Africans need to highlight success
This year, the overall winner was Citizen TV's Tom Mboya for his story on a tribe with African roots that lives in an Indian forest.
The Star newspaper's John Muchangi won in the print category, for his story on HIV/AIDs among men prostitutes. Last year, the overall winner was The Star newspaper's Fatuma Noor. While these journalists no doubt did the best to tell the stories from the continent, we can only hope that more journalists will be able to cover the continent and tell Africa's stories to the world.
However, the journalists are up against stiff challenge, when it comes to changing perceptions about Africa. Harvard Business Review blogger, Jonathan Berman, recently penned an article about the perceptions of Africa to the outside world, and how his view of Africa had been shaped by the Western media. Here are some of his insights.
"There are children starving in Africa. Eat your peas." Surely I am not the only person whose first impressions of Africa were shaped along these lines. Whether it was your mother castigating you about wasting food or an advertisement for Oxfam showing malnourished babies, the earliest impression of Africa many of us have received is of deprivation.
First there's the preconception of Africa as the embodiment of need. Our mothers, their peas and all the other major influences of childhood have a remarkably persistent impact on our adult, and even professional, perception of Africa. Those perceptions are reinforced by a news media that is quick to cover famines, slow to cover successes.
By successes I do not mean the occasional ox farmer or micro enterprise doing well, which is critical to reducing poverty but of limited interest to a business audience. I mean African business successes at scale, like the successful mobile money transfer in Kenya that has been phenomenal.
The entertainment sector has built a fortune depicting Africa as a place of happy animals and miserable people. In global entertainment, the only empowered Africans are the Lion King and Idi Amin. Nelson Mandela is doing OK, but only after 27 years in jail. Africans who are not animals, despots or Nelson Mandela are portrayed as suffering under the heel of poverty, war and disease. Think of the last two movies you saw with Africans in them and you'll see what I mean.
Finally, even when there is reporting on African success, it doesn't stick because we are rarely exposed to the people leading that success. The data is out there, but fails to penetrate or provide real insight. For that, you need to begin to understand the people succeeding in Africa and their perspective on what it means to win." Jonathan Berman concludes.
In case you thought that it was only the backstreet western media houses that are giving the continent a skewed reporting, then you are wholly mistaken. The conservative and influential weekly newsmagazine, The Economist, in May 3-9 issue, proclaimed "The Hopeless Continent" on its cover.
It was to recant that headline some years later, but the damage had already been done. Perhaps, out of the need to highlight African success stories, CNN introduced 'The African Voices' program. The 'African Voices' program features Africans, both continental and in the diaspora, that have been behind some of the success stories in the continent. Many personalities, among them, Radio Africa Group's, Caroline Mutoko, have been featured.
Fair reporting of the continent by African journalists would not be a simplification of the continents problems, which are many, starting with bad leadership, diseases and poverty, but also a reporting on its successes. For example, the number of middle class Africans is rising more than ever, more governments are opening their democratic space; and there has been a smooth transfer of power in Ghana and Ethiopia after the demise of their leaders. If Africa's perception to the outside world is to change, these successes, however minute they might seem, need to be reported, not just to Africans, but also to the outside world.
Source: allAfrica
