The Africans (46 page)

Government-controlled media are, of course, more the rule than the exception in the Third World. What is noteworthy, though, is that black Africa inherited a competitive, untethered press at independence and managed to destroy it so effectively that no one asks anymore what the future of the press is in Africa. They ask instead if it has any future at all. Except in Nigeria—where the black press dates back to a paper called
Iwe Irohnin
, first printed in 1859—the early newspapers on the continent were published by colonialists for colonialists. They bequeathed to Africa’s young nations an independent press pledged to serving the people and a constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression. But in country after country, the free press was the first of the Western-styled institutions to fall. It was the tool the governments most needed to manipulate the minds of the uneducated masses. News was censored and managed to the point that what got into print was little more than government press releases. Before long there was not a single independent radio station left in all of black Africa. Nigeria’s first government needed only one year to forget its proud journalistic history and its independence promises in favor of a more secure course that stifled critical comment. In 1961 the High Court of Lagos found journalist Chike Obi, the “Thomas Paine of Nigeria,” guilty of sedition as a
result of a pamphlet he had published entitled “The People: Facts That You Must Know.” The seditious section read:

The story across the whole continent is not much different. President Hastings Banda of Malawi jailed virtually the whole nongovernmental press corps in the mid-seventies. President Kenneth Kaunda appoints and fires newspaper editors in Zambia; in Uganda and Zaire, journalists shuttle in and out of jail so regularly that their wives don’t even ask where they have been when they reappear after an absence of several days. Equatorial Guinea’s president Macias Nguema Biyogo went one step further: by the time he was overthrown and killed in 1979, all journalists of note had been executed or were in exile.

South Africa is more subtle, and first-time visitors there are often astonished to pick up English-language newspapers and find editorials critical of the government. Indeed, the country’s forty-three daily and weekly newspapers do produce some first-class examples of adversary and investigative journalism. But reporters know precisely how far they can go. South Africa has fifty laws that directly affect the dissemination of information, and another fifty statutes or administrative regulations that indirectly restrict the public’s right to know. If a reporter, for instance, wanted to confirm the arrest of a black nationalist, his inquiry would have to include the address and birth date of the person believed jailed. This information is often impossible to provide because the births of many blacks are not registered and not remembered by the family. Thus the authorities have no obligation to say whom they are holding.

Predictably, the role of newspapers in Africa today has declined so much that they have very little significance in society. And not much circulation either. In the mid-sixties, according to the London-based International Press Institute (IPI), there were 299 daily newspapers in Africa. That figure included about forty papers in the Arab states, mostly Egypt, and about thirty in the white-ruled areas
of southern Africa. By the early 1980s, only about 150 dailies were left on the continent, and the shrinkage had occurred almost exclusively in black Africa. Nine countries had no newspaper at all.

The combined daily circulation of the papers in Africa fell during that period from well over three million to two million. Thus, the circulation on a continent of 455 million people is only about two thirds of what a single London newspaper, the
Daily Mirror
, sells in a day.

“When you look at the struggle of the press in Africa,” said IPI’s Frank Barton, “the sad truth is that the press is losing. I can’t be optimistic about the press’s future in Africa. Everything else on the continent has expanded in the last ten years—roads, education, medical facilities—and newspapers continue to shrink. I’d suspect in another ten years that we may not see more than about fifty dailies in Africa.”

Government constraints are not the sole reason for the decline of the African newspaper. Among the others: an illiteracy rate that runs as high as 90 percent in some countries; the emergence of radio as the most powerful communications medium in Africa; the high cost of importing newsprint from Europe; and the absence of daily or weekly newspapers in the rural areas, where the majority of people live. All of this has made newspapers an amenity of the city elite.

If the printed word belongs to the educated few in Africa, the radio belongs to all. It is the voice of authority, though not necessarily truth, and when it speaks, Africa listens. Its importance as a government medium is probably greater than that on any other continent, forming as it does the most direct link between the rulers and the ruled. In 1955 there were half a million radios in Africa; now there are more than twenty-five million. For every 20 people there is one radio, compared to one edition of a daily newspaper for every 210 people and one television set for every 525.

In the Central African Republic, the government uses radio announcements to summon foreign diplomats to the presidential palace. In Nigeria, the government broadcasts to its people in seventeen ethnic languages. In rural Kenya, schoolchildren take “creative writing” courses over static-filled radios set up in small dark classrooms. In Mozambique, the government used to beam its propaganda into white-ruled Rhodesia for an hour a day on 998 kilohertz, and Rhodesia, then in the throes of civil war, used to throw its own
right back into Mozambique on 1007 kilohertz. And in most countries, the government radio station is as heavily guarded as the national treasury; get the station and you can take control of the country and the people as well.

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.