---

---

Africa: 'New News' from Africa - Looking Beyond Death, Disease, Disaster and Despair

6 October 2006

---

interview

Washington, DC — Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the best-known and most award-winning journalists in the United States, has focused her recent career on covering Africa. After nearly two decades as a correspondent for the Newshour on public television, she moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, working successively as Africa correspondent for National Public Radio and CNN bureau chief, before leaving CNN last year to pursue independent projects. This month, her interview with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf appears in Essence magazine. She talked with AllAfrica about her latest book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance.

Your interest in Africa dates from childhood?

My initial interest in the continent goes back to my childhood in the segregated [U.S.] south where, on weekends, the big activity was to go to what we called "the show." It was the little segregated movie theater in my town of Covington, Georgia, and it was always either "westerns" or Tarzan movies which somehow captured my imagination. At that time, there wasn't a lot of discussion about Africa, either in my household or in the community. I was so struck by the adventures of Tarzan that I used to play in my backyard, where there were lots of trees and vines hanging, and I called myself "Nyoka, Queen of the Jungle."

So something in my primal memory must have been stirred by all of that - although in retrospect those Tarzan movies were so racist. They make me sad, because the victim was always some hapless African or the villain was some African terrible guy, and the white Tarzan was always the hero. But that didn't really register much.

In later years, I encountered the poem, "What is Africa to me, scarlet sky or copper sea?" [by Countee Cullen] It is a beautiful poem. But when I was in college, I began to see Africa as more than a poem, as more than a Tarzan movie, more than adventure. Robert F. Kennedy came to my university at a time when the south was resisting the law of the land requiring desegregation. I think that he and his brother, President John Kennedy, were concerned about the black vote [in the United States] and also viewed Africa as a potential bulwark against communism.

Speaking at the University of Georgia, Robert Kennedy said that the graduation of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes would be a major milestone in the fight against communism. I was shocked. There I was sitting in a room of hostile white people, and they said, "What was that he said?" But it was indicative that Africa was emerging on the international scene and making its making its way ever more deeply into the consciousness of African Americans like myself.

Why do you think that coverage of Africa in major U.S. media is so limited?

I am constantly confounded as to why American media don't find Africa an exciting place to report from and about. I think there's a perception that audience interest is limited. That's certainly not been true in my experience. I lecture on college campuses, before businesses and corporations and other venues around the country. And I always find receptivity to the 'new news' that I bring from Africa. Interest - and ignorance to be sure - because people aren't getting the information they need to understand Africa.

Reporting is dominated by the four 'd's I talk about in the book - death, disease, disaster and despair.

Has coverage changed during the three decades you've been paying attention to Africa and working as a professional journalist?

I don't think so! There are moments when journalists descend on the continent - when Mozambique floods and a baby is born in the tree, etc. I don't have a problem with that. I don't have a problem with reporting death, disease, disaster and despair, because all of the above exist.

But that is not all there is to Africa. And when you have crises to which the international community should respond, increasingly there is a reluctance to do so because, after all of this negative reporting, there is a feeling: What's the point? If all you hear about year after year is hunger, drought, disease and conflict, people conclude that Africa's problems are intractable and that nothing in Africa ever changes.

The "new news" that needs to be shared includes the fact that in 1998 there were 14 wars being fought on the continent. Today there are three, because Burundi's last guerilla movement has now signed on to the peace process. And in Congo, the first contested election in 40 years was held in relative peace. That's "new news," even though many people still focus on the unrest that continues in some parts of the country.

You've reported from Africa for both NPR and CNN. Were you frustrated by what you were able to do?

The whole time I was at NPR, and subsequently at CNN, I got the stories on the air that I went after and thought were important to do, sometimes to the frustration of editors. My stories were often longer than they wanted them to be, and I kept pushing the envelope. But I walked away from CNN quite proud about what I had been able to do.

I think a lot of journalists self censor, because they don't think there is going to be receptivity to their Africa reporting. That self-censorship becomes a self-defeating and self-fulfilling prophecy. Journalists who are invested in trying to get news of the continent out just have to keep slogging, keep on fighting for space. They have to be creative in the way they propose and sell stories.

As I say in the book, they have to go there to know there. Let them go there and spend a little time there, as opposed to parachuting in for a specific thing and leaving. If you go to Niger to cover the famine, go next door or go somewhere else in the country where there is no famine. Or if you go to Darfur, go to southern Sudan and see how they're rebuilding after decades of war. See what is the sprit of the people.

We have to understand that the audience is not tuning out on Africa. It's the media decision makers who decide that Americans aren't interested. After I left the NewsHour, many people in the United States thought that I had died! They so rarely saw anything I did on CNN domestic, or only episodically or occasionally, and those people who watched the NewsHour didn't watch CNN domestic.

Not a lot got on CNN domestic, and yet all over the continents of Africa and Europe - and everywhere else that people get CNN International - people were watching. But a decision had been made, or was made on a regular basis by the domestic side, that there wasn't sufficient [audience] interest [in Africa].

Now, I have to say, that's changing a little bit. I have friends who still work at CNN and who've been doing great work, people like Jeff Koinange. He's getting more things on CNN, and Anderson Cooper is becoming more and more interested in the continent.

Some of that has to do with, again, the death, disease, disaster, and despair, but the point is: let them get interested.

I've been working with a group called My Sister's Keeper. In fact, I reported on them from southern Sudan in December. I went over there to follow them because they were going to see if it was feasible to build a girls' school. It was an amazing eye-opener. Here was a part of the country that was put back into the Stone Age by war; there's nothing there, not even anything to make bricks. So the task of these women is going to be daunting.

I agreed to have them come over to Martha's Vineyard this summer and talk to people about the school, and see if there'd be people willing to contribute. They sent out emails to people whose names I gave them and others who are working with this project, and the response has been amazing. People want to contribute - and they don't know anything. So when you give them a little bit of "new news," the response is invariably positive.

In your reporting, you strive to make the people you are covering come to life for your audience. So do you think it's not just a question of finding the stories that are beyond death and destruction, war and famine, but it's also what you do when you're reporting on those crisis situations?

Be the first to Write a Comment!

---