The Africans (47 page)

Michael Goldsmith, a veteran reporter for the Associated Press, violated that principle once and was lucky he lived to relate his experiences. Writing about the Central African Republic, he filed a report from Bangui that displeased the emperor, Bokassa I. Worse yet, Goldsmith transmitted the article via public telex to the AP bureau in South Africa, asking that it be relayed to the Paris office, which he had been unable to raise on the telex. The report came back garbled so that Bokassa, in addition to being angered about some unflattering remarks in the article, now thought Goldsmith was a South African agent sending coded messages.

Goldsmith was taken from the Rock Hotel late one night to meet Bokassa, who had secluded himself in one of his nine palaces in preparation for his coronation. Bokassa greeted him warmly, raised
his club and struck him across the forehead. Bokassa’s bodyguards then kicked Goldsmith unconscious and tossed him in prison, where he was kept with unattended wounds. A month later, after intense diplomatic negotiations, Goldsmith was again summoned by the emperor. Bokassa hugged him, kissed him on both cheeks and had his henchmen put him on a plane to Paris.

Almost every country in Africa has a list of Western journalists barred from future entry because of allegedly offensive stories. Stanley Meisler, who covered Africa for the
Los Angeles Times
in the sixties and seventies, ended up after seven years being blacklisted by thirteen countries, even though he was one of the most respected and brightest correspondents on the continent. When he could no longer get visas for any significant African country, the
Times
had to transfer him to its Madrid bureau. The final straw came when he wrote a story about Upper Volta, an impoverished West African country he greatly admired. Meisler said that Upper Volta wore its badge of poverty without shame and suffered from neither the illusion of grandeur nor the expectation of false hopes. Two days after the story appeared in print, he was denounced on the government radio for being hostile to the country.

Nigeria is less subtle in its reaction to outside comment and criticism, still being resentful of what it believes was pro-Biafran Western reporting during its civil war. When the Reuters bureau chief in Lagos filed an incorrect story in 1976, soldiers picked him up, along with his wife and eight-year-old daughter, took them to the river and pushed them off in a dugout canoe without paddles in the direction of neighboring Benin, which they managed to reach safely. The
New York Times
resident correspondent, John Darnton, was expelled the next year on twenty-four hours’ notice for writing a story about a poor Nigerian family who could not get proper medical attention for their dying child. It was a very moving story. No one questioned the accuracy of the article, just the choice of subject matter.

Like other African countries, Nigeria contends that all it wants from the Western media is objective reporting, and given that, it will accept exposés along with favorable stories. The argument is not convincing. What Africa really wants is boosterism, a style of advocacy journalism that concentrates on the opening of civic centers and ignores the warts. It wants a new set of guidelines for covering the underdeveloped world, one which, if used in the West, would
tell journalists to disregard the Watergates and Charles Mansons and concentrate only on the positive and uplifting. It wants to be covered by historians, not journalists. Africa says it needs this respite from criticism during the early, troubled days of nationhood, but I am not sure who would really benefit if foreign correspondents wrote about Africa as some people wish it were rather than as it is. To write about only what is good does not mean that what is bad will simply evaporate. To contend that truth is only that which promotes national causes is to deny the validity of other causes and the necessity to re-evaluate them. It leaves a people in need of hearing a voice other than their own.

Not surprisingly, most African nations have lined up with the Communist bloc in demanding the endorsement of a UN-sponsored “new world information order.” The effect of the Orwellian resolution would be to restrict the free flow of news on the premise that journalism is too important to be left to journalists. One of the draft declarations debated in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—for which the United States pays 25 percent of the budget—would endorse the governmental licensing of journalists and would compel news organizations to print official replies to stories a government considered unfair. “It is the duty of states …” one article says, “to ensure that the mass media coming directly under their jurisdiction act in conformity” with the UNESCO declaration. Western critics contend that this is nothing less than giving the United Nations sanction to censorship and government control of the press.

What Africa does not seem to realize is that it can have total control over the news emanating from its countries under the existing ground rules: all a government has to do is deny visas to foreign correspondents and then there is no news to write. Also, Africa seems to have missed the point that government-dictated news is no more credible in the Third World than it is in Europe or the United States. If Africa wants its journalists to write news that is believable to the rest of the world, all it has to do is remove the shackles and let them be journalists.

Two countries, Nigeria and Kenya, deserve special mention in any discussion about the African press. Despite Nigeria’s sensitivity toward Western reporters, both countries have produced some distinguished journalists and both have maintained, often against great
odds, a perky, pesky press full of critical comment and relatively free of censorship. Even through thirteen years of military rule, Nigeria’s fourteen daily and twenty-four weekly papers—including black Africa’s largest paper, the
Daily Times
(circulation 300,000)—managed to remain nettlesome and, to a surprising degree, independent-minded. For failing to pay homage to their soldier rulers, journalists risked jail or having their heads shaved by army punishment squads, but it was a price they paid willingly to keep alive one of the last vestiges of a gadfly press in Africa.

In Kenya, the two English-language daily papers combine some intelligent editorial comment with a great deal of sex, crime and scandal. The result is a healthy circulation for each and an X-rated product. The
Daily Nation
(circulation 80,000) offered its readers these page-one stories one morning: “Boy’s Body Eaten by Dogs in Hospital Mortuary,” “Armed Gang Storms Hotel,” “Gangster Shot Dead,” “Manager Denies Fraud.”

The same day the other tabloid, the
Standard
, led off a lengthy story with this paragraph: “After sleeping with a ten-year-old girl … a man pleaded with the child’s mother not to report the matter to the police because he was possessed by the devil.” Readers were also titillated by a story about a dwarf who turned into a cannibal because of “bad eating habits.” And the same readers were no doubt surprised to see John Vorster, the South African prime minister, referred to as a “white friend.” The next day the paper ran a correction, saying it had intended to use the word “fiend,” not “friend.”

Kenya’s dailies are unique for more than their unpredictability. For Kenya is the only country in black Africa where the national press is privately owned, one of the few where there is no covert censorship, and probably the only one in the world where the major dailies are owned and controlled by nonresident foreigners. (The
Daily Nation
is owned by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, the international businessman and spiritual head of the Ismali Moslems, the
Standard
by the powerful British conglomerate Lonrho.)

Even in Kenya, though, freedom of the press is deceptive. It is not so much that journalists have no restrictions as it is that they understand how far they can go. They know which cabinet ministers are out of favor with the president and can be attacked with impunity, which African countries can be criticized without drawing official scorn. They also know that members of the General Service Unit, a state-police force working directly for the president, will come
knocking at their door in the night if they question national policy or suggest that the government is not working or criticize the president and his family.

“When you talk about freedom of the press, sure, we have it if you’re writing about sports or traffic accidents or the courts,” a Kenyan journalist told me. “But I’m not going to write anything that would embarrass the government and I’m not going to question anyone in high places even if he is a crook. It’s all relative. You understand what you can say and what you can’t say, and if there is any question in your mind, you don’t say anything.”

Self-censorship is often the most restrictive kind of censorship, but before anyone writes an obituary for journalistic integrity in Africa, let me introduce you to a remarkable man named Hilary Ng’weno. He works out of a cluttered, hot second-floor office overlooking Moi Avenue in Nairobi. Now in his forties, he was born in the Nairobi slums, educated in physics and mathematics at Harvard University, which he attended on scholarship, and is considered by those who know him to be a man of great intelligence and little business sense.

In 1975 he confirmed his friends’ doubts about his financial savvy by starting a weekly news magazine that promised to report critically on events in Kenya and elsewhere in black Africa. Ng’weno started with a deficit balance in his bank account, a staff of two and, it seemed, not much chance of making the
Weekly Review
a success. Half the original press run on the first edition went unsold, and the advertising community (which was and still is controlled by Europeans in Kenya) stayed away in droves, unwilling to support any publication that might raise the government’s ire.

Ng’weno worked eighteen-hour days. He borrowed and begged money. He and his wife, Fleur, did the reporting, the writing, the editing, the bookkeeping, the ad-selling. Ng’weno’s political analysis was so astute that some diplomats in Nairobi based their reports to their governments almost exclusively on what they read in the
Weekly Review
. The publication examined issues usually left untouched in Africa—income distribution, tribal rivalries, rising unemployment, the performance of parliament—and it went to the brink on challenging the government on some issues, always stopping just short of a dangerous confrontation.

The
Weekly Review
has never turned a profit, primarily because the advertisers are still gun-shy and ads account for only 20 percent
of the content. But at last count the weekly circulation had risen to 35,000, including 1,000 foreign subscriptions, and the magazine had won local and international recognition as a publication of unmatched editorial excellence in black Africa. By 1980 Ng’weno had increased his staff to eight and was also publishing a Sunday paper, the
Nairobi Times
(circulation 20,000) and a children’s magazine (
Rainbow
, 5,000). His modest publishing empire comprised the only African-owned and African-managed independent newspapers and magazines south of the Sahara.

“I’ve written things that have angered the government and nothing has happened,” Ng’weno said one afternoon, his voice rising above the din of traffic and honking horns in the street below his office. “I don’t know how much further I could have gone and gotten away with it, but certainly there is a governmental tolerance toward criticism in Kenya that is absent in most African countries.”

As Ng’weno sees it, there are three reasons why the Kenyan press has enjoyed a wide degree of freedom. First, any attempt to control the media would throw jitters into the foreign community, which controls a considerable part of the economy. Second, Kenya’s
Daily Nation
and
Standard
are part of large foreign-owned businesses with other, extensive investments in East Africa. And most important, Kenyan politicians have learned that there is no such thing as government control; there is only control by a particular faction of government. When that happens, the group that is out of favor loses access to a medium for reaching the public and is cast into the silent exile of the desposed.

When, for example, the radical left was forced out of the Voice of Kenya, the government’s broadcasting service, in the 1960s, the first thing its members did was run to the same newspapers they had branded “imperialistic agents” to complain that no one was reporting what they said anymore: it was fine to silence the opposition when the radicals were in power, but not when they were the opposition.

The last time we talked, Ng’weno was cautiously confident that his publishing company, known as Stellascope Limited, could survive financially and could escape government controls. Sadly, he was wrong. In 1981, with advertising dwindling and overhead costs rising, Ng’weno, the majority shareholder in Stellascope, had to turn the company over to a new nonprofit organization, the Press Trust of Kenya.

The patron of the trust was President Daniel arap Moi, and two of the nine trustees were presidential appointees. Ng’weno remained as editor in chief of the publications with “complete autonomy in all editorial matters.” But clearly, the realities of Africa had caught up with Stellascope and the future seemed predictable enough: President Moi was not going to have the same news judgment as editor Ng’weno.