The West Benefits from Negative African News Coverage

If all you knew about Africa grew out of the typical Western news reports, the coverage of President Obama's speech to the Ghanaian Parliament, last month, or his earlier trip to Kenya, you'd hardly suspect that most of Africa's 53 nations actually have thriving, modern cities, with gleaming skyscrapers, contemporary and crowded highway systems, world-class hotels, exceptionally high-level cell phone usage, and attractive residential areas. Neither would you know that they also have sprawling retail complexes with local and globally branded shops and restaurants, and highly educated citizens, who commute back and forth from their workplaces every day, in business attire, much in the same way that some Americans do.

For the Ghana trip, for example, we were shown tight shots of Ghanaians dancing at the airport in traditional garb, as a mildly amused President, and his family, strode unempathetically toward their waiting car. There were the obligatory "stand-ups" being done by CNN's Anderson Cooper, with images of "the bush" in the background.

Even if you watched and listened very closely, and read every word about the speech, and the news event at Cape Coast Castle and Dungeon, you'd be hard-pressed to know that Ghana's capital city, Accra, where the so-called "tough love speech" was actually delivered, is a wealthy, modern city of 1.6 million people. By comparison, Philadelphia is a city of just 1.4 million persons.

Who knew?

During the President's 2006 trip to Kenya, purportedly to visit his father's family (the side of the family that was not featured in the campaign commercials), the BBC coverage included his visit to Wajir, in northeastern Kenya, which the BBC described as Obama's "slum tour," pointing out that the President-to-be was actually walking through "rubbish and sewage as he toured Kibera, the slum home to at least 600,000 people, many without jobs...."

You got no impression that Kenya's capital city, Nairobi, with 2.8 million people, would be tied with Chicago as the third-largest city in the U.S., if it were moved, somehow, to North America. In fact, when Obama visited Nairobi during that same Kenya visit, according to MSNBC, he also made a point of visiting that city's "slum."

I don't seem to recall similar "slum visits" during the President's visits to Russia, Turkey, The U.K. or Italy. Why, in Africa?

Who would be able to tell from the slanted news coverage that Kenya has an 85.1 percent literacy rate (90.6% for males), or that a report early this year disclosed that about 14 percent of U.S. adults -- strikingly similar to the Kenyan average-- also cannot read? Instead, we get never-ending photos of Maasai tribesmen (who, by the way, constitute just 1.7% of the country's population), more images from "the bush."

Who knew, from the way Western media still cover Africa -- during Presidential visits and every other day -- that Lagos, in Nigeria, is a city of more than 8 million people, about the same size as America's largest city, New York, or that another Nigerian city, Kano, has 3.2 million residents?

Who would suspect that Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, has 6.3 million people, that Tanzania's capital, Dar Es Salaam, is the home to 2.7 million persons, that the city of Luanda, in Angola, also has 2.8 million residents, or that Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, a country from which only negative news stories seem to flow, now, is actually a city of 2 million people?

Did Western media inform us, during Obama’s visit, that the U.S. is trying to keep pace with Russia, China and India in taking a heightened interest in Ghana, since the recent discovery of more than one billion barrels of new oil reserves in that country, or that we're also especially interested in Ghana's two largest, current exports, cocoa and gold, or that, in 2007, gold contributed 31 percent of Ghana's foreign exchange earnings? Especially given the declining, underlying values of Western currencies, gold is experiencing an exponential increase in valuations. It's also becoming clear that China may be attempting to "corner" the global market for gold, having recently increased its gold reserves to 1,054 metric tons.

No, this wasn't a courtesy trip to Ghana, by Mr. Obama, and, given their growing, potential economic importance to the U.S., the Ghanaians should not have been spoken to, by your President, as if they were disobedient third-graders, or with the tone that the President usually reserves for African-American males on Father's Day.

Interestingly, this entire approach to Africa actually dates back to the West's 500-year-long need to morally "justify" African slavery. Fundamental to the slavers’ ability to sleep at night and to explain their very un-Christian, and certainly inhumane, treatment of black people during that era, was the carefully orchestrated theme that, even though the Africans were being taken into bondage, they were also, in a perverse way, being "civilized." They were being given a more "civilized" religion, a more "civilized" language and being introduced to a more "civilized" standard for clothing and housing. In the long run, as the story went, slavery was, in many ways, the best thing that ever happened to the indigenous Africans. They just didn't fully recognize it at the time. After all, who would actually choose to remain in a place as "savage," "primitive," and "miserable" as Africa?

That was the "party line," anyway, notwithstanding the fact that, since the late 15th century, thousands of Europeans actually left their own homes, traveled to Africa and, forcibly, took possession of the land, and control of the people. Curiously, the colonizers apparently liked it so much that most never left, seriously contradicting the "official" story that Africa was such a horrible place that no one in their right mind would ever want to stay there.

That story, apparently, served as an effective cover for slavery, and for the exploitation of agricultural and natural resources, such as diamonds, bauxite, and, recently, coltan-- that indispensable component for the manufacture of cell phones, video games and laptop computers, 80 percent of whose world-wide supply just happens to be found in the Congo. Accordingly, there is substantial evidence that the "tribal conflicts" in Africa, that are so widely reported in Western media are actually instigated, funded and sustained by the very Western powers that happen to have vested interests in Africa's abundant wealth.

In fact, a review of stories from news agencies about Africa, published in the Daily Graphic and Ghanaian Times (Ghana's two largest daily newspapers), disclosed that out of 543 stories published from May to July 2006, 13 percent came from Ghanaian news agencies, 64 percent from the BBC, with the remaining 23 percent from other agencies.

A December 2000 report about African-focused news coverage, by the New York Times and the Washington Post, found that the vast majority of news stories about Africa in those publications were confined to just three categories -- Aids, development and conflict. There were "no reports on regional economic or political cooperation in Africa, not one article on the private sector." Not surprisingly, in May 2005, former African heads of state met at Boston University to discuss the ongoing negative reporting on Africa. They concluded that it was imperative that African nations develop a set of strategies to counter the negative media portrayal of Africa, including the development of alternative media, and a multimedia campaign to counter Africa's negative image in the Western press.

We need to be cognizant of how this has always worked, and still works, to our detriment. We also need to challenge our President to stop taking the obligatory Colonial-themed tours when he visits Africa and, perhaps, most importantly, where Africa is concerned, we need to stop "believing the hype."



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