Why African scribes must protect continent’s image
Ann Soy, the celebrated Kenyan journalist now working for BBC got under the skin of Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, during a press briefing following the end of CHOGM in Kigali. Should Ann have known better?
Rwanda had successfully hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting (CHOGM) in the capital Kigali. CHOGM is a camaraderie of nations formerly ruled by the United Kingdom and are English speaking.
Rwanda may be an ill fit in CHOGM. Initially colonised by Germany before Belgium took over long, Rwanda’s lingua franca was French. But that all changed beginning in the 1990s following the civil war that left hundreds of thousands of Rwandese dead and even more displaced.
It took a team of Rwandese exiles in Uganda led by Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame to bring a semblance of order to Kigali. In years to come, Kagame, president since 2000, changed the face of the country and Rwanda of today is unrecognizable from the nation that butchered its own just four decades ago.
Kigali is clean, the public transport structured, the economy is growing and crime is low. The nation, now a member of the East African Community, is open for business with newly constructed conference facilities dotting the capital.
Rwanda is determined to become a middle-income country in 10 years. She is generally all that East Africa is struggling to become. During this period of transition from a basket case, Kigali picked a fight with the French who saw reality differently.
Rwanda switched from French to English as lingua franca and the spats between Kigali and pseudo-hegemons are always just beneath the surface. Joining CHOGM is probably indicative of this spat. It is perhaps no coincidence that while Kagame is the chairman of CHOGM, his former minister for foreign affairs, Louise Mushikiwabo, is the Secretary-General of La Francophonie, the CHOGM counterpart in French-speaking countries.
It is in this mix that Soy jumped in. During that closing press briefing, she asked Kagame a double-barreled question: one had to do with Rwanda’s human rights record and secondly the values that the east African country would bring to the leadership of CHOGM now that Kagame was going to serve as the chairman of the body.
It is almost certain that if that question had come from a white person Kagame would have been more blistering in his response. But he was restrained, even at one point referring to Soy as “my sister”. Yet the determination in his voice was unmistakable. What values and human rights were Soy referring to, he seemed to wonder.
If the script had been changed and Kagame was a western leader, and Soy a westerner would the questions have been the same? What is the role of an African journalist covering Africa?
The notion of journalistic responsibility reigns high in how the west covers itself. There is no such thing, beyond academics, as the universality of news values. Western media would hardly show the bloody faces of their conflict.
The dead white person would hardly be splashed on the cover of a newspaper or television screen. There is always a sense of rallying together in moments of adversity.
Should an African journalist, whatever media s/he may work for, local or international, not have the same sense of African social responsibility and solidarity when covering Africa?
This continent of the chocolate face has always received the short end of the stick in news coverage from time immemorial. It is often predictable what questions western journalists would prioritise in Africa: chaos, poverty, underdevelopment, corruption and one can go on.
Africans probably know better. Rwanda is no paradise and Kagame is no angel. But who would put these same questions to Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Victor Orban in Hungary? And more so at the end of a successful hosting of a conference?
The international media, however, has a script when it comes to Africa. It is this script that Africans working for international media need to change or just try. Should African journalists do journalism differently whether in Africa or abroad?
—The writer is the Dean, School of Communication, Daystar University
