Africa: Ugly and uplifting

It is an age-old debate: how to cover Africa. A session at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference this week attracted a range of views. We summarise them and provide a checklist for journalists.

Moeletsi Mbeki, executive chairperson of Endemol South Africa, said: ‘We have to remove the chip from our shoulder about the way Africa is covered. Bad governance and bad leaders do exist in Africa and we must beware of looking through rose-tinted spectacles.”

Azubuike Ishiekwene, executive director of Punch, Nigeria, said that coverage of Africa is stereotypically characterised by the four Ds: ‘death, disease, destruction and despair”.

Finbarr O’Reilly, Reuters photographer for West and Central Africa, said: ‘Africa should not be shown in an overly negative or overly sanitised way because it is many things.”

Professor Guy Berger, head of the department of journalism at Rhodes University, said that there are ‘classic complaints about covering Africa” but asked if these in fact were ‘wrong” since they looked at genuine issues that wreaked havoc on the continent. He said we should move from ‘whingeing to win-win” and that we should report on ‘the interesting, the ugly and the uplifting”.

Cheriff Moumina Sy, director of Bendre in Burkina Faso, said: ‘Africa is multifaceted and we must not turn a blind eye because we will become the dumping ground for information about ourselves from elsewhere.”

Mathatha Tsedu, editor of City Press in Johannesburg, said: ‘The tragedy of this session is that, despite the fact that the topic was about Africa reporting on Africa, we have gone and lambasted the West instead of looking at ourselves. We are not the helpless victims; we have a responsibility to do things for ourselves.”

Suggestions from the panel