Forgotten Newsmakers Postcolonial Chronicles of Stringers and Local Journalists in Central Africa

Forgotten Newsmakers Postcolonial chronicles of stringers and local journalists in Central Africa Anjan Sundaram Critical essay PhD by Publication The University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing March 2017 Word count: 22,488 words This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 Contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 3 2. The origins of the three books and the challenges of telling ignored stories from Central Africa ....... 5 3. Postcolonial theory and writing back to exclusion ............................................................................. 10 4. The political economy of journalism in Africa .................................................................................... 19 5. Chronicling the lives of stringers and local journalists........................................................................ 35 6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 60 7. Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 61 8. Appendix 1: Critical responses to the three books ............................................................................. 73 9. Appendix 2: Suggested extracts from the three books ...................................................................... 78 2 1. Introduction This thesis is principally concerned with three books of reportage, Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo (2014), Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship (2016), and the shorter e-book, The Road Through War: Anarchy and Rebellion in the Central African Republic (2016). The thesis also draws on several journalistic articles, magazine pieces, blog posts and essays. The books and articles were written between 2005 and 2015, a period during which I lived primarily in Central Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Stringer is an account of my time, from 2005 to 2006, working as a stringer for The Associated Press in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Stringers are freelance journalists who are paid by the word or article and who receive few other benefits from the media organizations publishing their work. Bad News describes the demise of the free press and the rise of dictatorship in Rwanda, as told through the stories of Rwandan journalists I taught during my five years living there, from 2009 to 2013. The Road Through War is a piece of reportage relating a part of a journey I undertook as a freelance reporter, covering the war in the Central African Republic (CAR) just before genocidal killings began in 2013. The three books are set in Central Africa, covering events of great significance that affect the lives of millions of people but that have received relatively scant attention in the news media. The books are both an investigation into the nature of those events and chronicles of the experiences of the journalists who report on them. I will consider the news contribution I have made in reporting and uncovering those events. However, my approach in this critical analysis also reflects my assertion that my three books make an important contribution to knowledge and literature about journalists. The purpose of this thesis is to situate my books within a broader intellectual framework that provides the context to describe my contribution to knowledge. To this end, I first examine why 3 certain places and peoples are underreported by the global news production system, and the historical context for this exclusion. I then examine the informational voids that currently exist in news production and literature of journalism about these places and actors. Finally, I reflect on my books’ contribution to filling this void and assess the insights that the books provide. This thesis is structured in five parts. In Section 2, I explain why I felt there was a need to write the books and the challenges of publishing them. In Section 3, I propose postcolonial theory as an intellectual framework for my books, to understand the historical context for the exclusion of certain places and people in literature about journalism in Africa. In Section 4, I explore how these ideas from postcolonialism play out in global news production and literature about journalism in Africa, examining the persistence of colonial narratives on Africa and the exclusion of the perspectives of stringers and local journalists who work on the lowest rungs of the news production system. In Section 5, I reflect on my contribution in writing back to those exclusions, relative to my peers, by chronicling the lives of stringers and local journalists working in Africa. I also reflect on my limitations. In the appendix, I assess my contribution’s effectiveness in light of the critical reception to my books from a diverse range of independent readers and institutions. 4 2. The origins of the three books and the challenges of telling ignored stories from Central Africa My interest in the Democratic Republic of Congo was sparked by a news article I read as a student in my final year at Yale University in 2005. I remember the article being about killings in the Ituri region in the east of Congo. It was not the headline that I found particularly arresting, but rather a few lines near the bottom of the article – they summarised the conflict in Congo in terms very similar to this description in an Associated Press report about Ituri from that period, in January 2005, by the AP reporter Bryan Mealer: Since 1999, fighting in Ituri has killed more than 50,000 and forced 500,000 to flee their homes, U.N. officials and human rights groups say. The Ituri conflict was part of a larger, five-year, six- nation war in Congo that killed nearly 4 million people, mostly through starvation and disease. (2005) This entire news article is a mere 288 words in length, though it described events so large – the killing of millions of people and displacement of hundreds of thousands more. This article is not unique. Other news reports about killings in Congo from that period did not even mention the millions of dead (Lacey, 2005), though some pieces, such as this New York Times editorial in February 2005, expressed indignation that in Congo “some 1,000 people die every day of preventable diseases like malaria and diarrhea” and writing, in response to criticism by the economist Jeffrey Sachs of the lack of media coverage of Congo, that “yesterday, more than 20,000 people perished of extreme poverty” (New York Times, 2005). Such commentary, however, did little to change the nature of news coverage. And I became intensely curious about this dissonance: how could such powerful events command so few words when events of seemingly lesser significance – a motor show in Geneva or shopping for “Important Meals” at 5 Washington, D.C. embassies – could warrant articles several times the length of Mealer’s (2005) Congo report, in major newspapers such as The Washington Post or The Daily Telegraph (Nicholls, 2005; English & Don, 2005). Shortly after this, as I describe in my first book, Stringer (Sundaram, 2014b), I was referred to an interview with the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuścioski in Granta magazine that pointed to one historical contributor to the paucity of reports from places like Congo. In the interview, Kapuścioski expressed a view that there has historically been a lack of writers bearing witness in Africa, relative to the scale of events occurring there: Twenty years ago, I was in Africa, and this is what I saw: I went from revolution to coup d'Ètat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere? Then I would return to Europe and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years. (Kapuścioski & Buford, 1987) My conversations with American foreign correspondents who had worked more recently in Central Africa indicated that despite the many changes in the news industry, much of what Kapuścioski had observed still held true – that there were significant events occurring in Africa that relatively few reporters and writers were chronicling. Nowhere did this seem more apparent than in Congo, whose war, according to an International Rescue Committee study in 2003, had already claimed the highest toll in any conflict since World War II (Coghlan et al., 2006). I felt that if important events were happening in Congo and there weren’t sufficient reporters there, then that was where I should work. In the summer of 2005, I bought a one-way 6 ticket to Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, with a conviction that what I would witness in Congo should be news. That began nearly a decade of journalistic reporting and investigation in Central

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