‘In the case of Africa in general,there is a tendency to exaggerate’: representing mass atrocity in Africa

Abstract

Based on an analysis of print media and journalists’ interviews, this article examines the representation of atrocity and mass violence in Africa. It specifically focuses on the atrocities in Darfur and Rwanda and compares African and Western coverage of them. It argues that since representations (just as the knowledge that anchors them) are highly dependent on one’s social location, it is necessary to understand multiple representations of the same atrocity. Although the literature on representation of Africa has been critical of Western representations of Africa, this article argues that including African representations of the same provides for a more nuanced understanding. It uses interview data from Kenya and South Africa, both of which have had peacekeeping engagements in Sudan. Kenya and South Africa also have media fields that are more robust and freer than many other countries in the continent.

Keywords

African media atrocities Darfur Kenya knowledge representation Rwanda South Africa

While there has been a lot of scholarly interest in representations of Africa and Africans in the West, very little has been done on how African media represent Africa and Africans. This silence is even more perplexing when considering how much has been done on representations of atrocity in Africa. Although only just preliminary, the results used here point to interesting trends within the journalism field in Africa. What I hope to highlight is the importance of including African media organizations when looking at the representations of atrocities in Africa and how it problematizes present scholarship on representation. Moreover, I argue that it is not enough to argue for the primacy of nation-specific cultural traits or the cultural sediments but rather recognize the matrix of pressures in which individual journalists are at the intersection of. By analyzing African journalists covering atrocities in Africa, this article seeks to understand how African journalists represent and Other Africans caught in conflict. To do this, it analyses the representation of Rwanda and Darfur, both of which gained more international notoriety than most other recent conflicts in the continent.

Covering foreign atrocity requires distant reality to be transformed into one that is salient and intelligible by creating conceptual order (Park, 1923). Therefore, journalists filter an atrocity through the domestic system of a society’s knowledge structure, and with this a reliance on recognizable language and frames becomes paramount for a journalist (Chin-Chuan et al., 2002; Hall, 1973; Seaton, 1999). Chin-Chuan et al. (2002), Hall (1973), and Moeller (1999) all suggest that ambiguity, and indeterminacy, of social reality abroad will be domesticated in an attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance for the audience. This can be assumed to be true for both Western and African journalists.

Scholarship on media representations of mass atrocities and genocide has focused primarily on Western media (Atkinson, 1999a, 1999b; Grzyb, 2009; Melvern, 2006; Thompson, 2007) and largely been silent on African representations of the same. This literature has echoed debates over the notions of distinct Western versus African knowledge and those over global versus localized scripts (see, for example, Mody, 2010; Ray, 2009). Benson (2013) has added to our understanding of how to analyze the media field by introducing the idea of habitus affinities and dissaffinities. Benson (2013) states that habitus affinities will ‘lead to more (and positive) news coverage of some groups whereas habitus dissaffinities could contribute to less (and less positive) news coverage of other groups’ (p. 27). Scholarship on representations of Africa and Africans has focused more on the effect and role of habitus dissaffinities than habitus affinities.

Sociology of knowledge tells us that knowledge will reflect the social location of an actor. Berger and Luckmann (1966) and Mannheim (1936) remind us that one’s structural position, social context, and social location can and should be presumed to affect how they will view and understand an event. Hence, understanding how knowledge about mass atrocity is constituted and how social events are framed and defined is important. As socialized members of society, journalists’ knowledge will, arguably, be representative and anchored upon their societal influences on knowledge (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Durkheim, 1961; Lippmann, 1922). Gamson et al. (1989) and Gans (1979) further argue that the news is never neutral and exhibits the beliefs and values of those that produce it. Yet scholarship on news production has hardly focused on African news production. In the rare occasion that scholarship on African news production has included African media, Nyamnjoh (1999) points out that it is, often, not grounded ‘in African realities’ (p. 15). This work has focused on comparing African media to Western professional values and standards (Atton and Mabweazara, 2011: 668).

The media field’s history in Africa can be traced as far back as the Egyptian newspaper Al Waka’e that started in 1797. Following Egypt, the first newspaper in Sub-Saharan Africa was the Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser in 1801, followed by Ghana’s the Royal Gold Coast Gazette in 1822 (Bourgault, 1995; Nyamnjoh, 2005). In Kenya, the first newspaper, the Taveta Chronicle, was commissioned in 1895 by Rev. Albert Stegal of the Church Missionary Society (Media Council of Kenya, 2012). While most early newspapers were largely printed in the language of the colonial occupiers, there were exceptions such as the Iwe Thorin (published by missionaries in 1859 in Nigeria) which was published in Yoruba (Bourgault, 1995: 154; Nyamnjoh, 2005: 40). Colonial administrations were often quick to label any indigenous newspapers started by Western educated Africans advocating for independence, such as the West African Pilot (founded by Nnamdi Azikwe of Nigeria), a ‘plague that was afflicting the whole country’, (Nyamnjoh, 2005: 40). Across the continent, ‘colonial administrative control, censorship and other restrictions severely hampered the birth and growth of a vibrant press’ (Nyamnjoh, 2005: 40). The media field thus developed either in response to colonization or with the express aim to indoctrinate the native populations.

At independence, however, the postcolonial state created, through administrative practices, what Mbembe (2001) referred to as ‘a master code’ that became society’s primary way to see itself (p. 103). In Kenya, for example, this ‘master code’ defined the nation as a family and the president as the father of the nation (Ogola, 2011). Political elites quickly learned the powerful role the state had when it controlled the structures of the field (Kupe, 2013). Controlling the media meant they would gain not only narrative control but also power to censor and restrict a field that may have posed a challenge to their hegemony (Kupe, 2013). With this history, it is disappointing that discourse on representations of Africa often does not include the voices of African media.

Rwanda and Darfur

The genocide in Rwanda and the atrocities in Darfur are separated by roughly a 10-year gap. While hostilities in Darfur had been going on before 2003, it was on 8 May 2003 that the first reports about the atrocities began to appear in African newspapers; Egyptian paper Al-Ahram was the first to cover Darfur. These two conflicts thus provide a platform upon which to investigate how the media field in Africa represented two jarring events that were brought, sharply, into the world’s conscious. Thus, in the coverage of Darfur, as with the majority of other conflicts post-1994, the memory (ghost) of Rwanda plays a central role. Conflicts are understood and gauged by whether or not they are just as bad or worse than Rwanda (most recent of this is the conflict in Central African Republic in 2014).

The more unusual and dramatic, Gans (1979) and Bourdieu (1998) argue, the better. Focusing on the dramatic, when it comes to Africa, is often influenced by an assumption that conflict in Africa is inspired by fossilized ethnic and cultural realities. This, incidentally, echoes fears of a periphery devoid of values thought to be important to the center that Schudson (2011) talks about (for similar arguments, see work by Gruley and Duvall, 2012; Mamdani, 2007; Myer et al., 1996; Said, 1979, 2008). Fine (2001) highlights the role of narratives in making structural aspects of a story more compelling and memorable to the audience. Such narratives glean from common language to provide structure for and to frame events, pointing to a reflexive embeddedness of narratives within the contexts in which they are produced and presented (Hall, 1973, 2007; Schudson, 1989; Tuchman, 1978: 192; Weimann, 2000).

The charge of oversimplification

You know it is Darfur conflict … the Sudan journalist is able to understand a historical … you know to give it a historical context. The western journalists on the other hand will be in a hurry to just look at it as uhm … you know what they are seeing now without that historical perspective […] secondly, as is the case of their coverage of Africa, in general, there is always a tendency to exaggerate. (Kenyan editor, 2012)

Western journalists have been accused of offering simplistic narratives about conflicts and having superficial knowledge about the African continent as a whole. Stereotypical reporting of atrocity in Africa, as based on ancient ‘tribal hatred’, is one of the more common charges (Harrow, 2005: 35). This is captured by The New York Times (NYT) on 10 April 1994, which referred to Rwanda as embroiled in ‘tribal warfare’, in which Rwandans were defined as being ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘savage’, with ‘gangs’ engaged in an ‘orgy’ of ‘terror’. This charge of superficiality is not solely from scholars. As shown by the quote above, African journalists also seem very distrustful of Western journalists reporting on conflicts in Africa.

Considering such criticism, it is surprising that two large-scale empirical studies of African media reports on Darfur find that the there is no substantial deviation in narrative from Western representations as may be expected. Ray’s (2009) analysis of news reports from five countries finds a tendency to oversimplify and racialize the Darfur conflict. Ray (2009) finds that the labels used to demarcate ‘fault lines in [the Darfur] conflict are often the same as those used by Western news sources’ (p. 172). Mody (2010) reports similar patterns identified in her analysis of African media outlets, such as the Mail & Guardian Online, from South Africa. Here, actions of the Janjaweed militias are often described as ethnic cleansing. This convergence in narrative is explained by the fact that coverage of Darfur was largely gotten from wire services by news organizations in both Kenya and South Africa. Editors in Kenya and South Africa stated as such:

In the Darfur instance, we almost exclusively rely on the wire agencies because our network of correspondents … we are not in every country […] So when it comes to the coverage of that war we largely depend on the wire agencies […]they will have the resources and have the advantage of their agencies operating in this area for a long … long time. (Kenyan editor, 2012 int.)

At the end of the day we are at the mercy of our readers. So we don’t ignore the issue [Darfur] altogether, that would be irresponsible, but we don’t necessarily want to spend exorbitant money on something which we know our readers are not that interested in. (South African editor, 2012)

Reporting the context/history of Rwanda and Darfur

In the Rwanda genocide, the conflict was largely defined as chaotic and lacking any clear political motivations by newspapers in the United States, such as the NYT and the Washington Post (WaPo; Gruley and Duvall, 2012; Hawk, 1992; Myers et al., 1996; Thompson, 2007). The narrative was one that did not seek to put the genocide into context by linking it to an ongoing hostilities that had exacerbated following the 1990 Tutsi incursion or, as suggested by Komola (2007), global economic events, such as the drastic fall in commodity prices – like plummeting prices of coffee. Instead, Rwanda was framed as timeless and ahistorical, fanned by ancient tribal hatreds while also being spontaneous (Harrow, 2005; Hintjen, 1999; Myers et al., 1996). This approach makes an appearance in the reporting of atrocities in Darfur as well. Initial reports by the NYT and WaPo on Darfur also relied on the ancient tribal hatreds frame that had been used in Rwanda (Sengupta, 2004; Wax, 2004). In an analysis of US newspaper articles on Darfur, Gruley and Duvall (2012) find that few journalists, such as Lacey (2004) at NYT, report on Darfur as a conflict about equitable sharing resources and representation in government. Crilly (2010), a journalist himself, points to the fact that journalists have contributed in decontextualizing the Darfur conflict by seeking to relegate ‘history, geography and identity to footnotes’ (p. 107) in the pursuit of headlines that captured the audience.

Alozie (2007) shows that newspapers, such as The Daily Nation from Kenya, worked to provide context for the Rwanda genocide. He shows that there was an attempt to highlight who the actors were, their motivations, and what the genocide meant for the Great Lakes Region. The Daily Nation situated the genocide in the context of the peace negotiations that had been going on for several months: ‘Rwanda had been torn by divisions among ruling Hutus over a peace accord […] signed in August with rebels from the minority Tutsi tribe last year’ (Agencies, 1994). The Daily Nation (1994) went on to explain the role of ethnicity in the atrocity and pushed back against its instrumentalization by ethnic entrepreneurs:

What is interesting about tribal tensions is that they are a relatively new phenomenon. In pre-colonial era, Hutus and Tutsis were on equal footing and inter-marriage was common. It was Belgium’s modernization and democratization that undermined local elite; tension then rose.

For Darfur, political context of the conflict was more salient with articles talking about the marginalization of Darfur, the conflict between North and South Sudan, the Abuja peace talks, and so on. The Daily Nation argued that the conflict was ‘much more complex than an Arab-Black clash’(Ochieng’, 2008) and that it was affecting the prospects of peace negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan which were taking place in Kenya (Oluoch, 2004). The centrality of the government to either conflict is pointed to more by the African newspapers. Journalists in both Kenya and South Africa appear to largely agree that the Sudanese government bears the blame squarely for Darfur but that also there is a need to understand and appreciate the role played by outside actors, such as Chad, Libya and Eritrea:

Sudan and Tchad supported each other’s, you … know the, rebels because the Sudanese did the same in Tchad as Tchad is doing in Sudan. So I can see the dynamic there even if the origins are a bit hard to understand [reason for interference by Chad in Darfur]. (South African editor, 2012)

Narrative on ethnic/tribal hatred

Another common frame is one that privileges narratives on ethnic/tribal hate in both conflicts. In Rwanda, the genocide was largely spoken of as one that was caused by ‘centuries-old tribal hatred that erupted into an all-out violence for political control’ (Lorch, 1994). In Darfur, both NYT and WaPo privileged ethnicity/tribalism schism that paralleled the narrative during the Rwanda genocide. In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Nicholas Kristof (2006) defines Darfur as a region with ‘historical tensions between the Arab tribes and non-African tribes’. Furthermore, Ray’s (2009) analysis of African newspapers finds that ‘ few reports addressed the complex identity politics at work in the violence, and in this way mirrored much of the reportage in western news sources’ (p. 172).

Journalists explain this primarily in two ways. One is a perceived cultural affinity (habitus affinity) with those defined as ‘Black African’. The other is that the narrative on ethnic/tribal hatred has been constructed in Sudan itself, and as such, this is reflected in the reporting by journalists:

We often don’t consider North Africa or … big chunks of North Africa as ‘real’ Africa […] also Sudan, at least the northern part of Sudan, so therefore this kind of divide is very evident in reporting and the way this [the Darfur conflict] is analysed. (South African journalist, 2012)

I met a journalist who told me [pause] we have been persecuted for too many centuries. Now we want our land back, and ‘these people’ [meaning Arabs and Muslims] should go back to where they came from because we too are people who have been wronged by light skinned people, they call them ‘the brown colonizers’ not white but brown skinned colonizers. (Kenyan journalist, 2012)

There was pushback, however, among other journalists who suggest that the presence of such narratives in African reportage is less as a result of any type of affinity. They argue, instead, that this presence should be understood as a consequence of inadequate funding, which necessitates news organizations relying more on wire services:

I don’t think here […] we have the capacity [to have their own correspondent always in Sudan]. So when it comes to the coverage of that war [Darfur] we largely depend on the wire agencies. Also, they will have the resources and have the advantage of their agencies operating in this area for a long … long time. (Kenyan editor, 2012)

This reliance on wire services is epitomized by the fact that between January 2004 and December 2005 Kenya had 196 published articles on Darfur in its newspapers. Of these, 119 articles were from the services, while 48 stories were credited to Kenyan journalists. Rank-and-file journalists were genuinely upset at the fact that reliance was this extreme, with multiple journalists explaining the prevalence as a product of a ‘colonial mentality’ within the news organizations:

When you are talking about issues next door, we a more placed … better placed than them. But you see this thing has something to do with colonisation […] Some editor in his mind thinks that a mzungu [white person’s] story would be better than yours. (Kenyan journalist, 2015)

Discussion

What does it mean then when African news organizations do not contextualize atrocity in Africa or rely on narratives of ethnic/tribal hatred? There are several possible answers to this conundrum, such as the influence of international institutions on global discourse and how Africans, in general, learn of events happening in other African countries. There is also the role played by a limited amount of narrative genres available to journalists or the role of collective memory in influencing how an atrocity is reported on. As suggested by Savelsberg and King (2011), a limit on narrative genres available creates a boundary within which levels of narrative innovation are restricted. It could also be a result of already existing narratives on ethnicity/tribal hatreds functioning as repositories from which journalists draw, as highlighted by the ‘brown colonizers’ comment by the Kenyan journalist.

Journalists interviewed attribute this presence to editorial pressures and decisions, which, in turn, lead journalist to operate within the ‘rules of the game’. Part of understanding these ‘rules’ anticipates what editors will allow to be published, thus tailoring framing of atrocities to meet this expectation. As a South African participant observed,

These are the kind of battles [how to frame atrocities] we do fight on a regular basis with our editors and even our readers. It’s not good or bad, I’m not complaining or anything I’m saying that is the reality of the life we live and it’s the life we chose. (South African journalist, 2012)

Cultural/racial affinities are repeated in attempts to humanize the victims, while the dissaffinities work to draw a stark difference between perpetrators and victims. Thus, describing the victims of Darfur as ‘Black African’ is useful in garnering emotional investment and is meant to ‘tug at heartstrings’ of a majority of Sub-Saharan readers than any other frame. Referring to the perpetrators as ‘Arabs’ or ‘brown skin colonisers’ places them as outsiders and thus Other. Shome and Hegde (2002) argue that within the global/local nexus, we must appreciate that boundedness of agency to ‘the politics of identity couched within the structures of gender, nation, class, race […]’ (p. 267). Thus, the role of sedimented knowledge from which culture, meaning, and our understanding of the world outside of us are made cannot be understated (Hall, 1997; Omanga, 2011). In the case of South Africa, the experience of apartheid influenced how journalists viewed and reported on Darfur:

our implicit support lies with the so-called black Africans for two reasons, the one is uhh the fact that we can associate better with them both because of uhh if you want to call it that uhh political strife a similar political strife that we’ve had from apartheid in South Africa. (South African journalist, 2012)

A nation’s collective memories of traumatic events in their past are important to consider as well. As was explained by interview participants in South Africa, the memory of apartheid played a large role in how they reported on and understood the atrocities in Darfur. What was unique to South Africa, though, was the fact that there appears to be a feeling of guilt because of the near lack of reporting of the genocide in Rwanda. It also shows the strength of collective memories and national histories and their role in shaping how African media houses by and large represented Rwanda and later Darfur. As was put to me,

here [South Africa] we pay a lot of attention to Rwanda because it happened around the same time we were having our democratic elections [..] so maybe we just have an extreme guilt about that [..] so therefore if you want to create some kind of message about what is happening in Darfur, what had happened then, you refer to Rwanda its at least a link and I think that’s useful. (South African journalist, 2012)

Finally, the role of sources used cannot go without mention. While journalists have a wide array of sources from which they got their background information about atrocities, these sources are often from the same milieu, aid workers, or government officials. Entman (2004) and Hallin (1989) posit that a reliance on sources leads to further cognitive constraints and a limited scope of investigation and range of employed narratives. Almost all, except for very few instances, sources used by journalists were ‘official’ sources, such as government officials and spokespeople of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This role of sources, especially those from humanitarian organizations, is an issue that journalists struggle with, as was put to me by participants from both Kenya and South Africa:

Sometimes it can be very difficult, like for instance uhm recently when the war broke out in South Sudan, Kakuma … Dabaab and Kakuma [refugee camps in Kenya] were flooded again. But how would I go there? The UNHCR took me there so uhm chances of me looking at thing from the UNCHR perspective are very high. But that takes a very experienced journalist to resist this kind of uhm … this influence [which] is not open, it is subtle. (Kenyan journalist, 2015)

Sometimes we rely too heavily on what Human Rights Watch says about something or International Crisis Groups or whatever. I don’t generally suspect them of wanting to distort some of the issues that you have mentioned, they don’t go there with a pro-U.S. agenda but they have their own limitations I suppose. I guess I should rely a bit more … well ideally you have your own people there, but that’s not going to happen. (South African editor, 2012)

Conclusion

While the results shown here are preliminary, they open up new and exciting avenues for understanding the politics that are inherent in representations of atrocities. If nothing else, they highlight the complicated relationship between African journalists and those they represent. Race, religion and national histories appear to play a big role in how journalists understand atrocity within the continent. Including African media in our discussion about how Africa is represented in the media should provide a more nuanced approach to discourse on the same. Why this has not been the case thus far is difficult to pinpoint; hopefully, this anomaly can begin to be remedied.

Footnotes

Funding

Part of the data collection and analysis of this paper was funded by the Bernard and Fern Badzin Graduate Fellowship in Holocaust and Genocide Studies through the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

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