allAfrica.com: Africa: Durham, Durban, and AllAfrica (Page 1 of 2)

AllAfrica.com is the largest free access source of African news on the World Wide Web. By 2007 it was posting some 1,000 stories daily from African newspapers and other sources. The predecessor to allAfrica. com, AfricaNewsOnline, was one of the first public Web sites. But few allAfrica.com readers are likely to know that its origins can be traced back to the 1970s, to Durban, South Africa and Durham, North Carolina.

Reed Kramer, the CEO of AllAfrica Global Media, and Dr. Tamela (Tami) Hultman have guided these news services through more than 30 years. Kramer reflected on these experiences in a 2005 interview with William Minter. This brief recollection is adapted from the interview and also draws on a 2003 article by Hultman.

Tami and I had gone to Africa in late 1969 on the Frontier Internship program sponsored by the United Church of Christ (UCC), United Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. We were assigned to assist the Methodist Church of South Africa in launching a racially integrated youth leadership training program. Called "Give a Year of Your Life," it brought two dozen young people together in Durban for three months of intensive training, followed by nine months as youth leaders in their congregations. We weren't trained for the challenge of helping young South Africans - some older than we were - negotiate their first relationships across racial lines as equal partners. But there was lots of good will, as well as tears and agony. So the courses became a learning laboratory that prefigured the post-apartheid era in many ways.

Steve Biko, then a medical student, was one of the first people we met in Durban. He was kind enough to speak at the leadership course, where his charisma made an enormous impression. He and other founding activists of SASO, the South African Students Organization, drew us into their circle and gave us extraordinary insights into the emerging political culture of black consciousness. Most of them went on to become deeply engaged in their communities. For example, a woman student, Vuye Mashalaba, who was on the initial SASO executive committee, became a beloved doctor in one of the roughest townships outside Durban.

Tami and I had access to a minivan provided by the churches, and we would often load up a group of students and drive up the coast, north of Durban, where you could get beyond the apartheid signs and go to the beach. We were also privileged to be there at the time of an explosion of black cultural projects. The Theatre Council of Natal, founded in 1969, united African, Indian, and Coloured students across ethnic lines to produce workshops and drama and poetry events. We saw the first performance of Welcome Msomi's stirring play Umabatha in an outdoor amphitheater under a full moon. It's now a South African classic that has been performed all over the world.

Our other assignment, which was not public, was to document the role of U.S. companies in South Africa's economy, research we undertook on behalf of the Southern Africa Committee and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. While in South Africa we spent three months at a time in Durban and then three months on the road, gathering data on dozens of the largest U.S. companies.In Port Elizabeth, for example, we visited all the auto assembly plants, interviewing everybody from managing directors to shop floor workers.

The data and photographs we collected were used by organizers of the first shareholder resolution against General Motors in 1971. After our return, the research formed the basis for a book, Church Investments, Corporations and Southern Africa (Corporate Information Center 1972). Our photos were used and reused in the divestment movement. I remember one ubiquitous photo of a General Motors police van carrying black prisoners. We were chased a few times while taking pictures of police or military facilities, but we always managed to get away.

It was an irony that when we were expelled from South Africa, in March 1971, it had nothing to do with our research. The government at that point hadn't realized the sensitivity of economic information. Our visas were revoked, along with those of other foreigners working with denominations belonging to the World Council of Churches, after the council gave humanitarian grants to Southern African liberation movements such as Mandela's ANC.

For six months after being expelled we visited groups working on Southern African issues in several African countries, discovering how little information was available and how hungry people were for it. In Nairobi we worked with the Africa region of the World Student Christian Federation. From José Chipenda, one of its regional secretaries, we got our first real training in photography, a skill we've made the most of ever since. In Lusaka we worked with a Zambian organization and discussed with the top leadership of the ANC what we had learned in South Africa, particularly about American companies, but also about the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement. In Dar es Salaam we began our journalism career, writing for the Tanzanian daily paper edited by Frene Ginwala, an exile who became speaker of the South African parliament after apartheid. We were in the fortunate position of knowing both the activists arising inside South Africa and a network of outside contacts who wanted to support them.

After two years investigating the role of U.S. companies in South Africa and a year in New York writing up our research, we returned to Durham, North Carolina, in 1972, initially working as a local branch of the New Yorkûbased Southern Africa Committee. The concept of a news agency focusing on Africa stemmed from frustration with the lack of news and information. Africa News Service was born through a small grant from the UCC Commission for Racial Justice, directed by the Reverend Charles Cobb Sr. and sustained by his colleague, UCC Africa secretary Larry Henderson. It subsequently received other church and individual contributions, as well as foundation grants.

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