Broadcasters focus a new lens on Africa
15 Jun 2012 10:27 - Faeeza Ballim <
http://mg.co.za/author/faeeza-ballim>
The BBC is going to produce the first daily news television programme about
the continent. Faeeza Ballim reports.
To get to the boardroom of the BBC Africa bureau in Johannesburg is like a
mini-journey through the international broadcaster’s past, present and
future of eight decades’ of news-gathering on the continent.
You pass its state-of-the-art radio and TV studios and go through a small
but busy newsroom, with large wall-mounted monitors broadcasting BBC World
news, next to clocks ticking away the different time zones. Then you go
along a corridor of editing rooms, where someone is digitising the bureau’s
massive tape collection.
The walls of the corridor are covered with sepia photographs of slim and
smiling old BBC hands such as George Alagiah, Milton Nkosi and Glenn
Middleton set against African sunsets.
The future of the BBC’s African broadcasting fills the boardroom with a big
voice and a large smile, and exudes a passion for the continent. His name is
Komla Dumor and he will be the anchor of the broadcaster’s new television
programme, Focus on Africa, starting on Monday evening on BBC World.
It will be the first daily television news programme (30 minutes long)
dedicated to Africa by an international broadcaster.
Ghanaian-born Dumor was in South Africa recently on a whirlwind promotional
tour.
Challenges and prospects
“I am incredibly excited to be part of a programme that will provide solid
coverage of Africa’s challenges and prospects,” he said.
Africa is no longer the lost continent – it is now a continent with
audiences that broadcasters want to capture. It is a three-horse race at the
moment between the BBC, CNN and
Al Jazeera International, but the field is expected to grow.
“Africa is the fastest-growing news market in the world,” said Solomon
Mugera, BBC’s Africa editor, who was in Johannesburg with Dumor. And the
audience is both in Africa and overseas.
Focus on Africa is not the first of its kind. Kim Norgaard, CNN Johannesburg
bureau chief, said: “It is nice to welcome the BBC to something we have been
doing for years.”
CNN has three dedicated African shows. “Africa is a business story,”
Norgaard said: “There are many who look at Africans as consumers.”
Depiction of the continent
Thanks to satellite broadcasting, there are eager viewers beyond the
continent. Isaac Mangena, e.tv’s continental operations editor, said e.tv
was pleasantly surprised by the size of its viewership in the United
Kingdom, but not all were Britons. “The audience is also Africans in the
diaspora interested in what is going on at home.”
But international coverage of Africa has long been a source of controversy.
Critics have attacked the depiction of the continent as a “hopeless place of
death”, according to Professor Tawana Kupe, dean of humanities at the
University of the Witwatersrand and associate professor of media studies.
However, there has been a shift: “Competition between news stations and
critiques over the years have led to gradual change in representation,” he
said.
Others have criticised foreign correspondents for engaging Africans
superficially. Recently, Binyavanga Wainaina, director of the Chinua Achebe
Centre for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in the United States,
made fun of their cosy relationship with international non-governmental
organisations in an article in the Guardian.
“If a foreign correspondent needs to know what exactly is going on in Sudan,
their weekly lunch with the Oxfam guy will identify the most urgent issues.”
But Focus on Africa seems a step in the right direction. “A new Africa is
emerging,” Dumor said. “The old stereotypes are being challenged and a new,
compelling narrative is being written.” Instead of incessant reports of
coups across the continent, the success of the Nairobi stock exchange and
mobile phone penetration were now deserving of mention.
According to Dumor, effective reporting meant that “you have to breathe the
air and taste the dust”.
Africa by Africans
With an 80-year-long presence on the continent, BBC radio’s correspondents
are integral to the new service. Peter Burdin, Africa bureau editor, said:
“We have 65 correspondents in 45 countries reporting on a daily basis. And
so we will be unleashing young journalists who are already in place.”
Dumor said: “These will be reports on Africa by Africans. We are not flying
in some expert for South Africans to say you don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
This will give the BBC an edge. For e.tv’s Africa 360, a programme with a
similar agenda, one of the key challenges has been continental
representation. “BBC has been there, they’ve had a radio presence and they
can use those people,” Mangena said. “We are a step ahead with TV
broadcasting, but they already have a footprint across the continent.”
Does this mean only Africans should cover Africa? Nkosi, a BBC analyst at
the Johannesburg bureau, said not. “I will defend the internationalism of
journalism.”
A veteran journalist from Soweto, he went on to head the BBC bureau in South
Asia. “I think that whole thing of parachute journalism is a cliché,
honestly. There are many people who fly in and do fantastic pieces.”
Immediate perspective
The international media has a role to play in painting African pictures.
“Local journalists are sometimes more interested in the immediate
perspective,” he said. “It is important to get a sense of the way others see
us, otherwise we’d be buried in our own stories.”
A recent online spat over the coverage of Africa elicited some biting
comment. Tristan McConnell is a Global Post journalist based in Nairobi. In
response to indignant criticism about “stereotyping and incomplete analysis”
by correspondents, he wrote: “When I write that the people of the Nuba
mountains are terrified of Khartoum’s Antonov bombers … it’s because I’ve
lain in the dirt with them when the bombs fell. I’ve seen the terror on
their faces and I’ve felt it myself.”
As Nkosi said: “The problem is when you see African people on TV, surrounded
by flies, going to the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees]
tent. This [Focus on Africa] will be an opportunity for audiences to see
Africa in its glory.”
TV guide
CNN has three dedicated African shows that air globally several days a week:
Inside Africa, Marketplace Africa and African Voices.
Focus on Africa will be the BBC’s first daily TV programme dedicated to
Africa.
Al Jazeera has a weekly investigative programme, Africa Investigates.
CCTV broadcasts a daily one-hour news show, Africa Live, from a bureau in
Nairobi.
E.tv broadcasts Africa 360, and eNews Prime Time on DSTV, Sky B in the
United Kingdom and affiliated channels around the globe.
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Received on Fri Jun 15 2012 - 12:29:05 EDT
