DEAR WESTERN MEDIA, GET YOUR NARRATIVES STRAIGHT.

I n early February, amid BBC headlines on ethnic clashes in Nigeria, new Ebola outbreaks in Guinea, and individual fates in the conflict-ridden region of Tigray, Ethiopia, a strikingly positive one stood out: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Finance Minister of Nigeria, was appointed as the first female, African director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO). While this was happy news, it certainly clashed with the overarching theme of chaos and disaster prevailing over BBC’s Africa News. But Africa is much more than a continent ridden by poverty, disease, conflict, and corruption. Unbalanced reporting about the continent makes a lot of good news go

unnoticed. Africans – wherever they are – pay the price.

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Overly negative media coverage of Africa persists in large part because non-Africans are setting the global news agenda. A new study commissioned by the donor collaborative Africa No Filter found that due to a lack of resources, African media outlets source one-third of all their stories relating to the continent from Western news services. If Africa currently lacks a microphone on the global and domestic stage, it follows that Western media outlets have extra responsibility to report in a diverse and balanced manner and even to reconsider how they conduct their reporting. Given the historical debt that rest upon Western shoulders, Western media must make sure to report accordingly and fight colonial biases.

CONSEQUENCES OF MISPERCEPTIONS:

In the United Kingdom, misperceptions fuelled by the media have grave consequences for people of African descent. The skewed power dynamics resulting from all the “bad news” Westerners consume – or the donations they make after witnessing disaster on TV in their living rooms – feed into systemic discrimination inherent to many societies. In a 2019 Nuffield College survey, 19% of respondents agreed some ethnic groups were born less intelligent than others, while 38% found that some ethnic groups were inherently less hard working. The manifestation of such racist beliefs reaches from high levels of disciplinary and exclusion measures at school, to discrimination in job application procedures, to anti-Black violence.

On the African continent, negative media coverage inhibits economic development. High lending rates weaken African positions in the financial market. The continent continues to receive less foreign direct investment than other developing regions despite constituting the fastest growing middle class.

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The solution to this is more balanced reporting, and that starts with serious self- reflection by Western media. Even good news about African countries is often given a negative slant. In September, the BBC promoted one of its articles about the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa on Twitter: “Coronavirus in Africa: Could poverty explain mystery of low death rate?”. While the article only glanced over the fact that early reactions by African governments accounted for lower death tolls, the headline said a lot about the type of news Western audiences expect on Africa.

Of course, this problem is not limited to the United Kingdom and even less to the BBC. In 2019, a New York Times job advertisement for the head of its Nairobi bureau sparked outrage as it proclaimed the post would delight its readers with “unexpected stories of hope”. A 2019 review of Australian opinion pieces by the anti-racism organisation All Together Now found an unacceptably high number reflected racist attitudes towards African Australians.

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LET’S SWITCH THE NARRATIVE:

So, what positive stories on Africa have gone relatively unnoticed? Recently, Zimbabwe banned coal mining in all its national parks. Kenyans have been using M-Pesa – a mobile banking service – for more than a decade. The number of women serving in parliaments in many African countries far surpasses that in Europe and North America. And, again, while Covid-19 began to spread in the West, Africans were highly proactive, scaling up medical equipment, closing borders, churches, and mosques before the first case on the continent had been detected. There certainly is a lot Western countries can learn from Africa.

As Africa correspondents, Western media should employ more local journalists to provide more in-depth and nuanced coverage of their countries’ developments. Reporting on disastrous events is important, but it is as important to offer context. Coverage of ethnic clashes, for instance, should offer a sense of how the colonial design of borders has fostered instability. Local journalists are better suited to provide this context as they understand their country’s circumstances and have a serious interest in avoiding colonial stereotypes.

If non-Africans set the global news agenda, Western media outlets must be held responsible to tell all stories in their entirety. Otherwise, they contribute to the persistence of colonial stereotypes that have wrongfully portrayed many Africans as inferior to Europeans. Shifting media narratives on Africa will be crucial to remedying blatant biases and inequalities in society. So, read that article on the WTO’s new African lady-boss before you open the next one on conflict in Nigeria. It might shift some perceptions.

FIN.