Addressing a gathering of the continent’s editors in Johannesburg earlier this month, President Thabo Mbeki delivered a caustic analysis of the state of Africa’s media.
His primary target was the South African press, whom he charged with gross ignorance on issues affecting the continent it operated in.
In a tone laced with scorn, Mbeki related the shock that he and fellow exiles got when they returned to South Africa and “realised how little many of our people knew about the rest of the continent”.
South Africans, Mbeki said, were ignorant of the continent’s great civilisations and reputable centres of learning, of African artists and writers, knew nothing about the sporting prowess of fellow Africans and had an unwarranted superiority complex with regard to their peers.
“Over many years we [South Africans] had absorbed an image of the African continent projected by a media that was relentlessly contemptuous of many things African,” said Mbeki.
The point that Mbeki was making was legitimate. Africans in different parts of this land mass know very little about each other’s worlds. And South Africans are among the worst offenders on this front, having been fed the tale that the “rest of Africa” was a wasteland of poverty, conflict and disease. The Africa beyond our borders, we were taught, was a vast expanse peopled by primitive tribes who had been prematurely abandoned by their colonial masters before they could reach acceptable levels of sophistication.
Furthermore, suggested the serving African Union chairperson, journalists were doing their continent a disservice by not acting as bridges between Africa’s peoples.
“It makes no sense that they [Africans] should be separated from one another by ignorance of one another. Indeed that dangerous state of unknowing, which leads to prejudice and superstition against and about one another, would make it impossible for us to achieve the goal of African unity.”
Now it is very true that knowledge breeds greater understanding, spurs economic development and is a bulwark against the prejudices that have turned many of this continent’s lands into killings fields and arenas of warfare.
It is also a fact that Africa’s media has many shortcomings when it comes to fulfilling its role. But these shortcomings are by no means a reflection of the ineptitude of Africa’s journalists or an indication of a Pavlovian addiction to the truth as seen through Western eyes.
There are reasons for these shortcomings, reasons that Mbeki should be well aware of.
Surely Mbeki knew when he returned from exile that he was returning to a country that had been isolated from the international community and that its people had been cut off from African brethren.
Surely he remembers that there was once an ideology called apartheid, part of whose devious mission was to foster ignorance. All South Africans were victims of that system that taught whites that they were better than Indians, who were better than coloureds, who were better than blacks, who were in turn better than the natives of Black Africa — as the Nats liked to refer to anything that lay north of the Limpopo and south of the Sahara.
South Africans, particularly black South Africans, lived a reality that no other people in the world could imagine. That reality is not something to be ignored.
But what really perturbs is the romanticisation of the notion of the “African story”, which Mbeki says journalists on the continent are failing to capture.
What, one may ask, is this mythical African story and why are we as journalists failing to tell it to Africa’s people and to the world? Is the story that the East African newspaper is telling an untruth? Is Nigeria’s The Guardian misleading its readers?
Is Noticias failing the people of Mozambique? Does Lusaka’s The Post not tell the people of Zambia about that country’s realities?
Does South Africa’s burgeoning tabloid industry not speak of the daily struggles of this country’s poor in the same breath as it celebrates working-class icons such as Mzekekeze and Gift Leremi? Does Zimbabwe’s Independent not expose the excesses of the Mugabe regime in the same edition that it records the resilience of indigenous businesses?
The African story is not just the story of those who preside over the continent’s 800-million people, some of them justly and some of them very unjustly. And it is not just the story of the evolution of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development that — while deserving the unqualified support of the continent’s people — also deserves rational criticism.
Our story — this continent’s story — is about millions of people who were passed from colonial oppression to abuse by domestic rulers. They trusted the Uhuru generation of leaders, hailing them as liberators and bringers of good. Alas, they were betrayed when the erstwhile revolutionaries began to mimic the departed colonial masters.
Now they are wary of the new wave of post-Cold War leaders, who also rode into power promising a second Uhuru, but once ensconced in office began to mimic the departing generation of betrayers.
These African masses, among whom Mbeki has urged the continent’s journalists to embed themselves, are a self-confident species who have grown sceptical and cynical about official power. They now do things for themselves. They are taking political power into their own hands, making decisions outside of the formal structures. They are increasingly creating their own economies and despise the cronyism and parasitism that characterise much economic behaviour on our continent.
This is the story that thousands of journalists around the continent strive to tell on a daily basis. They expose corruption, speak out against repressesion, propose alternatives and make the nomenklatura uncomfortable. While doing this they also celebrate the successes of their respective countries’ entrepreneurs, artists, civil society activists and those government functionaries who take the term public service literally.
There are journalistic heroes on this continent, men and women whose courage and tenacity put many of us in more developed circumstances to shame.
African governments could do a great deal to help the continent’s journalists tell our story better. This they can do by repealing repressive laws, passing and enforcing legislation that protects basic freedoms, opening up access to information, encouraging free debate in their countries and adopting policies that expedite economic and technological development.
And, most importantly, they should stop harassing and incarcerating those who wish to tell the story of the ordinary African.
For it is not easy to tell the African story from inside the walls of Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi prison.