African journalism needs to reawaken its historical role

J SIGURU WAHUTU

DAVID CHERUIYOT

Quick question: what do these titles have in common? A Dark Continent Seeking Light; Sure, Ebola is Bad. Africa has Worse, or; Magic and Cannibalism in the African Jungle. You guessed it – they’re all about Africa. But the most relevant answer is they’re all headlines that have appeared in the New York Times.

They’re just some examples of the ways that many traditional news outlets in the West have historically reported about Africa. Today news reporting that reinforces negative perceptions, stereotyping and racial misrepresentation is declining. But the harms inflicted on the continent and its communities remain unresolved.

US media scholar Meredith Clark predicted that 2021 would be the “year journalism starts paying reparations”.

She coined the term “reparative journalism” to mean a new approach for the US news media “to redeem itself ...through radically inclusive editorial choices”.

As if to answer this call, many news organisations have published prominent apologies. These acknowledge their racialised framing of the news or links to slavery.

Other forms of redress have also gained recognition. The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine, for example, is a platform for marginalised communities to revisit the history of slavery and racism. In the UK, The Guardian created a similar project, Cotton Capital, as part of a broader restorative justice programme.

Scholars have argued that this employs a strategy of “journalistic retelling” of the news.

There are some positive developments regarding how Africa is being reported internationally. But an ongoing cultural change is needed, mainly in the ways news is produced. This calls for rethinking journalism training and shifting to more community-oriented approaches of reporting.

And, in this rethink, should African media not also be taking stock of their own damaging historical role in supporting colonial interests and Global North perspectives?

As media scholars we focus on how journalism on the continent works. We have studied how African journalists report on African news in relation to global news media. In a forthcoming book, Wahutu considers what forces have shaped African journalism and why African narratives have been marginalised by African journalists.

It’s critical for minority world countries to reckon with a dark history of colonisation, slavery, genocide or racial discrimination. But there is also the question of how – or even if – this is something that news organisations and professionals in Africa themselves need to reckon with.

The press has a long history in Africa. The first newspaper appeared in the late 1700s in Egypt, followed by South Africa in 1800 and Sierra Leone in 1801.

Indigenous newspapers, such as The Lagos Weekly Record (Nigeria), L’Action Tunisienne (Tunisia), Imvo Zabantsundu (South Africa) and Njata ya Kirinyaga (Kenya), were not shy to call out the ills of the colonial government or African elites.

This would change after independence due to political repression by new African governments – as well as ongoing Western approaches to journalism education and training that had become the norm. The state was mostly treated with kid gloves or as a source of information. Audiences were mostly treated as “the man in the biscuit factory”: uninterested in politics and concerned about sports.

Research shows that when covering international events unfolding on the continent, African newspapers have been more likely to get their stories from organisations and actors from the Western world than from other African countries.

This is typically presented as a necessary function of a lack of resources.

For example, it may be cheaper for Kenya to get news stories from a global news agency than from Ugandan newspapers (some of which are owned by rival Kenyan media organisations).

So, if correspondents of The New York Times admit that their organisation misrepresents Africa, why would The New York Times stories appear in newspapers in Kenya? Especially when talking about events in Kenya? Whatever the reasons – and there are many –it’s time for African news organisations to also consider reparative journalism.

To think about whether or how African journalism has perpetuated these very misrepresentations through outsourcing labour or through what is understood as “good journalism”.

Many news organisations in Africa have yet to adequately examine how they have internalised white normative approaches to journalism.

National Geographic has apologised for framing Aboriginal Australians as “savages”. Perhaps we should ask some Kenyan newspapers to apologise for seeking to expand the colonial military’s presence and therefore violence against Kenyans.

A new period of cultural reckoning in the US and UK has paved the way for a global conversation about reparative journalism. Among the proposals are for news organisations to find new ways of doing news reporting. These include more sustained coverage of misrepresented communities, more just future dealings with minority communities, and journalism that is expanded to include sidelined voices in news reporting, such as artists and activists.

African journalism within the continent needs to reawaken its historically outspoken role instead of continuing to mimic damaging practices from the West. There is a need to retell the continent’s realities in a manner that avoids divisions embraced by early political elites.

Our research proposes that African news organisations must think of themselves as chroniclers of contemporary histories and builders of archives for future generations.

The news media is key in not only constructing reality but also archiving it. This informs how audiences think about their everyday life. This in turn influences how they imagine their tomorrow and remember their yesterday. It has a lasting effect on how future generations think about places like Africa.

Wahutu is Professor of Media and Genocide, New York University, and Cheruiyot is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, University of Groningen.

Cape Times