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Blackman Ngoro
Africans, around the world, continue to moan, rightfully or wrongly that they are either unfairly treated by the Western media or simply ignored. Certainly, the principle of access to fair representation in the media should be universally recognized, particularly when production and reproduction of negative representations violates the dignity of a people.
Yes, in 1980 UNESCO McBride Commission’s report, “One World Many Voices” sought a free but balanced flow of information between the North to the South, a proposal shot down by the United States and Britain in the heady days of an ideologically polarized world.
As the world moved from one epoch to another, from one crisis of representation to another, the negative stereotype of Africa remained constant. Current examples of this type of representation overwhelm. In the US wild bees were now described as “Africanised” because they sting when angered.
Recently we heard weather experts on CNN make much out of how the destructive Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, in the United States originated from Africa. That surely was no cause for the United States government to react the way it did towards assisting the mostly African-Americans victims of the hurricane!
The representation of negativity as African in origin in the Western world is really destroying the psyche of young Africans.
Who can believe the world-wide circulation of accusations/allegations by Reuters in its report dated the 19th of July, that Jean-Pierre Bemba a presidential candidate in the epoch-making Congolese elections was a cannibal and ate Pygmies, the habitants of the rain forest?
News about Africa is still being inflected with the 19th Century Western imperial and colonial-generated images and wisdom. Western media simply fish from this social, cultural and ideological repository.
The media should not take lightly its enormous influence in shaping public perception and imagination of situation in the world.
Climatic conditions now prevalent in Southern Europe are reported as bearing uncanny resemblance to the ones in Africa and diseases now happening there such as malaria also resemble those in Africa. Africa s composed of various individual identities and is not one homogenous mass. Why ignore this?
Add violent wars, corruption, ethnic strife, and poverty, HIV and child abuse, then you have a hell on earth. The way in which these representations are produced, reproduced and circulated violate the human rights of Africans by the media in advanced countries.
The biggest tragedy however is that African universities, academics and intellectuals, government officials and ambassadors are complicity to these media violations of human rights of Africa.
They donot take the initiative and bring about accountability to the Western media in the same way as the Western media is made accountable for Islamophobia. Through this Africaphobia the Western media emboldened by social scientists and now climatologists, is are busy entrenching the mage of Africa as the leper of the international community. In this way, the insistence for a free flow of information between the North and the South is achieved while the demand for balanced reporting is sacrificed.
A new marginalization of news about Africa, came about thanks to the 9/11 bombings. There is now a dearth of articles on Africa in the Japanese language media following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This was revealed in a research project undertaken by this writer and funded by the Foreign Correspondents Club f Japan in 2004.
A newspaper editor at a local Japanese language daily explained that on average about 15 to 20 stories on African countries appeared in the Asahi Shimbun's international news pages every month before 9/11. However this changed after the September 11th terrorist attack in the USA.
The 15 to 20 stories decreased and column centimeters allocated for reportage on African nations scaled down. The "September 11th syndrome" effect on coverage of African stories in most if not all Japanese publications has not changed since being taken over by stories on terrorism.
The 9/11 syndrome not only affected the production of foreign news about Africa in the Asahi Shimbun, as the research funded by the FCCJ showed, but also included the Mainichi and the Yomiuri Shimbun.
So over and above the marginalization of news about Africa effected through the “kisha kirabu” news about Africa in Japan suffers from the weather-like changes in the political world.
Is it not about time all concerned re-visited the debates of representation which came about as a result of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Mcbride Report, “ One World Many Voices”.
It is a well established fact that the production of foreign news by Japanese media follows a hierarchical structure after the placing ofthe United States on top of geographical, economic and political regions in the selection of foreign news.
Consequently the Japanese media reflect this tendency when reporting events concerning Africa. Moreover attendance of the few events about an African country staged by the Japan National Press Club was only a trickle.
Records at the club show that events with an African flavour were the least attended thus reflecting a Japanese language media ideological position towards Africa which signifies low priority.
Would the Japanese media owners and news managers consider it asking for too much if only for a few pages in their newspapers every month and give Africa a right to dignity through representation in their country?
Would they assume that Africans wanted to enforce some New World Information and Communication Order agenda with such a request?
Africans are not asking for the Japanese language media to force a product of a low selling quality. Perhaps it is high time African embassies in Japan create a budget for promoting their countries in order to make their countries and what they offer more appealing to Japanese audiences.
Due to the way Africa and African countries have been represented so far, it may seem to the ordinary man in the street in Japan that African countries are there to be used to earn Japan a United Nations Security Council seat and that aid therefore acts as a bribe. The visit by Yoshiro Mori to Africa in 2001 was resoundingly represented in this way.
African nations have done nothing to repair this damage to their dignity by showing the Japanese people where they stand in this matter. This should be tackled by all the African embassies together with a sitting dean of African ambassadors, a seat currently occupied by Tunisia.
Japanese media cannot sustain a charity-like relationship with African diplomatic representatives who seem to do little or nothing to promote their countries as suitable tourist destinations as well as showcase their cultural histories to new and curious audiences.
Travel issues including processing of visas for journalists, relaxing restrictions on the taking of photographs, and the improvement of security and road travel should be easy enough to do.
The way of doing business where African diplomats place calls to Japanese government and wait for calls from Japanese bureaucrats and nothing else is discredited and doesn’t serve their national interest. Africans display a shocking sense of lack of crisis about what’s happening around them in the world of representation.
It is surprising that in this digital age more than 70 per cent of African diplomatic missions in Japan donot communicate by email but rely on facsimile, which has its environmental disadvantages in that it is both expensive and wasteful as a lot of paper is used which could be saved.
Above that fax messages keep on getting lost in embassy offices.
Digital communication on the other hand, particularly e-mails will always reach the correct address, and if the contents are not clear can always be clarified without consuming time. The ball is clearly in African countries’ courts to improve their images world wide and in Japan in particular where it is important for the local population to understand Africans through non-Western images.
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