A huge uproar broke out at the start of 2021 over a familiar subject, namely, skewed Western media coverage of Africa. Looks like Euro-American mind-sets are going to take a while to recover from their colonial hangovers about the “dark continent”.
“A continent where the dead are not counted”, screamed a New York Times headline on January 2. From Lagos, Nigeria, Ruth Maclean reported that, “As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the world in 2020, it became increasingly evident that in the vast majority of countries on the African continent, most deaths are never formally registered. Reliable data on a country’s deaths and their causes are hard to come by, which means governments can miss emerging health threats — whether Ebola or the coronavirus — and often have to formulate health policy blindly.”
From the Cape to Cairo, Sierra Leone to Somalia, 54 diverse nations, “most deaths are not registered”. Health policies are made blindly. The Covid-19 death toll “will probably never be known, partly because elevated mortality rates cannot be used as a measure, as they are elsewhere.” There is no data.
“Families often don’t know they are expected to report deaths, or even if they do, there is little incentive to do so. Many families bury loved ones in their yard at home, where they don’t need burial permits, let alone death certificates,” Maclean reported. Does this sound like the reality you know?
“Every few years, most African countries do surveys to try to capture broad demographic and health trends. People are asked about who in their households died and what the cause was. But these surveys are irregular, and there’s much room for error.”
The same week, another round of uproar greeted a CNN story about a mzungu woman “who found whales in Kenya”. Apparently, residents around the Indian Ocean had no idea what whales were until recently. Doesn’t matter that coastal communities have local names for these massive creatures.
Protests from Kenyans forced CNN to edit the story and publish a correction on their website. “A headline on an earlier version of this story overstated Jane Spilsbury’s role in finding whales in Kenya. She was instrumental documenting their migration. An earlier version of the story also included two quotes from Spilsbury that overstated her role. Those quotes have been removed.”
What is the cure for these “errors”? Simple. Africans telling their own stories. But how well do we do this?
A survey released last week commissioned by Africa No Filter, titled “How African media covers Africa”, paints a troubling picture. The study covered media houses in 15 African nations, including Kenya.
“The review found that coverage of African countries was poor in terms of overall numbers. A closer look reveals some countries’ media include great amounts of stories and others almost none,” the report says. “Coverage also tended to be of a small number of countries, and many countries did not feature at all in the media of other African countries.”
“What coverage there was tended to revolve around a few events rather than exploring issues in-depth”. Hard news stories such as politics, elections and crisis in Africa dominate Africa news pages.
Most editors, when asked, said that their publication has an Africa page (45 per cent), and 45 per cent featured African stories on their world or international pages. Eleven per cent of editors said they had neither.
Most of the stories are by foreign news agencies. The French agency AFP accounted for 14 per cent of the stories reviewed, the BBC nine per cent, while Reuters and Al Jazeera contributed four and two per cent respectively. Other news agencies which contributed were Xinhua and China Global Television Network (which was only used by the Tanzanian Daily News), at four and one per cent each. African news agencies contributed minimally.
Although most editors surveyed (87 per cent) said it was important or very important to cover African stories, most of them cited low investment in African coverage as a major hindrance. They said their publications could not afford to send out journalists to other African countries nor assign journalists on the ground due to budget limitations.
“The editors linked this directly with the use of wire stories that were written with a western audience in mind and carry the tropes that such audiences expect. They acknowledge the bias of African authors about other African countries. This could explain why the editors surveyed acknowledged that they printed stories with stereotypes,” the report says.
The solution? Africans learn about themselves and other Africans through the media. Complaining about skewed coverage by foreign media is not enough. “There is a need for resources for African journalism and African stories in order for the content to be available. Such content would include more diverse topics and stories as well as the voices of more people, not only the authorities,” the study concludes.