulting from the loss of Rhodesia was at last allowed to express itself freely. In terms of the British mainstream media, the monstrous dictator Mr Mugabe has eclipsed coups, attempted coups, civil wars, US-sponsored terror initiatives and even severely malnourished children across Africa.

For example, in November 2004, at the time of the WFP warning on Niger, Zimbabwe featured twice on the BBC’sTen O’Clock News. On both occasions, the English cricket tour to what some journalists might as well have called ‘the land of Satan’ was the subject matter. So, taking the same time span – August 2004 to August 2005 – Zimbabwe featured 13 times on the Ten O’Clock News (about the same as Niger) and 10 times on the BBC’s Newsnight, a programme that featured Niger only once in the same period.

A cursory glance at the press reveals a similar pattern. A search on The Daily Telegraph’s output across the same 12 months brings up 61 hits on Zimbabwe but only three on Niger. Moreover, these three stories on Niger all came after July the 21^st 2005 – shortly after the BBC began broadcasting its pictures.

Similarly, a search on The Guardian brings up 82 hits on Zimbabwe across the 12-month period – but only 14 on Niger. This is a higher number than The Daily Telegraph, but nevertheless, just like the Telegraph, the Guardian only began to cover Niger after the 21 July, in other words AFTER the BBC team had gone into Maradi – when suddenly British news managers decided that Niger was an interesting place.

Similarly, The Economist shows 10 stories on Zimbabwe across that same 12-month span, and just two on Niger, both of which were printed in August 2005. There had been no coverage or mention of Niger prior to that.

NOT JUST NUMBERS, BUT CONTENT

Of course, it’s not simply a numbers game; it’s also about content. British media outlets began desperately predicting famine in Zimbabwe in as far back as 2002. The BBC’s Fergal Keane wrote in January 2003 that a catastrophe was coming, under the headline ‘Famine plagues Zimbabwe’.[ii] There is no doubting that the former bread-basket of Southern Africa is in a bad way – and I would certainly not want to be labelled a Mugabe apologist – but, for me, as a journalist who specialises on Africa, this is a question of accuracy. In the case of Zimbabwe, the British media seems to be obsessed with trying to prove that Mr Mugabe cannot survive without the white man. Keane’s story – and he is by no means alone on this – was described by a colleague of mine, a journalist from East Africa, as a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we say there is going to be a famine in Zimbabwe often enough, eventually, it will happen. In fact, Zimbabwe’s famine still hasn’t happened. The situation is bad – but the problem with alarmist, inaccurate reporting such as Keane’s is that it tends to encourage extreme defensiveness. People who support Mugabe use this sort of reporting to prove that the Zimbabwean leader is doing a good job, to prove the West wrong: this doesn’t help anyone.

Double standards have also been evident in the Niger coverage. When the British media finally awoke to the story, they depicted the hunger crisis as one of biblical proportions – Africa in disaster once again – unable to convey the complexities of the situation. This was exemplified in the British media’s response to the refusal of Niger’s president, Mamadou Tandja, to agree with various Western, er, ‘experts’ – mainly foreign journalists flying into his country for a first and probably last brief trip – about the existence of a famine in his country.

He said: “There is no famine in Niger. The people who are saying there is a famine either have a political interest or an economic interest in saying there is a famine.” He accused the Western media and certain aid agencies of making “propaganda”. In response, he was vilified by the Western press, despite the fact that his statement was accurate. As the WFP put it: “We have not spoken about famine but about pockets of severe malnutrition.”

And yet, the British media continue to make wild claims: The Daily Telegraph insisted on publishing headlines like “A nation starving to death”;[iii] The Guardian repeatedly talked of “Niger’s famine” and even reported, I quote, that “[t]housands of severely malnourished children are dying every day”;[iv] the BBC also confirmed “the famine”, despite exploring the definition of the word on its website and confirming that Mr Tandja is, quote, “technically right”: there is not a famine.[v]

For the record, there is no internationally accepted definition of famine. The WFP however, has come up with a guide which is an amalgamation of several leading famine theorists. It’s worth quoting in full: “Famine is a situation of extreme food scarcity in terms of availability or access, resulting in widespread deaths. Such death can occur due to starvation or starvation-related diseases. Normally anything over 2 deaths per 10,000 of the population per day constitutes an emergency situation. The precise rate at which excess mortality becomes a famine has not been determined. Famine is precipitated by substantial gaps between what a country is able to produce and what its population needs, which are not filled either by affordable commercial imports or by aid. Such gaps can be cause by nature or man.”[vi]

One well-placed aid worker told me that The Guardian claim of thousands of children dying on a daily basis “had to be an exaggeration”. The source said: “I visited the MSF clinic in Maradi in early July 2005 and they had just had one of their worst days when seven kids died. The average is about two. It is of course impossible to know how many kids are dying out in the villages in the bush, but the general impression from those who have been out and about is that Medecins Sans Frontieres and others have done a good job at treating the worst cases.”[vii]

To put this into some perspective, there are a couple of other statistics worth noting. First, in an average year, almost one in six children die before their first birthday in Niger. Second, 262 out of every thousand children do not make it past the age of five years.[viii] This is everyday life in Niger and yet few news managers – as they are now called – think it worthwhile investing in a Niger correspondent on a permanent basis, let alone a West Africa reporter or a regular visitor to the country.

HYPOCRITICAL REPORTERS

It may seem churlish to some to bicker about the semantics and statistics when people are dying of hunger, and it would be wrong to deny that Mr Tandja had (and still has) his own self-serving political reasons to fear a famine. Hunger can be the crucial catalyst to a successful coup and was in Niger in 1974 as Mr Tandja knows: he played a crucial role and was rewarded with the post of interior minister. However, the self-satisfied tone that slips so easily from the imperial tongues of Western journalists requires, at the very least, some reflection.

The journalists accused the Nigerien president of denying the obvious and of failing to care for his people without any sign of shame for their own very limited coverage of the crisis, an extremely belated and impulsive response to some shocking pictures of starving Nigerien children. Instead of busying themselves with the British cricket team’s moral stance on Zimbabwe in order to whip up patriotic fervour, they could have used some of their resources in November 2004 to respond to the WFP warning about Niger.

But it’s easier to present Africa as a continent of pathetic victims and mad, monstrous leaders. It’s not just journalists who promote this simplification, but also unkempt pop stars, well-meaning charities, diplomats, consultants and some academics. It sometimes seems that we can all say what we like about Africa because we appear to have so much power. Anyone who challenges the stereotype or pleads for a consideration of history is accused of political correctness, at best, or (particularly in the case of Zimbabwe) is labelled an enemy, at worst.

Does this mean that when it comes to the coverage of the African continent by the British media, we are to be stuck with threadbare accounts of dying children and Zimbabwe’s (or other) lunatic leaders? Will other events taking place in the continent’s 54 countries always be ignored? There are so many good stories, so many important stories, which remain untouched. For example, allegations that the United States is sponsoring attacks around the Sahara to suggest that Al Qaeda terrorists are operating in the area, or the continued persecution of northerners in Ivory Coast, or the fact that in Angola – predicted to become on of the world’s fastest growing economies – the government is carrying out forced removals on a par with Zanu-PF’s much-publicised policy, including shooting at children (a four year old boy was shot in the leg two weeks ago). How many people know about the persecution of journalists in the Gambia, a country with a dire political situation and yet tourism continues with great success?

It’s not all bad: last year, Nigeria’s so-called Nollywood films were being sold like hot cakes (no pun intended) in Niger, in areas where people were dying of hunger. The BBC domestic teams didn’t report this – perhaps they didn’t notice – but it was covered by the BBC World Service’s African English and Hausa services which had Nigerien and Nigerian reporters covering the crisis. Other good news: a trienalle – an arts festival – will be held in Luanda in July, displaying some of the continent’s finest art work; or what about Uganda’s budding entrepreneurs who’ve started making sandals out of Lake Victoria’s Nile perch! I’m reliably told they don’t make your feet smell bad!

DON’T FORGET IRAQ

Unfortunately, few news manager are interested in covering the complexity or, indeed the positive and humorous happenings that take place in Africa, which – they often need reminding – is a continent, not a country. Few are interested in the deeper narrative. Among those who are, they struggle to get the funding from their managers who have become so obsessed with ‘giving listeners or readers or viewers (let’s just call them customers) what they want’ in order to try and win the ratings battle!

I don’t believe that people only want to hear snippets of famines or snippets of dictatorship: part of the challenge for a decent journalist is to interest listeners, readers, viewers in complicated stories.

Recently, in the run-up to my ever-extending departure for Luanda, I have been speaking to editors and foreign editors about Angola. Trying to ‘sell’ Angola to the British media is a depressing, apparently impossible pursuit. First, it’s in Africa. Second, they speak Portuguese. Third, the war’s stopped! The Guardian foreign editor told me that she doesn’t have enough money to pay freelancers, particularly people working out of countries like Angola which British audiences are so unfamiliar with. The Guardian’s strategy is simply to invest in a country for a few days when, I quote, ‘something really big happens’. Presumably ‘really big’ means a famine or a civil war. The Guardian, according to a senior editor of theirs – who I shall leave unnamed – only has half a correspondent in Africa! Why half? Apparently, the other half is regularly in Iraq. It’s not just The Guardian that does this, the BBC also sends permanent staff in Africa to cover Iraq when the Iraq correspondent is on R and R. It saves money to send a staffer, who will cost a lot less than a freelance. And anyway, who will notice if 54 African countries aren’t covered for a while?

God forbid we forget Iraq!

And Iraq – like most of the Middle East – is a more tempting place for any ambitious correspondent because you will be seen more, heard more and therefore, more likely to climb the ladder. Africa, I was once told at the start of my career, is “where you go to cut your foreign correspondent’s teeth” – but it’s not a place to stay. So, inevitably perhaps, many British reporters who work in Africa are there for a year, or two or three – and then they ‘move on’. News organisations are not inclined to invest in complexity, to invest in a reporter who knows about a country’s history, who has a continued relationship with a place. And living in the instant-information culture that we do, perhaps informed reporters are unnecessary.

Briefly, since I have told people that I am going to Angola, most people in the industry have been surprised. “Back to Angola?” they ask. “You really shouldn’t go back: it’s never the same twice!” Going back is considered an emotional choice – “you must have got too close” – and an anti-career choice.

GOBBETS AND TECHNOLOGY

News, today, is about providing ‘gobbets’ as one former BBC news manager puts it. You don’t need to know much about the subject, but you must provide ‘the product’ quickly, efficiently and succinctly. Some news managers even feel that people with less knowledge ask better questions and write better reports because, like most of the audience, they don’t know too much and so they keep things nice and simple. There is a strand of thinking – and I have no evidence to contradict or support it – that a reporter who knows a great deal about country x (who has read and understood the history) finds it much harder to write a 45 second news story, than a fresh pair of ears and eyes who’s never set foot on the soil.

And in today’s news market, a single reporter is expected to file for radio, television and online. We need to write stories that can be cut down to an SMS for those people whose daily news fix is texted direct to their mobile phone. The ease of distribution of the gobbet is more important than the complex truth of the event.

For news out of Africa to improve, the nature of news itself needs to change. We think of news as entertainment, and increasingly seem to accept that it ‘peddles a line’. We accept that its about markets and that news is a product. We don’t want to invest in complexity, and narrative. My question is why not? Is that purely because of money or is it also about the way we view Africa?

THE LAZY PUBLIC

Before I end, I just briefly want to touch on the role of the audience, in this particular case, the British public. This morning, as I was re-reading this and pondering its strengths and weaknesses, a friend of mine who happens to be the head of City University’s journalism department, Professor Adrian Monck, sent me a copy of a speech he gave last week entitled ‘Why the public doesn’t deserve the news’.

My entire talk stems from my own deep belief that the British public deserve a much higher standard and deeper quality of news than is currently provided by the British mainstream media. I also believe that an informed population can, in the end, create change. Call me idealistic, but that was one of my prime motivations for becoming a journalist – that and the chance to travel cheaply (I didn’t realise then that it’s only really cheap for the BBC…!)

I would naturally tend to agree with the likes of John Rawls and the French media expert, Claude-Jean Bertrand, who argue that an informed citizenry is required for a functioning democracy. But Monck argues that there is no evidence to show that broadcast media, or any media in fact, can effect moral change. He also mentions political scientist, David Held, who, in Models of Democracy, lists nine different types of everybody’s favourite form of government, only one of which requires informed citizens: that’s participatory democracy.

It’s useful for me, for the purposes of this point, to be talking on the 4^th May – our local election day. In my constituency, Hackney South, less than 30% of eligible voters are expected to exercise their right to vote today. Across the nation, the turnout for local elections is around the 35% mark. As I left home this morning, to take the train here to Cambridge, I learned that only 500 people in my local ward had bothered to vote. Elections are not the only way to judge democracy, but most people accept that we do not live in a participatory democracy – but perhaps, a stable democracy. Arguably, stability does not require informed citizens. Some would argue the very opposite: the less informed, the better.

As I trotted off to the polling booth at eight o’clock this morning, I stopped to talk to a neighbour. I asked if she was going to vote. With a big smile, she said “Ooh, maybe later, I don’t know. I haven’t really got the time.”

I am sure she is not alone.

But if someone doesn’t have the time to vote – for a local councillor, even in Hackney where the council’s reputation is appalling and surely requires absolute change – then I must be mad to think that they would make the time to read a lengthy, informed article about a country they know very little about in a continent they know even less about.

I’m afraid therefore, that I end this talk with some questions, which I wish to explore further, and perhaps you could help me with:

Should people like me be grateful that the African continent gets any coverage at all? By arguing for attention to complexity and narrative, and against simplifications about dictators and famines, am I asking too much? As a consequence, by demanding more, could we risk losing the albeit piecemeal coverage of Africa altogether?

Or would Africa’s 54 countries be better off if the British mainstream media ignored them altogether? Perhaps ‘no news’ – of stereo-typed dictators, victimised hungry kids and cannibalistic rebel groups – would really be ‘good news’.

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[i] Ariel, 02.08.05, week 31

[ii] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2678557.stm

[iii] The Daily Telegraph, 28 July 2005, Nicole Martin

[iv] The Guardian , 23 July 2005, Andrew Meldrum, the former correspondent for The Guardian and Observer in Zimbabwe. He was seized by police and security agents on May 16 2003, driven to Harare airport and expelled. He had reported from that country for 23 years.

[v] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4139174.stm

[vi] Email correspondence with a WFP spokesman in West Africa, 31 August, 2005

[vii] Email correspondence with the aid worker on 30 and 31 August, 2005

[viii] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/fullMaps_Af.nsf/0/714AB6B072FAA30B852570520070E5FC/$File/rw_FFS_ner010805.pdf?OpenElement