allAfrica.com: South Africa: Newspaper Venture Embodies Fragile Freedom of Media (Page 1 of 2)

WE STAND at the top of Kumalo Street in Soweto, six Sudanese, a Zimbabwean and two South Africans, shouting above the noonday roar of trucks passing the iconic Hector Pieterson Museum. (Thirty-two years ago at this spot, a 12-year-old boy was one of the first to die as police bullets tore into demonstrating pupils in the Soweto uprising of June 1976.)

Tour buses come and go, dropping European and US visitors in a quietly buzzing flea market behind the museum. Curios spill on to the tarmac: drums from Mali, filigree copper work from the Congo, Moroccan studded brass, Malawian carvings, and beadwork bracelets from Zululand.

What we are doing there, eight men and a woman with our own tour bus and driver courtesy of USAid in Khartoum, is partly professional but mostly of a ritualistic nature, fêting freedom.

The Sudanese are here to learn how to set up a newspaper in their capital city, aiming for sustainability after receiving a kick-start from donor funding.

Their brave newspaper venture is to be the commercially independent New Sudan -- a title, it turns out, with layer upon layer of connotations that reflect the arcane politics of Africa's biggest country. Sudan is racked by three, maybe four, wars and oppressed by a Muslim fundamentalist regime.

The breakaway southern part of Sudan, Christian and animist, is now called the New Sudan, resonating with the name of the paper. Weird. Our friends are northern Arabic-speaking Mus-lims, and to them the name New Sudan symbolises unity, not separation. The paper will campaign for national unity in the coming referendum in which people are to be asked if they want separate nations or a united Sudan. Several newspapers and online news services are based in Khartoum, some government-owned and the rest obedient to state directives.

Journalists have been assassinated, charged with sedition, beaten up and harried in their work. But now a new age of press freedom has dawned under a government of national unity, which promises freedom of expression, we are told.

The six could not visit SA without walking up Vilakazi Street to tour the hallowed Mandela house. They have been to the Apartheid Museum and had a briefing at the Constitutional Court on basic human rights and the rule of law. At the Financial Mail and Summit TV, top staffers met them and expressed interest in news syndications to and from North Africa.

We locals are the trainers, identified from abroad by our credentials in journalism education and the experience of setting up new publications in townships. For four days we have brainstormed newspaper production, printing and distribution, talked on advertising and promotions, and tried to draw up the first news and features diaries in the launch edition.

One of the six is a representative of the agency that handles the USAid sponsorship. In setting up the training contract, the agency laid heavy stress on entrepreneurship. Sudan needs a new generation of innovators to push the country into the modern age.

So we lay it on. High hopes do not create a street-sales grid, or pay the stringing fees of reporters in the provinces. A thriving newspaper is good for democracy, so let your altruism shine through layers of effective business administration. Our Zimbabwean colleague -- who has been closely involved in running street newspapers with homeless people and exiles in Johannesburg -- offers sage advice.

"Plan everything in detail," he says, "then expect it all to change overnight."

Five of the Sudanese comprise the core management and editorial team of the planned paper. Some are fresh from years in the deserts and jungles of Sudan, where they worked as information officers for insurgency groups.

Most speak passable English, for Sudan was once a British colony. One or two seem communist inclined but all are surely liberal in their commitment to an open society where religious differences are tolerated and all citizens have the same rights.

We ask why they think USAid is ready to stake considerable finance on the paper's launch. The answers are tantalisingly vague, with a mention of other mysterious donors in the background. Their evident passion for a free press overwhelms our suspicion that this could be a CIA project.

Even if it is, the group declares they will take the paper where they want it to go, beholden to nobody. As trainers, we look at each other and wonder if there was ever a newspaper like that, anywhere.

We work step-by-step through a rates card for ad sales, trying to form an idea of how many local, regional and national companies might buy space in the paper.

The woman in charge of marketing and promotions confesses that she is afraid of the task. She wears an airy head shawl, is very demure, and takes virtually no part in talks but listens intently.

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