South Africa: Bittersweet Travels - A Journalist Comes to Terms with a Troubled Continent

It is less rare now for an American woman of color to be a foreign correspondent for a major U.S. news organization than it was when Lynne Duke became Johannesburg bureau chief for the Washington Post in 1995, covering most of central and southern Africa. She had been to South Africa before, for a brief but intense assignment at a time of profound political transition.

Her period as bureau chief followed closely on the Rwanda massacres and gave her the chance to try to understand its aftermath in the Great Lakes area of Central and Eastern Africa, where more than 3.5 million people are thought to have died in recent years. She also documented the radical changes in Angola, Mozambique and the rest of post-apartheid South Africa.

Duke calls herself an "Afro-realist...guided by the legions of African people whose lives are built on extraordinary fortitude, unwavering hope, and profound humanity, despite immense odds." AllAfrica's Tamela Hultman talked to her about her experiences and the book that grew from them.

How did it happen, that first trip?

Out of the blue, the Washington Post foreign editor requested that I go to the townships in South Africa and do what, at that time, I had distinguished myself in doing, which was insinuating myself into people's lives and writing in detail and with some passion about them. I wasn't sent to do daily coverage. I was literally sent over to give an honest and realistic portrayal of life in South Africa from the ground up, as the country was on the cusp of change.

The idea was conceived in the fall of 1989, just after Govin Mbeki had been released, and Nelson Mandela's release was imminent. The newspaper asked if I would be willing to go and write about how this would affect life in South Africa. Having only been a reporter for the Washington Post for three years, I said, "What do you mean, would I be willing?" Of course I would be! So that's how my first trip to South Africa came about.

I was there for nine weeks, and during that period I stayed in shacks and huts with ordinary people rather than hotels. Though I was untested internationally, I had experience with this kind of work in the United States. As a reporter, I had been a fly on the wall in the midst of people experiencing great change or conflict before. If I had been asked to go over and cover news, I would have been completely out of my depth. Instead, I was sent to report a very specialized perspective.

Did it change your own perspective?

It was certainly a career-changing assignment. I had become very much infected with the South Africa story. I wanted to go back and see how circumstances unfolded. And I did go back in 1994 with a team of five to cover the elections. I was far more prepared than anyone who had been posted in Africa before, because I had spent time covering the country where I would be based.

You allude to a major debate in journalism - whether familiarity with a place breeds bias or is a requirement for grasping complexity and context.

I think there is a notion that a correspondent can be selected and then immersed in three months of reading, language training, and briefings by experts and diplomats, and he or she will be sufficiently prepared for coverage in a particular country. I don't think that's enough. When I went to South Africa in 1990 I had already studied South Africa in college. I can't emphasize how important that was; I felt that I really understood the connections between the various conflicts of the region and the far-reaching evil of apartheid. One had to understand how evil and destructive it was for the entire region. It wasn't an idiosyncratic racist policy particular to the nation of South Africa. I went with a clear idea of the vast, far-reaching effects of apartheid, and I don't think that made me biased. It enabled me to get a firm grip on the story.

I think it's dangerous to go in with a tabula rasa . When trying to understand conflicts, the context can be very complex. Behind each story are so many layers of history to explain and understand. One doesn't necessarily need an ideological bent, but a clear historical understanding is essential.

Now history is contested ground. One person's analysis could spark an allegation of bias. So it can be a very subjective matter. However I do think it's necessary that a correspondent going in be very well grounded.

What was hard in the beginning? What did you get wrong?

I think my conceit was my belief that President Mandela and his administration would view us - myself and the rest of the foreign correspondents - as important players in how they were presented to the world. The fact that they didn't was very interesting. They definitely did not cater to the foreign press. They did not go out of their way by any stretch of the imagination to exploit us in any cynical or obstructive sense. It seemed as though we were almost an afterthought.

Furthermore, it became clear over time that senior officials didn't even read the foreign press. It was amazing to me. They didn't follow the way they were being portrayed overseas in any systematic way. Of course, every once in a while a cabinet official would come and speak to the Foreign Correspondents Association. But the fact that they didn't read the foreign press - Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times - as important conduits, it was stunning to me.

Thabo Mbeki [the deputy president who succeeded Nelson Mandela] and the people around him seemed to have paid a bit more attention to the way things were playing out overseas in the foreign press, and I think the cases with which they were displeased colored their view toward all of us. It was as though they never stopped to examine whether there were any opportunities to change the relationship between the ANC (African National Congress) and the press.

At the end of your book, you recount an attempt to interview Nelson Mandela after a day of watching him tour rural areas with a group of business leaders he wanted to engage in fighting poverty. You wanted him to talk about what he expected of his life after retirement, and he refused. Why did that upset you?

I gave a lot of thought as to whether I would frame an entire chapter around that day. The reason I did is that there is a side to Mandela that is counter-intuitive for most American readers and non-South African readers. That side of Mandela is the Mandela who is not necessarily a heroic magnanimous icon, but the Mandela with issues. He gets an attitude and he can be rude. In thinking about how to handle this one massive encounter with him, I had to portray it honestly. There were also several episodes I did not put in the book for reasons of space and flow of the copy, but the essence of those episodes is captured in the Mandela that is revealed in that final chapter. He was having a bad day, and I wanted to portray the fact that Mandela has bad days. More importantly, I used it because it shows the bitter sweetness that I was grappling with personally. I wanted something out of that day, something out of him. You can't always get what you want. You have to decide what your own feelings are. I had relied on this notion that Mandela would, in some way, help me sort out my own feelings about South Africa by extension. But that's not the way it worked.

You conveyed his impatience when you kept pressing him. But maybe he wasn't having a bad day. Maybe he was just determined to keep the focus on what meant most to him. To you it feels like a rebuff.

Yes, it does. And it was quite taxing to me. I hope people don't read it as an insult to him. If I had asked other kinds of questions he may have welcomed them, and certainly what he wanted to talk about was his attempts to bridge the economic gap and building schools, clinics and so forth. But the arrangement upfront was to talk about that as well as his upcoming retirement. That was the agenda, and he reneged on it. It behooved me to press him because, first, that was my mission, and second, it was such an innocuous subject. I couldn't understand what the problem was. Everyone knew he was going to be leaving, and I just wanted him to say how he felt about it.

I think the events of the day may have also had an impact on him, though I was never able to verify that. There was an incident in the Cape where a senior police official was shot and there were some strange racial politics going on. I wondered how much that may have influenced his mood.

Sometimes you have certain notions of people as being angelic. I've seen [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu annoyed, as well. That's what's so marvelous about people like Tutu or Mandela. We think that they're always at an elevated state of being. But they have risen to that level because of how they've dealt with their sense of self and circumstance. I think that makes them inspiring, because they have risen above themselves.

Take Mandela for instance. He's a man with strong imperial tendencies, but he's still a democrat. If South Africa were in a different circumstance and he were a younger man, perhaps that imperial streak would have grown. But he's able to move beyond his tendencies, to rise above the kind of thinking, in terms of respect and authority, under which he matured - and he still became a democrat.

Outside South Africa, the stories you covered were mostly about conflict.

In my book, there is a lot of discussion about conflict. That's what I covered - the Congo war was going on, the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide was unfolding, the Angolan conflict continued. While my book is an attempt to show one person coming to grips with that kind of conflict and her role as a journalist writing about that conflict, it also tries to demonstrate that there is a real Africa that is not about conflict and operates outside death, starvation, and destruction. Whenever I could I tried to portray people, just people.

But even conflict doesn't get the attention it deserves. It didn't when you were there, and it doesn't now. You saw the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has killed more than three and a half million people, by many estimates - from fighting and massacres and related disease and starvation. But it doesn't get much notice from the international community, and you recently wrote an opinion piece that suggested you were outraged by that.

It's still true. It will always be a prick at my conscience. I was really quite naïve, as it was my first time covering a war in progress on the ground. I don't think South Africa of the early nineties was quite the same, which was more a township conflict. While in the Congo, I had an incredibly naïve sense that if we could just get to the bottom of what was really happening, if we could reveal the truth, it would make a difference.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that we could scrape and scrounge and resurrect or unearth the truth, and it would make no difference at all. It was a bitter lesson. Seven years later it still bothers me. I still feel that there was a failure in the press. Although it's probably too strong to say that it was our failure, I certainly don't think we pressed hard enough or dug deep enough to make clear that there was a game being played and hundreds of thousands of peoples' lives were hanging in the balance. I sort of wrote that piece to get over it.

There has been occasional, brief media attention. But the situation has remained quite horrible for people in the area, even though a small UN peacekeeping force has now curbed some of the violence. Why is it still largely unreported in the major print and broadcast media?

It's hard to sustain the coverage in light of other issues. Let me put it this way. If the . situation in Liberia hadn't deteriorated, then Ituri [province in the southeast] and the Congo in general would have continued to get coverage. If you recall, before fighting really exploded in Liberia [in mid-2003], correspondents were in Bunia [in Ituri]. The Post had a correspondent in Bunia. The New York Times , the wire services, and the Los Angeles Times were all there writing good front-page stories on the situation: the absence of a strong force, the debate about a [peacekeeping] mandate etc. Stories were also coming out of the UN as well. Unfortunately, the way Africa is staffed in terms of the newspapers and their correspondents on the continents, it lends itself toward biased coverage. I don't mean contextually biased, but there's a limit to the coverage. In the case of the Washington Post , we don't currently have full-time correspondents in west Africa or in South Africa.

That's due to the staffing for the Iraqi war. It's just a matter of priorities. The western press doesn't staff Africa at levels it should. Considering these stories and the level of conflict that goes on, there should be more correspondents either based or routinely circulating in and out of the continent. This doesn't happen and coverage is skewed. Anyone reading press coverage of Africa in the last six months would think "my god, killing and cannibalism in Congo and mayhem in Liberia" - and that's all they would know about.

Do you see an element of racism in the lack of sustained attention?

Definitely. The fact that the victims were all Congolese is the reason we've barely heard of their deaths. If they had been European or American, believe me, we would have heard all about it. I don't have any hesitation about saying that there is racism - flat out, indisputable racism - about the way we cover and prioritize stories out of Africa. There is, in the Western mind, a great value placed on an American, European, or white life than an African's life. That's my experience; it's what I've watched for four years.

Can that change? And, if it does, can that make a difference?

My answer will make it seem like it's such an impossible task. It doesn't start with journalism. It's the culture. Unfortunately, the press in general has become very conservative, and I don't mean that in a partisan sense. All we do these days is reflect the status quo. Twenty-five years ago the press was an agent for change that really did try and afflict the comfortable, that really did try and shake things up, and at least cause the powers that be and the public to look at something critically.

Now, it's simply a mirror. We reflect the status quo. We don't change anything, and we don't even try to any more. I really do think the press has become very much an agent of the status quo. The standards that come to bear for foreign correspondents are an extension of society in general. The questions journalism faces, such as what is important, what level of atrocity merits coverage, whether the color of the bodies makes them more worthy of coverage, those are questions that journalism responds to based on the broader culture. Is there really an appetite in this western culture for journalists to try and change that mindset? Among some people there is, but we're living in a very strange period. It's quite dangerous, really, when people don't even view the attempt to change someone's mindset as an important journalistic value.

I think lack of Africa coverage stems from a confluence of several factors. I think the shrinking news hole may be part of the picture. The news hole really shrunk at the same time as correspondents were trying to do better work from Africa. Since Africa was already rather low on the level of foreign priorities, African news was becoming a very small priority. Selling stories became more and more difficult, and the stories that made it into a newspaper tended to be conflict related, because the news hole was so small.

Let me also point out, however, that though there may be African-American journalists who really pound their fists on the table about the dearth of Africa coverage, there really are not a lot of African-American journalists who get in line to take these jobs. It's truly amazing to me.

And African-American communities should demand more Africa coverage - but they should demand it in an effective way. They should be inundating newspapers with letters, phone calls, and editorials. They make themselves more effective by really lobbying for a change in coverage, rather than just criticizing the lack of it. Other groups do it.

Why isn't it happening?

Part of me wants to say there is ambivalence about Africa. There are plenty of Africa advocacy organizations, but they don't have broad-based support. They have very specialized interests, whereas the sanctions campaign, the "Free South Africa" campaign [in the 1980 and 90s], had broad grassroots support and was therefore effective. I don't think there's been an African campaign since then that has had anywhere near as wide-ranging support. [During the fighting in Liberia], there was a piece in the New York Times about the ambivalence in African American groups about whether the United States should be intervening in Liberia. I must be really out of touch, because I was shocked when I read that.

If context is a way to help an audience connect with an unfamiliar place, how do you get that into your stories?

It's a real struggle. There are basic excuses, such as space constraints, but there is still a way to do it when you have limited space. One has to be very adept with the language. Time must be spent crafting the language and content in a succinct but distinguishable way. This can be a struggle for a journalist, especially when you're on the road trying to meet deadlines in an environment where logistics are a real concern. It's difficult to focus on content when your battery is about to die or you're trying to find an Internet connection. On the other hand, I've never met an editor who wanted more context. There's never a demand for more historical context. Once in awhile, as in the Congo conflict, that would occur, but it's very rare. It's a huge problem. When you do add historical context, it can also become interpretive. There were times during the Congo conflict when an editor would challenge the context I had added to an article because he felt it went beyond the facts.

If you're trying to negate or minimize the importance of an issue then context is not used. If the mindset is "Africa is just a bloody mess," then context is not necessary. You're not going to find context if the journalistic mindset writes off Africa from the beginning. And I think that underlies the absence of historical context: why provide historical explanations if your fundamental belief is that Africa is a complex bloody mess, and inevitably so.

In coverage of Sudan today, as in much of your Africa reporting, telling the story with the kind of intensity that the reality demands can be seen as advocacy.

Yes, and I do know that there are journalists who regard that as bias. They believe that a journalist who focuses on the dangers of a people struggling to survive and writes with passion is biased. I've had this debate with people on numerous occasions. But I do think it's a responsibility of journalists.

My editors would often ask me to ratchet-down the passion. But I don't think that in toning it down a little, I was removing it entirely. I hope that the immediacy of certain situations and the plea inherent in all the coverage - that peoples' lives should be saved - was still there.

Where do you find hope for Africa, or do you?

I find the hope in various places. Countries like South Africa, Mozambique, or Senegal - though I never reported there - that are stabilizing, taking up leadership roles in their region,and have credible leaders pursuing sustainable policies for the benefit of their people are the obvious places to look for hope. The less than obvious places were where ordinary people did extraordinary things, such as the free press advocates in Zimbabwe who were put in jail or the human rights advocates in Congo-Zaire who were being killed. It was the people who were risking their lives to bring attention to issues like human rights and free speech that inspired me. They weren't the only sources of hope in Africa, but I found their struggle distinctive.

I don't think HIV is going to consume the population of Africa. Not every country faces a 30 percent HIV infection rate. It's horrible where it exists, but it doesn't exist everywhere. There's time to combat it. I just hope that this new [momentum towards prevention and treatment] can be sustained in a programmatic way and not suffer any more setbacks.

I see hope both on an institutional level and a more personal level. I've never wrung my hands wondering "whither Africa, what will happen?" Africa's not some miasmic place that will always be sucked down to some lower level of existence, which always seems to be the basis of that question. There are points of conflict, and some of those conflicts are huge. But there are also points of progress and hope.

South Africa: Bittersweet Travels - A Journalist Comes to Terms with a Troubled Continent

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