The Challenge of Nordic Media: Bringing Africa Home

By: Anne Hege Simonsen, Journalist and social anthropologist, presently working at the Department of Journalism, Oslo University Colllege, Norway.

Let’s put the record straight. Africa is not a priority to the Nordic media. A Finnish study from 1998 shows that the whole continent gets four percent or less coverage in the Nordic media. (Kivikuru and Pietiläinen, Uutisia yli rajojen: Ulkomaanuutisten maisema Suomessa. Sweden and Iceland are not included in the study.) This is somewhat more than Latin America and somewhat less than Asia. A quick glance at four Nordic newspapers that the Nordic Africa Institute subscribes to is no more encouraging. In February 2003 Africa was mainly represented in the so-called fillers. Out of 81 entries, 49 were fillers, snapshots of current African affairs in some three to five lines (for details, see www.nai.uu.se/media/survey/surveyeng.html). Only nine news stories were top stories on the page they were printed on. Three of them were on HIV/AIDS.

It should of course be taken into consideration that the survey was made during the build-up to the Iraq war, but still, where were the articles on the inter-African protest against the same war? And where were the analyses of the ongoing crisis in Côte d’Ivoire, the failures of the NEPAD initiative, the warnings on the re-awakening civil war in Liberia, the comments on the reelection of Obasanjo in Nigeria or the challenges to the fragile democratization process in Burundi?

Africa—as news—always comes as a surprise. When a crisis breaks, the Nordic audience is back to square one, every time. The four million deaths in DR Congo since 1998 were merely an abstract number until it was decided to send Swedish UN soldiers to the country. Only then did the Congolese population cease to be name- and faceless. No Nordic soldiers have been sent to Côte d’Ivoire, which may explain why there is no debate about the historic drama unfolding in this former example of peace and economic growth in Africa.

The lack of locally based correspondents is an important explanation for the lack of coverage. Most Western media are shaving their budgets, and as a paradox to ponder on in our globalized times, this is something all international coverage suffers from. We do not hear much about France or Italy either, as foreign correspondents are becoming a threatened species within the media. Another element is that our eyes and ears in Africa are, almost without exception, based in South Africa, and they do not necessarily have any more reliable sources on DR Congo than the foreign desk in their home countries. Freelancers and staff journalists on short term visits most often go to places after a crisis has emerged and subsequently they more often than not have limited background knowledge and access to sources outside the international relief community.

As a result, Africa—as a narrative—never comes as a surprise. To most people in the Nordic countries, Africa is perceived more as a country than a continent (or two countries at the most: Africa and South Africa). To them, any African war seems like ‘business as usual’. A peace agreement in Burundi is of limited interest, because there is still war in Liberia. A peaceful electoral process in Ghana does not change the image of a continent ruled by dictators like Mugabe. A change in government in Nambia, consolidating the disputed power of Sam Nujoma, is not of any political interest in the North. Africa is illness and suffering, poverty and war, exotic animals and strange human customs. This is how we prefer to see it, and this may be why we feel we do not need to write much about Africa. We already ‘know’ what’s going on.

Positive image of Africa?
Like the rest of the world, Africa is dynamic. All places, countries and regions have their own development—some for the better, many for the worse. Some of these developments are easy to grasp, others not. But the image of Africa has not evolved in any substantial manner since the heyday of development enthusiasm changed into pessimistic gloom in the 1980s.

Not that there have not been any attempts. In the 1990s we had the debates about ‘positive image of Africa’, fronted by aid and solidarity NGOs. The idea was that Africans should no longer be portrayed as victims of starvation, underdevelopment and war. They were to have faces and full names and be seen as smiling agents in their own history of development. This was an image that suited the aid agencies’ agendas, badly in need of success stories as they were, but the public found it boring. The public likes drama, and the smiling Africans could never compete with the tragedies, the rescue operations, the heroes and the grateful aid receivers.

As a journalist, I have also advocated the ‘positive image of Africa’, at a media seminar in Oslo some years ago. During the debate, I was brutally cut down to size by the representative of Norway’s biggest tabloid claiming that he was “tired of being kind to Africa”.

I resented him for his arrogance, and I would prefer to resent him still, but he made me realise that a positive image is no more dynamic than a negative image. And as we all know from watching television every day: if it is not art, an image that does not move is doomed to receive limited interest.

The point is that we should not have to choose between images of destitution on one hand and pathological happiness on the other. They are both too predictable, and too much in line with our missionary tradition and our history of wanted-to-be-colonialists-too. What we need instead is some realism, some context, some dialogue and some continuity.

Why Africa?
At the media conference organised by the Nordic Africa Institute, Sarah Chiumbu, Zimbabwe Director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) asked the question why a Nordic audience should be interested in Africa. I must admit I had never really asked myself that question. Answering it requires a certain amount of cynicism.

I f people are interested in Africa today, it usually stems from one of the following perspectives:

1. The humanistic approach, telling us that nothing in human life is foreign. We all inhabit the same planet and we should all be interested in one another.

2. The altruistic approach, telling us that we (still) have a civilising mission: people in Africa need assistance, food, money and democracy.

3. The self-protective approach, telling us that we should help them to help themselves. Otherwise the bottle called Africa will turn itself upside down and pour all its people into Europe.

I personally favour the first approach, even if I realise that it is not the one selling newspapers. (On the other hand, who said that Africa should necessarily sell newspapers to have the right to a decent coverage?) I favour the first approach because I favour friends to clients, counterparts to patients and subjects to objects. I also favour dialogue to teaching. I even believe that these are some of the elements that can actually create more interest for the various African realities.

Bringing Africa home
All listings of news criteria tell us that the public prefer news/information they consider as ‘close to home’. Africa will never be geographically close to home, but it is possible to imagine African lives as intertwined with our own, bringing them ‘home’ in a more metaphysical sense.

How do we do this? The obvious answer is to make journalists travel more, and give them time and space to get to know people in Africa and the realities that surround them. But experience shows us that even if this is done perfectly, it will not necessarily change the patterns of understanding in the heads of the audiences back home. The media not only report on what is going on, they also reflect and recreate their audiences. And people prefer stories that fit their presumptions.

To change this, it is not enough to go banging at the journalists, telling them to create space for dialogue. Even if the media are powerful (according to Le Monde Diplomatique editor Ignacio Ramonet the media are moving from the fourth to the second power of the state), journalists are far from omnipotent. Journalists have editors and editors have owners, and the media are, as they have always been, a curious mix of enlightenment and money.

Some dialogue-resistance is also inherent in the way media work. Nordic media are linked to the construction of the nation state in the 19th and 20th centuries. Their story-telling tradition is authoritarian. Journalists are trained to tell factual stories about other people’s lives, not to dialogue with them. Journalism is about essentials, not doubt and ambiguity. This works pretty well when there is continuity in the coverage, as there is for instance in the coverage of day-to-day national politics. But it does not work well when it comes to covering the world, because the dynamics of a foreign society are lost in the distillation process.

The limits of journalism are becoming more apparent every day, in particular through greater knowledge of the media’s excluding practices. Mainstream media have a hard time coping with our own multi-ethnic societies, the many faces of globalization and the world outside the nation-state. In the Nordic countries, a particular paradox is how the dominating discourse of egalitarianism has become an obstacle to dialogue.

Most Nordic citizens, including journalists, are proud of living in relatively egalitarian societies, and they believe—maybe naïvely—that the world would be a better place if everybody lived like us. The problem with this egalitarianism is that other ways of life are often perceived as non-equal and in need of correction. We compare, not always consciously, an idealised image of our own societies with the most negative sides of African societies. This is not a good point of departure for a dialogue with Africa. The Nordic countries are situated on top of the human food chain, while African countries are at the bottom. How do we balance these unequal positions?

If we want to communicate with Africa, as friends and not supervisors, we must address what Ashis Nandy (in The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi, 1991) calls “unlearning privileges”. We have to understand that privilege is also loss, and we have to moderate our presumptions and our willingness to produce sweeping statements and analysis. We have to include Africans in our own countries in the debate, and use their competence and knowledge as relevant sources. We also have to disagree more, with Africans and each other, about politics, images and solutions. Maybe then we can cut the umbilical cord that exists between Nordic aid initiatives and journalistic reporting on Africa. Maybe then we can bring reporting closer to real life. Probably at the cost of the most flamboyant reporting, and most certainly by cutting the umbilical cord that exists between Nordic aid initiatives and journalists reporting on Africa .