“Tribal Fixation” and Africa’s Otherness

Traveler’s Tale, News Values, and News Frames

Mike Featherstone has noted in this regard the dilemma of representing other people’s life and experience as journalists and historians “structure the writing in such a way as to reflect back on one’s own preoccupations and formal conventions and narrative structure: One’s writings provide a mirror which one cannot go beyond.” ⁵⁷ In his analysis of journalistic standardization and stereotyping, Robert Danton similarly argues that reporters “bring more to events they cover than they take away from them.” ⁵⁸

Thus, the factors of social cognition and perception continue to inform news values both because journalists are part of their society and culture and because they seek to engage the attention and reflect the presumed interest of that society. In her study of the coverage of the Darfur conflict, for example, Bella Mody found that the news frames of media of different countries reflected not just their national interests but also what they deemed to be the expectations of their particular audiences, whether domestic or foreign. ⁵⁹

Indeed, attributes of the traveler’s tales are consistent with news frames analyses ⁶⁰ and the gatekeeping perspectives, which attribute qualitative divergences in international news coverage to editorial choices and emphasis. Within this perspective are findings that relate qualitative differences to specific factors of coverage such as relational affinity or cultural consonance, ⁶¹ political or diplomatic consonance with the United States, ⁶² and commercial imperatives. ⁶³ Moreover, making an increasingly complex world comprehensible to the American populace necessitates the situating of news within familiar reference points or stereotypes. ⁶⁴

From the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, following the intense debate in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) over the “new international information and communication order,” there was considerable scholarship on the relative coverage of countries by the Western news media. The research largely supported the contention that countries outside the global spheres of influence were marginally covered by the Western press. ⁶⁵ There was also a reasonably strong consensus that what coverage the developing world—especially Africa—received was predominantly negative. ⁶⁶ Where there is substantial disagreement is the reason for the regional divergence in negative coverage.

Broadly speaking, there are two dominant and divergent explanations of differences in negative coverage: the mirror image theory and the gatekeeping/framing perspectives. The mirror image theory attributes qualitative differences in coverage to differences in reality. ⁶⁷ For instance, in their study that addresses the findings that news about the Third World is unduly negative, Robert L. Stevenson and Gary D. Gaddy conclude that “violence and conflict get reported in pretty much the same way wherever they occur.” ⁶⁸ Similarly, Taeyong Kim concludes in another study that “most of the countries that were unfavorably covered either had serious domestic problems or persistent international troubles in ‘reality.’” ⁶⁹ The major case against the mirror image perspective is, of course, that it minimizes the role of human subjectivity.

Therefore, the dominant perspective on news coverage is the gatekeeping/framing perspective. In its varied expressions, it depicts news coverage as involving conditioned selectivity and active construction. It thus attributes qualitative differences in the portrayal of countries to editorial choices. Within this perspective are findings that relate qualitative differences to specific factors of coverage, such as relational affinity, ⁷⁰ diplomatic consonance with the United States, ⁷¹ and commercial imperatives. ⁷² These gatekeeping perspectives are consistent with news frames analysis, which posits that events are invariably reported to fit existing frames of reference. ⁷³

The ultimate illustration in this regard may well be The Economist’s cover story of May 13, 2000, which carried the caption, “The hopeless continent.” The cover story exemplified what Charlayne Hunter-Gault characterized as the “four D’s of the African apocalypse.” The piece was an example of an orientation to coverage that portrays “Africa as a place of death, disaster, disease, and despair.” ⁷⁴ Significantly, The Economist formally reversed its editorial stance on Africa about eleven years later with a cover story in its December 3, 2011, issue captioned “Africa Rising.” The magazine expressed regret for its caption in the 2000 cover story.

One would be hard pressed to make the case that the magazine’s dramatic switch in its characterization of Africa reflects the mirror theory. While Africa’s objective realities eleven years later would, indeed, be objectively characterized as progress, the switch from a “hopeless” to a “rising” continent is too bipolar to be a reflection of reality. The characterizations seem rather purposive, especially in light of the magazine’s expression of regrets for the earlier cover caption.

Of the framing/gatekeeping factors of qualitative news coverage the one that would be least affected by the dictates of globalization is that of the commercial imperatives. In a study of the potential impact of the advocacy for a new information order in the 1970s/1980s, for instance, Thomas J. Ahern Jr. concludes that it could not change the divergences in attention given to various regions of the world because that would require the “redeployment of resources,” which is determined by “market forces.” ⁷⁵ Though Ahern was referring to the relative scope of coverage, it is reasonable to assume that the same factor would be resistant to qualitative changes.

Whereas the broadened interactivity and connectivity inherent in globalization would tend to attenuate the relational and diplomatic factors, that is not so for commercial imperatives. If anything, the intensified media competition engendered by the proliferation of web-based information and entertainment outlets has further intensified the tendency to select news by the standards of sensationalism. Moreover, the need to make an increasingly complex world comprehensible to the American populace has not necessarily changed. It could be assumed that it continues to necessitate the situating of news within familiar reference points, which often means stereotypes.

Diminished Tribal Fixation

When William Artis Jr. wrote about the tribal fixation in the coverage of the Nigerian civil war, his theme was not so much about the tribal as it was about the fixation. Tribal or ethnic conflicts exist everywhere, including Europe. What makes its application to African affairs of concern is the near exclusive reliance on it to explain African conflicts and violence, especially the suggestion of African primordial and bestial tendencies. Therefore, to write of a diminished tribal fixation is not to suggest that the ethnic factor is no longer used to interpret events in Africa. Rather, it is that other interpretations are increasingly coming to the fore, and there is a greater tendency to report atrocities in their situational contexts rather than as inherent in societal character. African conflicts that would have been covered as resulting primarily from deep-seated ethnic hatred are now framed in more universal terms of rivalry, with the ethnic dimension duly noted.

An aspect of the diminishing tribal fixation in the coverage of Africa is the subtle but significant supplanting of tribal by ethnic, as in ethnic conflict, ethnic rivalry, or ethnic cleavage. Although the word “tribe” has its origin in Roman history, ⁸² it has come to be used almost exclusively in reference to non-European peoples, especially Africans, and to connote the primitive. In contrast, the word “ethnic” is used universally to refer to both Western and non-Western peoples and with no pejorative connotations.

For this reason, although the reportage of African wars in terms of ethnic cleavages is still considered objectionable by some critics, the term “ethnic” is deemed an improvement over “tribe.” Soderlund and colleagues have noted that “Many scholars are uncomfortable with the ‘e’ word because it is thought to smack of racism reminiscent of colonial times and/or because it is regarded as a simplification that obscures complex social factors.” ⁸³ The contention here is that the use of the word “ethnic” rather than “tribe” or “tribal” suggests a movement from the “special vocabulary” ⁸⁴ in the coverage of African affairs. It is deemed to be a shift from the connotatively pejorative to the semantically neutral, thus suggesting a repositioning of Africa in terms of perceptual distance.

However, even as the Western press makes a transition from tribal to ethnic in reference to African peoples, there is an emerging curious usage of the term “ethnic.” For example, an Associated Press dispatch on October 3, 2007, covering former President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Darfur used the phrase “ethnic Africans” and its derivatives at least four times. That prompted Humphrey A. Regis, a communications scholar and ethno-cultural historian to ask rhetorically, “What is an ‘ethnic African?’” ⁸⁵ It appears that the usage is intended to distinguish between Negroid Sudanese from their Arab counterparts. Even then the identification of the former as “ethnic” in this context still conjures the notion of otherness, though not as strongly as would have the word “tribal.”

Nevertheless, the coverage of the three African conflicts analyzed here (Kenya’s, Sudan’s, and the Congo’s) suggests some transformations in focus and rhetorical orientation. In no case could the coverage be characterized as a tribal fixation, per se, relative to the coverage of, say, the Nigerian civil war of the mid-to-late 1960s and even the Rwanda genocide in 1992.

Kenya’s conflict was an electoral crisis, Darfur’s had dimensions of secession and ethnic cleansing, and Congo’s was a full-blown civil war that threatened to trigger a broader regional war in the subcontinent. All three conflicts entailed similar issues and actions that in past conflicts had engendered tribal fixation and framing in primordial terms. That the framing of these conflicts did not fixate on the primordial is suggestive of an emerging pattern in the coverage of Africa. For the most part, the accounts suggest an enhanced awareness that savagery and brutality are universally situational.

The universal nature of war atrocities is discussed by war historian Victor Davis Hanson in an article in the Wall Street Journal of May 30, 2013. ⁸⁶ The article, which is pegged on atrocities in Syria’s civil war, carries the headline, “Why Some Wars Are So Savage.” Hanson provides an overview of major war atrocities in history, drawing examples from Africa, Asia, and especially Europe. He identifies three major conditions that give rise to brutality.

The first is the duration of the conflict: The longer it lasts the higher the level of stress, frustration, and elevation of bitterness, which then manifests in atrocities. The second is conventionality or the lack thereof: The more conventional the war is, the more likely the combatants would be imbued with the conventions of warfare and, therefore, the less likely they are to commit atrocities. However, when there are various factions and undisciplined combatants, atrocities are more likely to become rampant and severe. The third condition is the expected repercussions in the event of victory or loss. When combatants expect the worst in the event of defeat or expect not to be held accountable in the event of victory, they are more likely to engage in atrocities. To varying degrees, these conditions apply to all three African conflicts analyzed in this monograph.

Background to Darfur

Only a most detailed history of the politics of Sudan and the Saharan region of Africa, in general, would provide the full context of the war in Darfur. What has to suffice here is a synoptic treatment against which the press coverage will be analyzed. As should be evident even from this contextual overview, the Darfur conflict exemplifies all three conditions outlined by Hanson ¹⁰² as likely to produce atrocities. The conflict has been protracted, largely unconventional, and there is a sense of impunity.

Like most political crises in developing countries, ¹⁰³ the Darfur conflict in Sudan has multiple origins and impetus. Primary among them is the vastness of the territory about the size of Spain (which makes governance difficult) and the fluidity of population movement (which inherently introduces social instability). In addition, there are the secondary factors of regional geopolitics, political mismanagement, economic pressures, and ethnocentric prejudice, all of which intensify contestations over scarce resources.

Directly and indirectly, M. W. Daly sums up the essence of most of these factors by noting that,

Other than the Sahara, there are no geographical barriers to migration into and out of Darfur. The effect has been constant movement of people impelled by events elsewhere to move into the territory or reacting to local changes by moving within or out of it. ¹⁰⁴

Thus, though the name Darfur (Dar Fur) means the homeland of the Fur, ¹⁰⁵ it readily became a place of multiple ethnicities, including nomadic Arabs.

Initially, the relationship was largely amicable and symbiotic. Natives typically extended hospitality to visiting nomads, including the provision of food. Nomads on departure would give gifts of camels. There was intermarriage among the various ethnic groups that included Darfur natives and Arab settlers. Darfur subsequently adopted Islam as the official religion and with it the Arabic language, which the people speak in addition to the Fur language. “Darfurians—like most Africans—were comfortable with multiple identities. Dar Fur was an African kingdom that embraced Arabs as valued equals.” ¹⁰⁶

Darfur’s fortunes began to change with the colonization, first by the Egyptians and then by the British of much of the territory that is now Sudan. The Darfur sultanate, which used to be “the most powerful state within the borders of modern-day Sudan,” ¹⁰⁷ became a peripheral and marginalized region. Naturally, dissatisfaction with the government in Khartoum grew and that ultimately resulted in the formation of rebel and insurgency groups, most notably the DLF. Subsequently, the DLF renamed itself the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) to reflect its broadened vision of working toward and collaborating with other Sudanese groups to pursue the goals of equity and empowerment.

SLA’s relations with the central government aside, Darfur experienced severe economic and political distress. Incessant droughts led to desertification of much of the territory. Arable land became in short supply and traditional sources of water dried up. This situation gave rise to inter-ethnic tensions as territoriality intensified. Grazing land was at a premium while nomadic cattle herders were considered unwelcomed and labeled a menace.

Meanwhile, the imperial ambition of Muammar Gaddafi, the president of Libya, Sudan’s northwestern neighbor, added to Darfur’s volatility. Gaddafi’s quest to establish a pan-Arab empire in North Africa included the sponsorship of rebellions against neighboring countries, most notably Chad, which shares a long border with western Sudan. For this purpose, Gaddafi recruited mercenary soldiers from neighboring African countries that included Darfurian Arabs. After the Chadian army routed the rebel forces, the Darfurian recruits returned to Darfur loaded with arms. These soldiers became the Janjaweed, notable for perpetrating much of the atrocities in Darfur. ¹⁰⁸

Added to this volatile mix was the emergence of Arab supremacist ideology. Though such notions had existed in northern Sudan for centuries, Flint and de Waal attribute their particularly acute expression in Darfur to Gaddafi’s quest for a pan-Arab union in North Africa. “The roots of the Arab supremacism in Darfur do not lie in the Arabized elite ruling class in Khartoum,” they wrote. “They lie in the politics of the Sahara.” ¹⁰⁹

However, the Sudanese government would exploit the growing ethno-ideological rift. Although the war between the Sudanese government and the DLF and then the Sudan Liberation Movement had festered for years, it took a decidedly horrific turn. Rebels carried out a lightning attack on a Sudanese garrison in which several Sudanese troops were killed, military jets and helicopters destroyed, equipment was absconded, and soldiers were captured, including the commanding officer. The success of the operation rattled the political and military establishment in Khartoum. After waiting for a negotiated release of the general, the Sudanese military went on full offensive against the insurgent group. However, the SLA beat back the government’s forces and demonstrated that their successful attack of the Sudanese military base was no fluke. ¹¹⁰

It should be noted at this point that government forces had similarly engaged in a protracted war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which was fighting to establish an independent country in southern Sudan. That conflict ended in 2011 with the establishment of the Republic of South Sudan. The Sudanese military was thoroughly demoralized. It was, therefore, an act of desperation that the government contracted with the Janjaweed to fight a proxy war against the Darfur’s rebel forces. ¹¹¹ Though the Sudanese government consistently denied it, the evidence became clear that it had equipped and coordinated attacks with the Janjaweed. ¹¹² In fact, at some point in the conflict, “The Janjaweed were upgraded to a full paramilitary fighting force, with communications equipment as well as plentiful new arm, artillery, and military advisors.” ¹¹³ As a shadowy group that was not a signatory to international conventions, the Janjaweed felt no inhibitions about engaging in atrocities.

The nature and scope of the casualties prompted assertions, among them by the then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, that the Janjaweed and their sponsors had committed genocide. Although a United Nations commission investigated the atrocities and reached the controversial conclusion that it did not constitute genocide, the commission nonetheless referred the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for probable prosecutions for crimes against humanity. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, other top officials of the government, and leaders of the Janjaweed were subsequently indicted by prosecutors and held liable for trial at the ICC. ¹¹⁴

Press Coverage

This monograph focuses primarily on 2004, the initial and most intense year of coverage. As Gerald Prunier notes, “Actually it was not until the spring of 2004, when the situation had degenerated into catastrophe, that the international community began to take serious notice.” ¹¹⁵ The serious notice and the related intense U.S. press coverage followed a United Nations declaration on May 4 that Darfur had become “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.” ¹¹⁶

The initial focus was on the atrocities being perpetuated by the Janjaweed, which rather than engaging Darfur’s rebels, targeted defenseless civilian populations in a concerted program of ethnic cleansing. The press highlighted the crudeness of the Janjaweed’s method of killing that included the hacking to death of defenseless people, including children. There was also much reporting on the challenge of getting funds for refugee camps, a major concern of the United Nations. ¹¹⁷

The Times’ first major coverage on January 17, 2004, carried the headline “War in Western Sudan Overshadows Peace in the South.” The 1,268-word story began with the lead, “As Africa’s longest-running civil war comes to a close in one corner of this vast country, a terrifying new theater, fueled by old ethnic divides and old-fashioned greed, opens here in another.” The phrase “old-fashioned greed” was evidently intended to draw attention to the economic dimension of the conflict. The Times detailed the influx of refugees into neighboring Chad, cited casualty figures, and narrated accounts by fleeing refugees:

The refugees described their attackers as Arab militias armed with grenades and machine guns, sometimes accompanied by soldiers in Sudanese military uniforms. They said their belongings were stolen, the men were killed or kidnapped, and the women were raped. There are reports of villages being burned and bombed by Sudanese military planes. ¹¹⁸

The Times quoted one of the refugees as saying that he heard the gunmen say, “You blacks, we’re going to exterminate you.” The story, which carried the dateline of Tine, Sudan, a border town with Chad, noted that “It is impossible to travel in Darfur to verify these claims.”

The AP relied considerably on United Nations officials’ accounts of the events, especially with regard to the refugee crisis. ¹¹⁹ On April 12, with a United Nations dateline, the AP detailed the UN’s plea for refugee relief funds: “The United Nations launched an appeal Monday for $115 million in humanitarian aid for the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan, where the UN humanitarian chief says a scorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing is taking place.”

The story ends with more specifics on the dimension of ethnic cleansing. The AP cited the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs as saying that it had received from its field staff “credible reports almost daily about widespread atrocities, grave violations of human rights, and forced depopulation of entire areas. The targets of the campaign are the region’s black African population, especially the Fur, Zaghawas, and Massalit ethnic communities.” ¹²⁰

As with the coverage of Kenya, the use of the phrase “ethnic communities” is notable as it is consistent with the language of reporting of such conflicts elsewhere. However—again as with Kenya—the word “tribe” and its derivatives were also used in reference to the Sudanese/Darfur people, though, unlike Kenya, there is no discernible pattern.

Notably, early in the coverage, the attackers were referred to as Arab militia, horsemen, or gunmen. It was not until about midway through 2004 that they were specifically referred as the Janjaweed, the natives’ name for the attackers. In a story on July 1, the AP began with a reference to the horsemen and then made a transition to the name the Janjaweed. The story focused on a visit by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan along with Sudanese and other UN officials to refugee camps. As the AP narrated it,

Sitting on mats shaded by trees, he chatted with camp elders and women who described the waves of attacks humanitarian workers have likened to ethnic cleansing. Human rights groups accuse the Sudanese government of backing militias of Arab herders, known as the Janjaweed, in a campaign to forcibly remove African farming communities from the vast western region where they have coexisted, and in some cases intermarried, for centuries. ¹²¹

The report of co-existence and intermarriage clearly placed the conflict in contemporary political, rather than primordial terms.

The story provided evidence of coordination between the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed: “First come the airplanes. Then the horsemen who burn, rape and kill.” The reporting was based on accounts from refugees in one of 137 camps, which sheltered about one million displaced persons. The lead paragraph above was derived specifically from the account of “a 20-year-old woman, who gave her name only as Zahara.” It read,

First the planes were flying over us and bombing us. Then the Janjaweed came. They started to shoot and burn. They took all our belongings. They took men and slit their throats with swords. The women they took as concubines. ¹²²

The themes of ethnic cleansing and genocide were intermingled in the coverage. The emphasis on genocide became pronounced after U.S. Secretary Colin Powell made a declaration in September 2004 that events in Darfur amounted to genocide. However, before that date, it was commonly reported, especially in the editorial components of the coverage.

In a column in The New York Times of March 27, 2004, for example, Nicholas Kristof compared the killings in Darfur with the Holocaust. The column that carries the headline

“Will we say ‘never again’ yet again?” begins:

For decades, whenever the topic of genocide has come up, the refrain has been, ‘‘Never again.’’ Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan’s Army is even bombing the survivors. ¹²³

On Tribal Fixation and Genocide

In covering the ethnic impetus of the conflict, both the AP and the Times reflected the dominant thrust of the conflict while also, at least on occasion, pointing out the multiple dimensions. The dominant thrust of the conflict was, of course, the atrocities inflicted on non-Arab peoples by the largely Arab militia. Still, both news entities also covered stories that indicated that the conflict was much broader.

For instance, in a 1,453-word story on July 18, 2004, which focused on the scope and intractability of the violence, the Times noted midway through the story that “The chaos began in early 2003 when two rebel groups initiated attacks on the government.” In the preceding paragraph, the newspaper also noted the multiple dimensions of the conflict: “The conflict is a complex one, part a clash between farmers and herders, partly a rebel insurgency and a military crackdown. In addition, the violence has involved Arab militias attacking black Africans.” ¹²⁴ The coverage focused on the Janjaweed’s attacks on non-Arab villages because those were the most consequential atrocities. It is improbable, therefore, that the nuanced and holistic rendition of the conflict had much of an impact on public perception.

Part of the problem is that despite the passages above that convey the multiple dimensions of the conflict, both the AP and the Times confused matters in some stories through oversimplification of the ethnic alignment. ¹²⁵ In a story about two months after the holistic rendition above, the Times chronicled the efforts of a coalition of black and Jewish organizations in the northeastern section of the United States that drew greater attention to the atrocities in Darfur. The story began with a roundup of various celebrity “crisis” news that had dominated the U.S. news media and contrasted that coverage with the effort of the group Westchester Organized Response for Darfur (WORD) to raise knowledge about Darfur. The story on November 28 included this summary of the conflict, “But after almost two years of intense conflict between nomadic Arab cattle herders and farming communities of African tribesmen, it has evolved into perhaps the world’s most glaring human rights crisis.” ¹²⁶

Such oversimplifications would tend to cancel out the effect of the more nuanced and holistic explanations. Moreover, the suggestion that the crises was just between “herders” and “tribesmen” renders the conflict a primitive hue. Yet the Darfur rebels and fighters that ultimately coalesced into the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) were led by people in various professions, including lawyers from urban centers.

The Times provided a less primordial summary of the conflict in a story on November 8, 2006. To stress the contemporary and essentially political nature of the conflict, the newspaper offered this capsule of the civil war:

It is easy to oversimplify Darfur. The broad outlines of the conflict are that non-Arab tribes felt excluded from Sudan’s Arab-led central government, and formed rebel groups to attack government forces. The government responded by arming Arab militias, who did not confront the rebels directly, but instead brutalized civilians who belonged to the same tribal groups as the rebels. ¹²⁷

Despite the use of the words tribe and tribal, this summary more accurately indicates that the conflict is much more than a bloody rivalry between Arab herders and African farming tribesmen.

The question of whether the atrocities rose to the level of genocide, despite the pronouncements of U.S. and UN officials, is one that received considerable and consistent coverage. A story in the Times on July 23, 2004, reflected differences in the debate with the headline, “In Darfur, Appalling Atrocity, but Is That Genocide?”

The story summarized the “appalling, gut-wrenching and vicious” atrocities and noted that, “An ethnic dimension to the attacks is undeniable.” Nevertheless, the story raised questions as to whether the atrocities and the ethnic pattern reached the threshold of genocide, a crime that by international convention required UN’s forcible intervention to stop. The Times summed up the complexity with:

Most of the victims in the conflict have been from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups, all black Africans. But not all Arabs have joined the Janjaweed militias, which are accused of carrying out most of the atrocities. The Beni Hussein, an Arab group, have not taken part in the violence, and the Dorok, another Arab group, have been attacked by the militias. The Tama, still another Arab group, have been found to be attackers and victims. ¹²⁸

In a dispatch on September 9, 2004, the AP quoted Jean-Charles Ellermann Kingombe, a spokesman for the European Union as critical of Powell for his pronouncement that the atrocities constituted genocide: “We have not discussed specifically the use of the word genocide. For us, we have noted that there is an extremely serious situation that still requires a huge humanitarian aid effort.” ¹²⁹

In an essay in the New York Times Magazine of July 18, 2004, James Traub argued that the atrocities in Darfur were not even comparable to those in another African conflict, Rwanda, about a decade earlier.

The comparison is not quite right: so far the Sudanese dead number in the thousands or tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands, and the mayhem appears not to have been designed to exterminate an entire class of victims. The right analogy for Sudan isn’t Rwanda; it’s Kosovo. ¹³⁰

Regardless of which comparison is more apt, it is notable for purposes of this study that both Traub’s and Kristof’s essays compared the events in Darfur with atrocities in the mid-to-late-twentieth-century Europe. Though Kristof’s preference for the term “tribe” and its derivatives might suggest a preference for a different vocabulary in the reporting of African affairs, his reference to the Holocaust robustly placed the events in the context of contemporary world history, more pertinently European history. Traub’s reference to Kosovo made the comparison all the more contemporary.

Both the AP and the Times also periodically reported on the history of inter-ethnic relations in the region and how that history was manifesting in the conflict. ¹³¹ However, the accounts usually steered from primordial interpretations. The recurrent theme was that the various ethnic groups in the region, both Arab and non-Arab, had co-existed for long. In its story on July 23, 2004, for instance, the Times noted that “In some cases, the Arabs have lighter skin than the black Africans. But years of intermarriage have blurred that distinction.” ¹³²

Although the relations between the two major groups were shown to be multifaceted, some reports made the case that the Arabs’ sense of racial superiority was a factor in the Janjaweed’s violence against Darfur’s black Africans, who are also Muslim. The Times’ story of July 23, 2004, reported that refugees said “they were subjected to ethnic taunts,” including being referred to as “abid,” Arabic for slave, and “zurug,” the connotatively derogatory term for black. ¹³³

This theme of Arab sense of ethnic superiority is also encapsulated in a story by the AP on July 1, 2004. The story began with an account of a Senegalese Muslim who had vacationed in a North African resort town. Among largely fellow Muslim and African vacationers, he felt at ease until a policeman yelled at him, “son of a slave.” The AP then linked that incident to the conflict in Darfur:

Along ancient Saharan trade routes, 1,300 years of shared history that have mingled the faiths, cultures and skin tones of Arabs and Africans has left another, more vicious legacy: Arab-African slavery that has endured as long as the two peoples have been together, leaving black Africans fighting perceptions of themselves as lesser beings, and of Arabs as the civilizing, conquering force. ¹³⁴

Today, the old roles are playing out at their most extreme in Sudan’s Darfur region, with murderous results: Arab horseman clutching AK-47s raze non-Arab African villages and drive off and kill the villagers, in what rights groups call an ethnic cleansing campaign backed by Sudan’s Arab-led government.

Tapering Coverage and Thematic Re-orientation

Coverage of the Darfur conflict began to taper off by the end of 2004 and fell sharply during 2005. It rose slightly in 2006, fell sharply again in 2007, and continued to fall until it became minuscule by 2012, though the conflict continued. With the tampering off of coverage also came further broadening of the thematic dimensions.

By the end of 2004, international pressures on Sudan, including the arrival of African Union peacekeeping troops, had begun to have the effect of reduced attacks by the Janjaweed. By that time inter-rebel warfare and attacks by rebel groups on humanitarian aid workers began to gain attention. Some of the rebels began to align with the government in Khartoum. Meanwhile, the Janjaweed started to splinter. As Julie Flint, the co-author of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, wrote in an essay in The New York Times of July 6, 2007, these shifts complicated the situation on the ground and suggested international rethinking concerned with the appropriate response to the conflict. ¹³⁵

Accordingly, the much-reduced coverage became distributed among those developments, continued attacks by the Janjaweed on refugee camps, and other areas. The spike in coverage in 2006, for example, reflected resurgence in militia attacks on refugee camps along with intra-rebel conflicts and continued diplomatic and peacekeeping issues that included efforts to resettle some refugees in their villages. These factors of the coverage continued to varying degrees after 2006 and yielded news stories that were ever more multidimensional.

A story in the Times of November 8, 2006, for example, carried the headline, “In a Calm Corner of Darfur, Villagers Rebuild Fragile Ties With Former Enemies.” As the headline suggested, it was an account of non-Arab refugees who returned to their communities and began to establish ties with their Arab neighbors. The story noted that before the crises broke out in 2003, the two groups had the equivalent of a symbiotic relationship. The non-Arab people were primarily farmers, and the Arabs were nomadic animal herders. As the Times narrated,

The nomads, who herded camels and cows, would bring meat, and the farmers would bring grain, and they would trade with one another in a fragile tapestry of interdependence between two peoples surviving off the same slice of dry, unforgiving land. ¹³⁶

That co-existence ended when Arab militia on horsebacks began attacking the non-Arabs, who recognized some of the attackers. The surviving non-Arabs had to flee to refugee camps. But on their return years after, the sense of community continued. The Times reported that “for the first time since then, Wastani’s farmers are moving back, and the nomads are trying to make amends.” The newspaper offered a touching narrative of an Arab neighbor bringing food to a returning refugee and both shedding tears. The paper quotes the refugee: “She said she was sorry, and was crying even more than I was.” ¹³⁷

While this narrative made clear that the atrocities in Darfur were not inherent in communal savagery, other stories recounted the continuing atrocities and the reluctance of some refugees to return to their homes. The reluctance stemmed not just from fear of the Janjaweed but also concern for tensions with other ethnic groups.

In a story on a tenuous truce, for example, the Times of January 2, 2010, quoted a farmer, Abbas Abdallah Mohamed, who had been a refugee for four years. Although he was “uncomfortable and depressed” in the refugee camp, he did not want to go back home. “‘If we go back, maybe there will be tribal war,’ he said, referring to one of the biggest problems today in Darfur, the fighting between different ethnic groups over shrinking grazing land.” ¹³⁸

The summation on the coverage of Darfur is that the decidedly ethnic dimension of the most pronounced aspects of the violence engendered a corresponding thrust in the coverage. Nevertheless, the overall coverage, especially during the later years of the conflict, reflected the multidimensional, contemporary, and political nature of what was essentially a civil war between parties of vastly unequal power and involved extreme atrocities.

Historical Overview

Although the first phase of Congo’s civil war began in 1996, in reality, the conflict dates back to the early 1960s, when Congo became independent from Belgium. First, the northeastern province of Katanga declared independence almost immediately after Congo became independent in 1960. Subsequently, a power struggle between President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba resulted in the latter’s abduction and execution in what is widely believed to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)–assisted operation. ¹⁴⁸

Amid the political chaos, General Joseph Mobutu (whose soldiers effected the arrest and execution of Lumumba and who later renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko) overthrew Kasavubu and installed himself president. He imposed despotic rule on Congo (which he renamed Zaire) for the next thirty-two years until he was deposed by an insurgency in 1997. Although the civil war that led to Mobutu’s ouster constitutes what is labeled the first phase of Congo’s conflict, there had been internecine insurgencies, which Mobutu routinely put down often with the aid of the CIA and Belgian or French troops. ¹⁴⁹

Although the rebel army that sacked Mobutu’s government was inclusive of various ethnic groups, it was dominated by ethnic groups (especially the Tutsi) from the Katanga province in eastern Congo. This fact proved to be the most destabilizing factor in the post-Mobutu Congo. ¹⁵⁰ The Tutsi, natives of Rwanda, had a sizable population and had been a major political force in neighboring eastern Congo because of pre- and post-independence migration. Though a majority of them had long naturalized in Congo, many native ethnic groups lumped them all together and considered them non-natives.

The resulting tension was exacerbated in 1994 when Rwanda’s Hutu majority carried out a pogrom against the Tutsi minority. The pogrom was ignited after Tutsi rebels under the command of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s current president, shot down an aircraft carrying then President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and killed him. French investigators have since blamed Kagame for the crime and charged nine of his officials. ¹⁵¹ The Tutsi-dominated rebels promptly mounted an assault that soon ousted the Hutu-dominated government in Rwanda. A sizable number of the Hutu, men, in particular, escaped to eastern Congo, making it all the more volatile. ¹⁵² Moreover, they formed militia groups who mounted internecine attacks on the newly formed Rwandan government.

With the Tutsi effectively in charge in Rwanda, the Congolese Tutsi became empowered. Paul Kagame, who was trained and assisted by the Ugandan military, was also emboldened by his success in taking over power in Rwanda. It was the alliance of the Rwandan and Ugandan governments with the eastern Congolese rebels that made the latter potent enough to overthrow the weakened government of a dying Mobutu. In fact, for a variety of reasons, a number of other African countries in the region including Angola had also joined in the effort to oust the Mobutu administration. ¹⁵³

After Mobutu’s overthrow, the leader of the rebel forces, Laurent Kabila became Congo’s second president since 1965. However, Kabila’s success was due largely to the sponsorship of Kagame’s government in Rwanda, which had its own interests for seeking a change of government in Congo. First, Kagame aimed to empower his fellow ethnic Tutsi in Congo. Second, by installing a friendly, perhaps subservient government in Congo, he sought to ensure that Hutu soldiers who fled from Rwanda after the pogrom would not have a stronghold in Congo. Such a situation facilitated reprisals by Kagame’s government against the Hutu soldiers and also diminished their capability for guerilla insurgency against his government. ¹⁵⁴

Meanwhile, having in effect been installed by another government, Laurent Kabila struggled to gain legitimacy with the Congolese people who required a measure of independence from the Rwandan government. He therefore ordered all foreign troops to leave Congo, an order that the Kagame administration saw as particularly antagonistic to Rwanda and the Tutsi. ¹⁵⁵

In what became the second phase of the civil war (1998–2003), Rwanda and its allies, Uganda and Burundi, attempted to overthrow the government they had just helped to install in Kinshasa. This time, however, other regional powers, especially Zimbabwe and Angola, were disquieted by what appeared to be Rwanda’s quest for regional hegemony. They then heeded appeals from the Kabila government and sent in their troops to halt the advance of the Rwanda–Uganda–Burundi alliance. ¹⁵⁶

It was during this period that Laurent Kabila was assassinated by a bodyguard in 2001. His son, Joseph Kabila, succeeded him and quickly began a campaign for peace. Following a stalemate, a peace accord was signed in 2003 by which foreign forces were to withdraw from Congo and the Tutsi rebels would merge with the Congolese soldiers to form a national army. ¹⁵⁷

However, the arrangement was tenuous as mutual suspicion persisted. In 2008, Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda formally decamped from the national army to re-form his rebel forces in eastern Congo and begin another march on Kinshasa in what became the third phase of the conflict (2008–2009). This phase of the war witnessed some of the highest levels of casualties and atrocities, as resentment, frustration, and troop disorderliness grew. ¹⁵⁸

The phase ended when Congo and Rwanda reached an accord in 2009 to collaborate to eliminate the rebel forces that attacked each other. A large contingent of UN peacekeeping forces was also deployed, which brought a measure of peace to the region. The Rwandan government also arrested the Tutsi rebel leader, General Nkunda. ¹⁵⁹

However, as was evident from the Tutsi’s M23 insurgency of summer 2012, eastern Congo remained a place in crisis. Much like Nkunda’s rebellion in 2008, the M23 rebels were largely Tutsi deserters from the Congolese army who claimed that the government of Joseph Kabila reneged on its promises to the Tutsi. What follows is an analysis of the extent that press coverage of the conflict reflected this complexity, multiple dimensions, and impetus.

Between Reality and the Pejorative

While it was nearly impossible for news stories to fully or consistently reflect the complex realities of the conflict, the coverage of Congo’s civil war cannot be characterized as stereotypical. The major topics of news coverage were battlefront developments, casualties and atrocities, peace initiatives and peacekeeping efforts, and the various factors that gave rise to the conflict and hindered its resolution. Taken as a whole, what emerged was a holistic picture of the events. Despite the tragic events of the war and specific emotive reportage that dramatized them, one cannot make a generalized case of pejorative framing in the coverage.

As already noted, Congo’s protracted conflict exacted a considerable toll in human life and suffering. Both The New York Times and the Associated Press conveyed the specific incidents with data from local and international agencies, hospital sources, and aid workers. The reports tended to stress casualties resulting from atrocities rather than from battles. Most reports implicated the rebels. For the most part, the accounts suggested the awareness that savagery and brutality were universally situational.

In its November 7, 2008, edition, for example, The New York Times carried a Reuters dispatch with the lead sentence, “Congolese Tutsi rebels went from door to door overnight killing people in Kiwanja, residents said Thursday.” The lead was followed with a denial by rebel commanders who claimed they killed only pro-government fighters. ¹⁶⁰

The AP’s dispatch the same day conveyed much the same facts but further muddled the picture regarding culpability:

Villagers who fled fighting in this rebel-held town trickled home Thursday to find the bodies of more than a dozen men in civilian clothes in and around mud huts and accused rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s forces of the slayings. But New York-based Human Rights Watch accused a pro-government militia called the Mai Mai as well as the rebels of deliberately killing civilians in Kiwanja and said U.N. peacekeepers nearby had been unable to protect them. ¹⁶¹

Some of the rebel atrocities were by the Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which had bases in northeastern Congo. On December 30, 2008, the Associated Press distributed a story with the lead sentence, “Ugandan rebels have killed more than 400 people in northeastern Congo since Christmas, an aid agency said Tuesday.” The AP attributed the account to the Catholic charity Caritas. ¹⁶²

The Congolese army was also blamed for some atrocities. In a dispatch on November 25, 2008, the AP covered a report by Human Rights Watch that 500 of Congo’s opposition members had been killed at the directive of President Joseph Kabila. Human Rights Watch said its report was based on 23 months of fieldwork that included interviews of more than 250 people affected, as well as members of the president’s inner circle. According to the AP, the Kabila administration characterized the Human Rights Watch’s report as nonsense. ¹⁶³

Earlier in the year, on January 8, the AP also reported (a story also run by the Times) that opposition members, including captured and surrendering rebel soldiers, were summarily executed. A government spokesman declined to respond to press inquiries, saying only that such matters were not appropriate for discussion through the press. There were also reports of the discovery of mass graves. On May 23, 2008, the AP reported that three mass graves that contained about 100 persons were discovered by a South African patrol in eastern Congo. The story indicated that the graves did not appear to be recent and the origins of the bodies could not be determined. The AP added, “Nearly 4 million people are believed to have died in Congo’s 1998-2002 war, and mass graves have been found dotted throughout the country, which is the size of western Europe.” ¹⁶⁴

For the most parts, the Times’ and AP’s accounts of the atrocities could be summarized as straight reports. There were a few exceptions, however. Occasionally, the Times and the AP would cover what journalists call the “human interest story,” which essentially is a genre that goes beyond the facts and statistics to delve into emotional dimensions.

On November 4, 2008, for example, the AP distributed a 1,160-word feature story with the headline, “Faces of war: Wounded children in Congo hospital.” It began, “The bullet pierced 5-year-old Naomi Harerimanea’s back and chest, just missing her heart, but on Monday she managed to smile.” As is typical of such stories, it affectively portrayed the casualties while also conveying the ascendant capacity of the human spirit. ¹⁶⁵

Few human-interest stories concentrated on the macabre or suggested inherent African barbarism. One of the few such examples was a ghoulish account by the AP (November 13, 2008) of the use of bodies by Tutsi rebels as roadblocks. The in-depth story began:

The road that leads into rebel-controlled Congo begins with a makeshift roadblock made from the corpses of two government soldiers strewn across the dark volcanic earth. The pair on Wednesday blocked the main two-lane track running north from the regional capital, Goma, one with a bullet in his forehead and a frozen fist grasping the air above. The scene was meant as a warning to government troops just a few hundred yards down the road whom the rebels had battled the night before. And for the few fearful civilians trickling past the frontline, it was clear message that Congo’s savage war is not easing amid fears it could draw in Angola and others in the region. ¹⁶⁶

Given that much of the 1,017-word news story was about the broader issues of the war, that included its growing internationalization and the plight of refugees, the choice of the lead was clearly intended to accentuate the macabre. It readily conformed to the thematic format of the traveler’s tale. ¹⁶⁷

The topic about which the emotional dimension was—perhaps inherently—played up was that of rape. As an atrocity of war, rape is often a fixture in the coverage of African conflicts ¹⁶⁸ and it got considerable attention in the coverage of Congo’s civil war. A CBS’s “60 Minutes” segment on February 21, 2009, for example, had the title and subtitle, respectively: “War Against Women. The Use of Rape as a Weapon in Congo’s Civil War.” The segment detailed heart-rending accounts by victims and aid workers. ¹⁶⁹

Similarly, in an article in The New York Times, the same Sunday titled “The Invisible War” columnist Bob Herbert quotes a colleague’s report, “Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.” ¹⁷⁰ Fellow Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, who wrote with considerable passion, also touched on the atrocity of rape, among other issues of the crisis, in a column on January 31, 2010:

Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.

Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.

That’s why I’m here in the lovely, lush and threatening hills west of Lake Kivu, where militias rape, mutilate and kill civilians with a savagery that is almost incomprehensible. ¹⁷¹

The tenor of these comments harken back to those of the coverage of previous African conflicts, including the Nigerian civil war. ¹⁷² The phrases “brutality,” “barbaric,” “savagery that is almost incomprehensible” all seem reminiscent of past coverage. However, a review of the totality of coverage suggests a different conclusion.

In the past, such phrases were used to convey the primordial, but in the context of these columns and the overall news coverage, they convey an indictment of the incidents and perpetrators rather than cast aspersion on the people. Herbert was careful, for example, to place the atrocities in the context of the “twisted standards of a place riven by civil war and haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.” Seen in this context, the atrocities cannot be seen as any more inherent in African nature than did atrocities of World Wars I and II reflect European proclivities.

In fact, stories about atrocities by non-African UN peacekeepers also served to broadly locate the propensity for such crimes. On September 11, 2008, for example, the AP reported on the conviction in Paris of a French national for raping about twenty Congolese females ages twelve to eighteen between 1998 and 2004. The AP put this incident in an even broader context:

Abuse allegations have dogged U.N. peacekeeping missions since their inception more than 50 years ago, but the issue was put into the spotlight after the world body found in 2005 that peacekeepers in Congo had had sex with Congolese women and girls often in exchange for food or a little money.

Such reportage again avoided the Africanization of war atrocities. ¹⁷³

Contemporary or Primordial?

Although the question of primordial framing of Congo’s conflict was addressed at various points, it is helpful to give it a more focused treatment. Soderlund and colleagues wrote that although Congo’s civil war may have an ethnic coloration, in reality, the challenges “revolve around issues of land, citizenship, resources, access to status and power, and indigenousness.” ¹⁷⁴ Both the Times and the AP reflected all of these dimensions in their coverage.

The Times, in particular, consistently put the bitterness of the civil war in a contemporary context. A story on January 10, 2008, for instance, cited the regional dimensions summarized earlier in this monograph. The headline “Fighting in Congo Rekindles Ethnic Hatreds” might seem to be another primordial interpretation of African affairs, but it actually analyzes the contemporary dimensions of the bitter conflict, especially the complications from neighboring Rwanda:

Now a new wave of anti-Tutsi sentiment is sweeping Congo, driven by deep anger over the renegade Tutsi general. Many see his rebellion as a proxy for Rwanda, to the east, whose army occupied vast parts of Congo during the most devastating chapter of the regional war and plundered millions of dollars’ worth of minerals from the country, according to many analysts, diplomats and human rights workers.

The current battle is in many ways a throwback to the earliest and most difficult questions at the heart of the Congo war, and also a reflection of longstanding hostilities toward Tutsi, who are widely viewed here as being more Rwandan than Congolese. ¹⁷⁵

Similarly, in a news story on March 4, 2009, the Times took pains to note that eastern Congo had been a peaceful tourist haven because of its wild life preserves, which included some of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas. “But in 1994, all that changed. More than a million refugees from Rwanda’s genocide poured into eastern Congo, which promptly exploded from many of the same tensions over ethnicity and land that tore Rwanda apart.” ¹⁷⁶

Before then, the paper’s editorial on November 13, 2008, began with the statement, “The legacy of Rwanda lives on in eastern Congo, where ethnic tensions fueled by the 1994 genocide are creating new horrors.” ¹⁷⁷ The editorial addressed a new round of fighting that erupted between government forces and those of Laurent Nkunda, the Congolese Tutsi general who was backed by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. The editorial noted that Nkunda’s campaign was more about a political ambition than ethnic passion:

Mr. Nkunda claims that he is fighting to protect Congolese Tutsis from those Hutu militants. We suspect his ambitions go far beyond that. He is either hoping to overthrow the weak, elected government of the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, or at least win control of the eastern region.

In a column distributed to the press later that month, Jon Elliott, of Human Rights Watch, also stressed the political motivations when he wrote that “local militia leaders cynically use ethnicity as a cloak for their own political agendas.” ¹⁷⁸

The regional geopolitical dimension of the conflict got considerable coverage. The Times’ editorial of November 13, 2008, noted, for example, that Rwandan had invaded eastern Congo twice. Those invasions and the Rwandan government’s support of General Nkunda’s rebellion in Congo risked a broader regional war, the editorial stressed. Indeed, at some point in the conflict, at least six African armies became involved, with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi fighting for the Tutsi rebels and Angola and Zimbabwe fighting on behalf of the Congolese government. ¹⁷⁹

Besides heeding Laurent Kabila’s plea for help, Angola and Zimbabwe (along with many other countries in the region) were also concerned that Rwanda’s control of Congo would give the tiny country an outsized leverage in the region. The Times, however, added in its March 4, 2009, issue that “The Congolese war dragged in a half-dozen other African countries, eager to settle their own scores and cart off Congo’s tin, timber, diamonds and gold.” The story reported that Rwanda similarly carted away Congo’s natural resources during its invasions in 1996 and 1998, attributing the information to human rights organizations. ¹⁸⁰

The geopolitical nature of the conflict became particularly notable in news reports when the governments of Congo and Rwanda reached an agreement that would undercut the rebel movements that, respectively, warred against their governments. The first major manifestation of the agreement was the arrest in January 2009 of General Nkunda by Rwanda, his former ally. Unaware of the broader agreement, this arrest took the press by surprise, though its implication was not missed. The Times on January 27, 2009, editorialized as follows soon after the arrest:

After helping to fuel the horrific war in eastern Congo, Rwanda has created a potential opening for ending the conflict by arresting Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the rebel leader who once seemed untouchable. It is a surprising and positive move. But it is only a start . . .

Mr. Nkunda, whose troops have been accused of massacres as far back as 2002, was arrested on Thursday. It was a stunning turnabout since he had long been supported by Rwanda, which twice invaded Congo in pursuit of Hutu rebels who fled there after taking part in the 1994 genocide. We hope his arrest means an end to the proxy war between Rwanda and Congo. ¹⁸¹

As the Times predicted, the arrest did, indeed, mark the beginning of the winding down of the third phase of the conflict. The armies of both Congo and Rwanda soon began joint operations in pursuit of the respective rebels that warred against their governments. Had the press fixated on the ethnic dimensions of the conflict rather than the political or geopolitical, this development would have confounded the narrative, much as did the fraternal ending of the Nigerian civil war in 1970. ¹⁸²

A notable aspect of the semantics of the coverage of Congo’s crisis was the almost exclusive use of the word “ethnic” or “people,” rather than “tribes” or its derivatives in reference to Congo’s various peoples in the stories examined. In the coverage of the Kenyan and Sudanese/Darfurean conflicts, the term “tribe” and its derivatives were used much less frequently or exclusively as in the coverage of previous African conflicts. Its minimal use in the coverage of Congo’s civil war is a finding for which there is no ready explanation because the focus year of this analysis is the same as that of Kenya’s crisis, 2008.

Peripheral and Diminutive Africa

Despite the Times’ summation, at least two patterns of coverage suggest that Africa’s perceptual remoteness has not ended. The first is the continued perceptual marginalization and diminution of Africa, that is, the related portrayal of Africa as peripheral to the global community and as a geo-cultural nugget. The second—and much more prevalent pattern—is the continuation of the news frame and rhetoric of quaintness and cultural remoteness.

The perceptual marginalization is most evident in the minimal coverage of certain tragedies in Africa as contrasted with coverage of similar tragedies elsewhere in the world. It illustrates J. C. Adams’ findings that the U.S. press implicitly assigns a wide range of values to lives, depending on the region or country. African lives are the least valued. ¹⁸⁵ For example, a plane crash that killed twenty-five people in Nigeria in June 2011 only merited a news brief on Page 4A of the Birmingham News (June 27, 2011). Had the same accident occurred in Europe or similarly elite countries such as Canada, Israel, or Japan, it would have been a major front-page story, with several feature follow-ups. ¹⁸⁶

The diminution of Africa in press coverage is similarly related to perceptual marginalization. It is significant because the capacity to distinguish among parts of a whole is one indication of relational proximity. Although the coverage of incidents and crises always draws attention to particular countries, it has not managed to erase the perception of Africa as one cultural nugget. Said has noted the problem of such diminution with regard to the perception of Islam. Although the usage seems simple, in reality it

is part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory principally in Africa and Asia, its dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, cultures. ¹⁸⁷

In news stories, the diminution of Africa is most commonly manifest in lists of places. It remains quite common, for example, for news stories to summarize a person’s international experience by reporting something like this: he has lived in France, Russia, Japan, and Africa. In effect, Africa is perceptually a country much like the other three listed before it.

A staff-written news story in the Birmingham (USA) News of March 4, 2011, provided a pointed illustration of diminution. The headline, which was drawn from the story’s lead paragraph, states, “CME Bishop Wallace Lockett, 65, dies on Africa-Europe flight.” While the headline does, indeed, place Africa as a conceptual equivalent of Europe, the story itself does not. Details of the origin and destination of the flight appear in the seventh paragraph of the eleven-paragraph story: “The precise time and cause of death [were] not immediately available. French [an acquaintance of the deceased commenting on the tragedy] said that Lockett was on a flight to Amsterdam from Africa.” The interviewee and reporter specified the bishop’s city of destination in Europe but not the country, let alone the city of origin of the flight in Africa. Perceptually then, to the interviewee and the reporter, Africa is the geographic equivalent of a European city. ¹⁸⁸

Such perceptual distortion of Africa endures even though news stories periodically provide countervailing information. In the coverage of Congo’s civil war and the Darfur crises in Sudan, for instance, both the AP and the Times periodically compared the African countries to Europe or the African countries’ regions to European or Asian countries.

In a dispatch on April 25, 2008, for instance, the AP referred to Congo as “the Europe-sized nation.” The AP modified the comparison about a month later, May 23, by referring to Congo as a country “the size of western Europe.” As to the Darfur region in Sudan, the AP referred to it in a story on July 4, 2004, as “the vast western region, the size of Iraq.” Apparently, such references and related facts are ineffective in countering the perceptual diminution of the continent as a whole.

Otherness as Reportorial Requisite

Otherness is particularly evident in the portrayal of Africa as a place that is removed from modernity. On May 21, 2009, for example, The New York Times—a paper that is reputed for its relatively substantive coverage of all parts of the world, including Africa—devoted a 1,160-word article to covering Gambian President Yahya Jammeh’s obsession with witchcraft. According to the story, Jammeh had several villagers rounded up and forced to drink a portion that caused various erratic behaviors and some deaths in an attempt to “root out witches, evil sorcerers who were harming the country.” The story does not indicate the number of deaths, which would suggest that it was assumed to be few.

At one level, the primordial image of Africa evoked in this story may be said to reflect the mirror theory. After all, there is little doubt the event reported happened. However, that the story was given as much prominence in the coverage, given the much more substantive events in Africa, would suggest that the framing of Africa’s otherness as a negation of Western identity. ¹⁸⁹

The negation is pointedly expressed in a travel piece on Gambia in The New York Times on March 16, 2014. Contrasting Gambia’s modern tourist facilities with its rural life, Judith Dobrzynski wrote, “White-sand beaches on its Atlantic coastline are a favorite of Northern European vacationers. . . . And with such a light tourism infrastructure upriver . . . visitors can get close to the real Africa, the Gambian people and their way of life.” ¹⁹⁰ It is the equivalent of writing that real America is to be found in rural Mississippi, not Miami Beach.

Such framing was also manifest in what was otherwise a human-interest story The New York Times published that related to Kenya’s political crises of 2007–2008. As discussed earlier, the overall coverage was not unduly fixated on the ethnic and primordial tendencies, but even then, the dimension of otherness was evident. The story in the Times of May 13, 2008, was on the impact of the violence on Kenyan athletes’ preparations for the Beijing Olympics. The accompanying photo of Luke Kibet, the world champion marathoner, showed him jogging past a herd of cows. Also framed in the background was a ramshackle structure that may have been an abandoned house or a farm-storage building. ¹⁹¹

The photograph is almost a replica of one that the Times used about twelve years earlier on March 4, 1996, in a similarly themed story about another African athlete. The context then was Ethiopia’s economic difficulty and its impact on its athletes. The focus was on another world champion distance runner, Haile Gebrselassie. In the photograph that accompanied the story, Gebrselassie jogged over crumpled soil with cows grazing behind. ¹⁹² The thematic exactness twelve years apart strongly suggests the resilience of the socialized orientation that Payne describes, ¹⁹³ especially given that the photo credits go to different persons.

The photographs suggest that beyond wars, in which the unsavory is inherent, Western journalists still go to great lengths to ensure that news about Africa retains the elements of the quaint. Given that jogging is not a sudden act, one has to deduce that the photojournalists took pains to capture the particular backgrounds that would be most consistent with Africa’s enduring stereotypes and otherness. It illustrates how, as Robert Danton contends, reporters bring more to events than they take from it. ¹⁹⁴

This deduction is supported by research evidence of predetermined selectivity in photojournalism. In their study of photographs published by three major U.S. newspapers on the Persian Gulf War, for example, Michael Griffin and Jongsoo Lee probed the question of whether the coverage was “characterized more by candid, on-the-scene, visual reporting of events, or by pre-existing, staged, or symbolic representations” and they find that the latter was the case. ¹⁹⁵

Textual narratives similarly continue to reinforce the frame of otherness. In a pre-election news story before the Kenyan crisis, for example, The New York Times of December 25, 2007, zeroed in on Kibera, an urban slum near Nairobi, as a probable pivotal locale in the election. The lead paragraphs included the descriptions of Kibera as a slum “with one million people squeezed into a warren of rusted roof shacks, linked by muddy footpaths and streams of greenish-grayish sewage trickling alongside.” The newspaper added further that “Half-naked children play in 10-foot-high piles of garbage. Drunken men stumble down the dirt boulevards, begging for work.” ¹⁹⁶

The Times had ample opportunities to paint a contrasting portrait of downtown Nairobi and other similar pristine locales. But in a reference to the city center, the newspaper of December 31, 2007, wrote only that “The only figures in downtown Nairobi, the capital, which is usually choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Oily black clouds of smoke rose from the slums, smudging out the sun.” ¹⁹⁷

Similarly, in a story on January 4, 2008, the Times covered an environment that was in sharp contrast to the slum of Kibera but again the description was terse and superficial. Covering the spreading electoral violence, the newspaper wrote, “The trouble even spilled into the garden of the Serena Hotel, one of the fanciest in town. Guests in safari vests watched the turmoil from the balconies of their $400-a-night rooms.” ¹⁹⁸ This superficial description contrasts considerably with the picture-through-words painted of the Kibera slum.

In some cases, the photographs that accompany stories do not quite bear out the textual portrayal of otherness. When Congo’s M23 rebels reached the outskirts of the provincial capital of Goma in 2012, for example, the AP on November 19 offered this description, “As tanks rumbled by, civilians including young children could be seen running to safety, seeking shelter in huts and behind ledges along the road where the two sides were battling.” The accompanying photograph matched the description, except that there was nothing in the picture that could be deemed a hut, a term that connotes the primitive. ¹⁹⁹

The images of the neighborhood showed a wide but unpaved road and electrical poles and wires with a speeding motorcycle. Although by no means pristine, the buildings were contemporary in size and structure and seemed typical of the homes of Africa’s impoverished semi-urban residents. Some of the buildings seem to be made of cement blocks and others of wood. The AP’s report of persons “seeking shelter in huts” suggests adherence to a thematic norm.

News stories about African elections also tend to stress elements of otherness, as the reporters (much like the photojournalists who take pictures of athletes) seem to go to great lengths to convey elements of the quaint and substandard. While Western journalists enthusiastically cover African elections, as is consistent with the spirit of political globalization, they still take pains to stress Africa’s negation of the West. For example, when Zimbabwe conducted parliamentary elections in 2005, National Public Radio took pains to report that some polling stations had to be closed early to keep voters from being attacked by wild animals. Similarly, photographs and videos of polling stations are invariably of rural areas or areas that seem rural, but rarely of Africa’s modern skylines. ²⁰⁰

The theme of otherness is manifest even in the coverage of sports. On June 8, 2010, just days before the first World Cup held in Africa, the Cable News Network (CNN) carried a feature story on the lowly origins of West Africa’s growing prominence in international soccer. Thematically, it was an overtly heart-warming story about overcoming odds. However, the substance of the narrative was selected to conform to the image of Africa as a place of deprivation. The storyline was that African youth reach the levels of international competitiveness without so much as grass playing fields. The narrative and accompanying video concentrated on Nigerian youth playing soccer on a sand pitch in Lagos.

Nevertheless, given that grass fields are not among the things of which there is a dearth in African countries, this illustration of African youth’s deprivation is tenuous and reflects conformity to thematic structures. The congested urban center of Lagos is hardly the appropriate locale for illustrating the availability or absence of soccer fields for African youth. In Lagos and in other African metropolises, there are grass soccer fields. Moreover, African institutions, from elementary schools to colleges and universities, typically have lustrously green soccer fields where Africa’s aspiring soccer stars hone their skills. The story reflects the double-edged implications of Western anti-colonial literature and journalism that Spurr, Said, and Davidson have noted. ²⁰¹

Aspects of the Associated Press’s coverage of Africa’s participation in the World Cups of 2006 and 2010 also provide some insights on the resilience of otherness. In a preview of a match between Ghana and the United States in the early rounds of the 2006 tournament, the AP wrote that “as Ghana proved against the Czechs, defeating the scrappy African team is no easy task.” ²⁰² The term “scrappy” suggests a substandard status but an admirable effort. Although not nearly of the same deprecatory intensity, the phrase thematically evokes Henry M. Stanley’s characterization of Africans in his chronicles of his nineteenth-century expeditions in Africa. In one instance, for example, Stanley referred to his African boat-boys’ singing as their “barbarous and exhilarating chorus.” ²⁰³

Of course, the phrase “scrappy” is in common use by U.S. journalists. What makes it significant in this context is that without the particular professional socialization, the reporter would have found it inapplicable to the Ghanaian team. As the story indicated, Ghana had just beaten an excellent Czech team by a resounding score of 2-0. It is improbable that any team would have beaten another by that margin at that level of competition just by being scrappy. In any case, the Ghanaians demonstrated their elite status by beating the United States in the subsequent match by the closer margin of 2-1.

In its coverage of that match on June 22, the Associated Press dropped the qualifier “scrappy” in characterizing the Ghanaians but described them instead as “an opportunistic team that was stronger and faster.” ²⁰⁴ Ghana went on lose to Brazil in the subsequent matchup. However, the Brazilians’ coach conceded in broadcast interviews that the Ghanaians outplayed his team in Brazil’s trademark “beautiful football.” In other words, rather than being scrappy, the Ghanaians were playing at a high level of artistry.

As fate would have it, Ghana and the United States were to play again in the following World Cup in 2010. Again the Ghanaians prevailed 2-1. In a story on June 28, assessing the future of the U.S. team, the Associated Press wrote that Ghana’s victory caused “a sudden realization [that] the most talented soccer team in American history still wasn’t good enough to consistently compete with the world’s best.” Thus, in four years the Ghanaian team had advanced from being “the scrappy African team” to becoming one of “the world’s best.” Apparently, it took successive victories over the United States for the Ghanaian team to overcome the perception that it was inherently substandard. ²⁰⁵