D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 5, September/October 2002, p. 21-24)

The author has observed Africa as a journalist since the beginning of the 1960s - practically since the independence of most African countries. In this article he draws up a personal balance sheet. How has he personally and the German media in general reported on the neighbouring continent over these decades? How has the image of Africa changed in these years? His sobering conclusion: reporting on Africa has reached an all-time low.

"Africa is not in demand, not even in journalistic terms." A colleague wrote that in a farewell note about me when I retired at the end of 2001 after working for Der Spiegel ( Germany’s oldest and most prestigious weekly news magazine) for 32 years and almost four decades in journalism. The editor related how at editorial conferences I fought doggedly for space for stories on Africa. He concluded that due to my efforts "This continent did not really do too badly from us."

I rate this assessment of my colleague as an exoneration - at any rate, I have not given up. For, of course, I am convinced that Der Spiegel did not give Africa the attention it deserved. Reports from there in 2001, which filled 23 pages, accounted for less than 2.5 per cent of its foreign news coverage. By comparison, the 125 pages on the USA accounted for 13 per cent, Europe less the former East Bloc with 147 pages 15.2 per cent, and Asia including Afghanistan with 206 pages 21.2 per cent. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela’s election as President of South Africa sealed the end of apartheid and 800,000 people were killed in the genocide in Rwanda, the magazine’s 96 pages on Africa accounted for almost 10 per cent of its foreign news section. But in 2001, my last year with Der Spiegel, its reporting on Africa reached an all-time low. Not a pleasant departure.

The only consolation is that Der Spiegel hardly differs from the other German media. Africa is not taken very seriously in Germany. What is printed or broadcast consists mainly of reports on disasters. I have followed events on the African continent and how they are portrayed in the German media since a stay in Nigeria as a student in 1962. Later, I was myself involved in the reporting on Africa as an editor of the Africa programme of Deutsche Welle radio from 1964 to 1969, and after that with Der Spiegel, where in the 1970s and from 1992 to the end of last year, Africa was the focal point of my work.

Although I cannot provide figures, I would like to depict the trends of the last 40 years. How have we in Germany observed Africa? To what extent are we journalists jointly responsible for the expectations and disappointments that our neighbouring continent has triggered? Have the German media treated Africa worse than other regions of the Third World? Why is the ‘Black Continent’ now largely written off as "hopeless"?

The present generation can scarcely imagine that Africa was once regarded as a continent of the future. Actually, many Germans were fascinated by the decolonisation of the 1960s. The newly independent countries and their leaders were presented very positively in reports and editorials. And in West Germany, which was blossoming amid its ‘economic miracle’, there was a willingness to help the Africans in their own economic advancement. On the other side, the new African elites purposefully sought contacts beyond their former ‘mother’ countries - which was a great opportunity for Germany. German businessmen built up connections with Africa. German universities offered lectures and seminars on current African topics. Students applied for stays in Africa.

Among young people, both German and African, there was a boundless belief in progress through modernisation. ‘Development aid’ - now called ‘development cooperation’ - was to ensure that within a foreseeable time the former colonies would achieve a standard of living equal to that of the industrialised nations. For Africa, only the best was to be good enough. That is why someone like Albert Schweitzer was considered dubious because he deliberately ran his jungle hospital with the simplest resources. Thousands of development ruins now prove that Schweitzer was right.

To be sure, the western and particularly German interest in Africa also had a self-serving political background. In the Cold War contest between the ideological systems the capitalist West and the socialist East wooed the new countries. "Africa - Red or Black?" by Fritz Schatten and "Black Skin in Red Stranglehold" by Rolf Italiaander were the titles of two highly-noted non-fiction books. Radio Moscow and Radio Berlin International of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) competed with Deutsche Welle for listeners in Africa - in English, French, Portuguese and African languages such as Kisuaheli, Hausa and Amharic. When the West Germans were permitted to set up a relay station in Rwanda it was celebrated as a strategic victory. The propaganda war for Africa took curious forms. As a student intern in the press department of a German embassy in West Africa, I noted its tireless effort to place stories from West Germany in local newspapers and torpedo the GDR contacts of local journalists.

One thing is sure: so long as the Cold War continued and African statesmen could play the Western or the Eastern card, the interest in the continent with its mineral resources and strategic importance was much greater than it is today. Subjects such as the building of the Tanzam railway from the Zambian copper belt to the Indian Ocean by the Chinese, and Cuba’s military aid for Angola, made headlines in the West. But the general interest in Africa also enabled continual reporting on sectors which had nothing to do with the East-West conflict.

Africa first became a subject for mass readership during the Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970. For the conflict over the breakaway Eastern Region, which called itself Biafra, could be portrayed in simple terms. The Biafrans were Christians, their opponents mainly Muslims. And just as once the so-called ‘raisin bombers’, the Allied transport aircraft of the Berlin Airlift, supplied the blockaded western half of the city, now ‘stockfish bombers’ flew into the besieged secessionist African state. Daredevil pilots risked their lives for the ‘Biafra babies’, the half-starved children whose photographs shocked people. In West Germany, MPs in the Federal Parliament in Bonn and people in churches and on the street talked about the African war. When Biafra capitulated in 1970 its German supporters stormed Der Spiegel’s newsroom and demanded a committed cover story. That was written anyway. It should be recalled at this point that there was also good news from Africa, which has largely been forgotten. The Nigerian army did not wreak the massacre in defeated Biafra which had been generally feared.

More than two decades later a similar ‘African miracle’ repeated itself. White supremacy in South Africa ended without the bloodbath which even apartheid opponents such as author Nadine Gordimer (in her novel Julie’s People), had feared. The world breathed a sigh of relief, and as a historic turning point the change in South Africa would have been given even more space in the German media had not the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the GDR coincided with that of apartheid. Understandably, the fate of the whites in Southern Africa was, besides the East-West conflict, an ongoing subject from the 1960s. For the people of Europe identified themselves more with their own kin than with alien peoples.

That as an ‘alien’, and an African to boot, Nelson Mandela could become the idol of many Germans as well is one of the curiosities and strokes of luck of modern history. Of all things, the world’s most-disparaged continent produced what is possibly the most-admired figure of the 20th century. Much more frequently it had been "ugly Africans" that made the headlines. For instance, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was pictured on the cover of Der Spiegel in the 1970s, although an interview with Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere was the main part of the cover story. But who in Germany knew what he looked like? Market logic rules that a popular magazine must attract its readers with well-known people. And unlike Nyerere’s face, that of cruelly eccentric Amin, who of course was covered by part of the story, was at that time known to many people.

Idi Amin hurt Africa’s image as a negative stereotype. Others from as early as the 1960s onwards included the ‘golden bed’ of a Ghanaian Cabinet minister’s wife - the classic example of the misuse of development funds by corrupt elites. Africa lost respect during the years after the wave of independence. And that was reflected in the Western media. While in the early days stories on successful development projects made most of the coverage of Africa, over the course of the years there were more and more reports on their failure. And whereas at first Africa’s problems were often attributed to the consequences of slavery and colonialism, readers later wanted to know less and less about the "guilt of the whites".

On top of Africa’s economic decline came military coups and civil wars, which to a large extent resulted in famine. And because these events continually repeated themselves the German public got tired of Africa. The ‘African perestroika’ which the German media covered so fully at the beginning of the 1990s, when elections took place in some African countries and old leaders had to go, slowed this trend only temporarily.

Afro - scepticism boomed after
The Somalia tragedy

Weariness with Africa had reached a high-water mark by December 1992, when Der Spiegel published a controversial cover story on the landing of US troops in Somalia under UN mandate. It was headlined: ‘Misery Continent Africa - Rescue by the White Man?’. More than 100 readers wrote letters or telephoned the magazine to express their outrage over the second half of the headline in particular. Despite its question mark it sounded racist and neo-colonial - even though many African states had failed, warlords terrorised the people, and the premise of white intervention was not wide of the mark. Experts bewailed the "end of the Third World and the failure of the great theory" and suggested "placing especially threatened crisis regions under the trusteeship of the countries of the North until further notice" (thus the German development sociologist Ulrich Menzel).

The angry critics of the Der Spiegel cover headline did not accept that the magazine’s interview based on it gave a negative answer to the question of ‘Rescue by the white man’. Nicephore Soglo, the democratically elected President of Benin, explained the African chaos as an historically-related transitional phase. He said "Europe has gone through similarly bad periods", and emphasised that only the Africans themselves could solve their problems.

Still, the controversial cover led to dialogue. Berlin-based Professor Kuma N’dumbe II, from Cameroon, placed a critical article in Der Spiegel. The Media Watch organisation, financed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation (affiliated to the Green Party), visited the magazine’s editorial department in Hamburg and called for a "positive article on Africa". That appeared in 1994 headed ‘Africa - forward to tradition’, and described the survival skills of people in the underground economy. As a "counterpoint to the general trend of Afro-pessimists", the article was even nominated for the Development Policy Journalism Prize of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

But in general what held true was what Ivory Coast student Kouassi Raymond found in his dissertation for the University of Abidjan titled ‘The image of Africa in the German news magazine Der Spiegel of 1995-1996’. "By means of figures and tables we have been able to prove that compared to the other continents, information on Africa is insufficient. We have also shown that (with the exception of the Republic of South Africa), Der Spiegel is interested in Africa only when it is about disasters, wars and crises." For sure, Raymond could also have found this negative trend during the same period in the publications Jeune Afrique, Le Monde and Marchés Tropicaux. He characterised the criterion as "Good news is no news", as the "main philosophy of journalism", and said he believed that that was why the media’s selection of news "contributed to harming the continent". It would keep foreign investors away from Africa. "That Der Spiegel, a magazine to be taken seriously, publishes only negative information," Raymond added, "brings discredit upon the whole continent."

The dominance of bad news about Africa can be explained. Nowhere else is infant mortality so huge, per capita income so low, and the illiteracy rate so high as in Africa South of the Sahara. Nowhere else have wars displaced so many people or has the Aids pandemic cost so many lives. While life expectancy in all other regions of the world is rising it is dropping in sub-Saharan Africa, although at an average of 48 years the region already holds the global record for short lives. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo once called Africa the "Third World of the Third World". Its share of world trade has fallen from 2.4 per cent in 1972 to a current level of about 1.2 per cent. Africa has only 0.06 per cent of all computers with Internet access. In view of this situation, the British magazine Economist last year headed a cover story on Africa with ‘Continent without hope’.

But is Africa alone in suffering from mainly bad news about it? Examples from other world regions say no. For instance, Der Spiegel and other German publications hardly carry any stories on Slovenia - the only region of former Yugoslavia in which peace has reigned since the disintegration of Tito’s state, while the media ran daily horror stories from crisis-shaken Kosovo. From Latin America, we hear time and again about drug barons and kidnappings in Colombia, but there are no reports about functioning democracies such as Costa Rica.

A quiet region is likely to be covered only under special circumstances. My last foreign assignment as a Der Spiegel editor in November last year is an example. From the mid-1990s I had several times suggested a story on Somaliland, the separatist state on the Horn of Africa that has no international recognition, but where - unlike Somalia - stable conditions prevail. For precisely that reason an article on Somaliland was not in demand. Given the anyway limited space for African news, dramatic subjects had priority. But when after the terrorist attacks in the USA on September 11 last year Somaliland came into focus as a possible base for the Western anti-terrorism coalition or a potential haven for al-Qaeda terrorists, it became interesting as a story. On-the-spot research was speedily approved and the story printed immediately - not least because the magazine had to assume that a lot would soon be written about Somaliland.

For the media are increasingly descending on the same subjects like a flock of migratory birds. This is to be seen most clearly in the case of the trendsetting USA. There is practically no general reporting on Africa in America, but when the President travels around the African continent - such as Bill Clinton in 1998 - hundreds of reporters follow him. The poor American public are bombarded all day long with stories from countries of which they have never heard. But Africa immediately disappears from the face of the earth as soon as the President has left it. It was nothing more than a stage upon which he announced his own policies.

Particularly in relation to Africa, persons or institutions determine the topics and seek to instrumentalise the media. Our correspondent in Nairobi at one time reported that aid organisations would once again take journalists along on their supply flights to South Sudan. Big famine stories were to be expected. The colleague asked if he, too, should take part in the flights. He was covering his back in the sense of: just in case we don’t take part, I have warned you.

In fact, it often depends on PR managers or coincidence whether we hear that people somewhere are dying from starvation. The so-called ‘CNN effect’ mobilises the media and can put even politicians under pressure. This is how aid for disasters which are given heavy media coverage comes to be over-financed, while funds are lacking for forgotten crises. When disastrous floods hit Mozambique in the spring of last year, aid organisations were showered with donations after sensational TV pictures were transmitted around the world. They included a South African Air Force helicopter crew rescuing a mother and her new-born child from a tree as the floodwaters rose. But there were no cameras on hand and consequently no aid for tens of thousands of Hutus who had fled to the Congo for fear of revenge after the genocide in their country Rwanda and died wretchedly in the forests there.

How many such tragedies have there been in Africa since the 1960s? Would they have been prevented if people on-the-spot had reported on the escalating situation? Experience suggests no. With hindsight, we know that UN experts in Rwanda had warned of the looming genocide in detailed reports over some months. But knowledge of threatening disaster is of no use if the will to act is lacking. And because sub-Saharan Africa has slipped to the margin of world events there are no incentives to be active there.

As a journalist with the task of bringing Africa closer to the German public I witnessed a far-reaching change in the four decades of my work. In the early days we sought to rouse our readers’ interest in our neighbouring continent by reporting on its great opportunities - Africa’s natural resources, its human potential, its ‘markets of tomorrow’. We proclaimed a vision of future cooperation.

By contrast, the public, including the politicians, apparently can now be stirred only by warnings of Africa’s ‘chaos potential’. True, the continent is largely uncoupled from the globalisation process and therefore is not very important. But because its economic decline creates a breeding ground for terrorism, fundamentalism, epidemics and migration, we should take an interest in Africa. For a flood of people from there could flow over to us if we do nothing.

This change in the portrayal and perception of Africa hurts everyone that has a heart for the continent. But unfortunately its current image is based on facts - even if journalists earlier were too naive in seeing mainly the positive aspects and now often paint a particularly gloomy picture.

Certainly, there are also promising developments. I would like to cite what the British NGO Oxfam, which has great experience of working in Africa, listed as "positive signs" in its situation report on the continent South of the Sahara published in March.

"There are certainly some positive signs: Africans are increasingly holding their governments to account: they are actively demanding change and greater inclusiveness. Local and regional media are speaking openly and freely about highly controversial political issues, against enormous odds. Women’s groups and other networks have raised the profile of female genital mutilation, domestic violence, and rape. Local non-governmental organisations are pressing their governments to fight HIV/AIDS..."

This account matches my observations - even though I must make the qualification that in many places there is no longer any government which the people can pressure into action. That is why they must help themselves.

What they achieve in doing so is exemplary. Time and again between 1962 and 2001 I met Africans whose courage and energy impressed me deeply. As a member of an affluent Western society I sometimes almost felt ashamed. But that is another story.