Essential The Africa the Media Doesn't Tell You About
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Hipsters Don’ t Dance’s Top 10 African/Caribbean Collaborations of 2014
January 7, 2015
Busy Signal
2014 was a year when our musical worlds began to collide and we saw an increase in African artists working with artists from the Caribbean. This is a really big development as some DJs have seen similarities between the musical styles for some time, now artists are jumping on board and helping the sound to develop and grow. Although we still can’t figure out the government endorsed cultural link between Trinidad and Nigeria (Calabar in particular.) We have seen a sudden explosion of these 2 cultures colliding, with the most successful collaboration being Timaya and Machel Montano’s Shake Yuh Bum Bum. Similar artists teaming up together created something magical and we hope that they do it again. M.I. featured Jamiaca’s Beenie Man on his LP and Samini had Popcaan on a single as well. Busy Signal lead the way merging dancehall and afropop with his versions of P Square’s Personally and Mafikizolo’s Khona. We are glad that these artists are working together, not only does it broaden their appeal but selfishly it provides us with more ammunition for the clubs! Here are our top picks for 2014:
Timaya feat Machel Montano – Shake Yuh Bum Bum (Official Soca Remix)
January 7, 2015
Busy Signal
2014 was a year when our musical worlds began to collide and we saw an increase in African artists working with artists from the Caribbean. This is a really big development as some DJs have seen similarities between the musical styles for some time, now artists are jumping on board and helping the sound to develop and grow. Although we still can’t figure out the government endorsed cultural link between Trinidad and Nigeria (Calabar in particular.) We have seen a sudden explosion of these 2 cultures colliding, with the most successful collaboration being Timaya and Machel Montano’s Shake Yuh Bum Bum. Similar artists teaming up together created something magical and we hope that they do it again. M.I. featured Jamiaca’s Beenie Man on his LP and Samini had Popcaan on a single as well. Busy Signal lead the way merging dancehall and afropop with his versions of P Square’s Personally and Mafikizolo’s Khona. We are glad that these artists are working together, not only does it broaden their appeal but selfishly it provides us with more ammunition for the clubs! Here are our top picks for 2014:
Timaya feat Machel Montano – Shake Yuh Bum Bum (Official Soca Remix)
China Strives to Be on African Minds, and TV Sets
By BREE FENG January 7, 2015 7:11 am January 7, 2015 7:11 am
Photo
The state-run China Central Television opened CCTV Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2012.Credit Sven Torfinn for The New York Times
While China imposes strict controls on foreign-produced entertainment at home, it is also eager to see its cultural products embraced abroad. And in Africa, Chinese television shows have become immensely popular — at least according to the Chinese state news media.
This week, People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Communist Party, reported that Africans have given Chinese television shows a warm reception. It described a Ugandan taxi driver as professing his love for the Chinese romantic comedy “Let’s Get Married” as soon as the writer stepped into his cab. And it quoted a Tanzanian professor as saying that his countrymen wait in front of their television sets in anticipation of a new Chinese program.
“More and more African peoples are gaining an understanding of Chinese society by watching contemporary Chinese television dramas, and becoming interested in China,” the article said.
Enthusiastic articles about friendly ties between China and other countries, particularly developing countries, are a common feature of state news media. But the emphasis in state news reports on the popularity of Chinese cultural products in Africa underscores the importance Chinese leaders place on winning cultural influence abroad.
In 2011, only two Chinese companies participated in Discop Africa, an important annual trade show for producers, buyers and distributors in the television industry in Africa. But by 2012, the number had jumped to 10, according to Variety magazine.
Chinese and Kenyan employees of the Xinhua news agency watching a CCTV news program in Xinhua's Nairobi bureau.Credit Sven Torfinn for The New York Times
That same year was also the start of a vastly expanded Chinese news media presence in Africa with the state broadcaster China Central Television opening its CCTV Africa production center in Nairobi, Kenya. The state news agency Xinhua has signed partnership agreements with local news outlets in what a Kenyan newspaper editor described as part of “a full-on charm offensive” by the Chinese news media.
Discop estimates that there are about 42 million households with televisions in sub-Saharan Africa, a low figure given the region’s population of 840 million. However, the market is growing.
The Chinese company StarTimes Media Group is riding the waves of that trend, with support from the Chinese government and funding from the Export-Import Bank of China to sell its digital TV packages in Africa. The company is building an $80 million headquarters in Nairobi, complete with a dubbing center where Chinese programs can be translated into various local languages, including Swahili. It says that it has signed up four million subscribers across Africa.
Liu Dong, a cultural attache at the Chinese Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, told People’s Daily that the five Chinese television series, including family-oriented soap operas, being broadcast in Tanzania were chosen by the embassy in cooperation with China’s national broadcast authorities and have been “very well received.”
Chinese leaders have made it clear they want CCTV and other media to enhance China’s image in Africa.
Speaking at the opening of CCTV Africa in Nairobi in 2012, the Chinese ambassador to Kenya, Liu Guangyuan, told guests, among them the Kenyan vice president, that he wanted the network to project “the real picture of China-Africa exchanges and cooperation.”
“Under the current unjust international media order, some people from a few countries are always distorting the fact of the friendly ties between China and Africa,” he said, without specifying which countries.
Still, some analysts suggest that Chinese news media and entertainment offerings face significant challenges in Africa.
“Over all, I must say that I am quite skeptical about the popularity of Chinese media in Africa up until now,” said Howard W. French, author of “China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa” and a former New York Times correspondent in Africa and China.
“I spent most of the summer in East Africa, and people I spoke with in several countries said that not only did they not watch Chinese TV, but that they generally didn’t know other people who did, either,” Mr. French said.
One problem, certainly for news programs, is the tightly controlled nature of the Chinese news media and the “stodgy and euphemistic” delivery by anchors, he said.
Though CCTV Africa’s programs are presented by local journalists, the content appears very much in line with Beijing’s goals of promoting a positive view of China.
Bob Wekesa, a Ph.D. candidate at the Communications University of China, conducted a study of CCTV’s current affairs discussion program “Talk Africa” and found that “all but one of the shows that relate to China is thumbs up for the image of China,” which was also the most discussed single country. The United States fares less well, Mr. Wekesa found.
“Probably the two episodes during which the interviewees are not in a U.S.-bashing position are one where a philanthropic guest is interviewed and the one about the re-election of President Barack Obama,” Mr. Wekesa wrote in his report.
The channel’s tendency to skirt over what it deems delicate topics is unlikely to endear it to local viewers, Mr. French said.
“The problem with this is that, in a great many African countries, the media scene is quite diversified, and Africans are quite used to having problems, including ‘sensitive’ problems, raked over directly, with space for lots of contending points of view,” he said.
“Beyond that, in most African countries, access to foreign media, whether it is the BBC, Radio France, Al Jazeera or what have you, is high. The CCTV product doesn’t hold up well by comparison.”
By BREE FENG January 7, 2015 7:11 am January 7, 2015 7:11 am
Photo
The state-run China Central Television opened CCTV Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2012.Credit Sven Torfinn for The New York Times
While China imposes strict controls on foreign-produced entertainment at home, it is also eager to see its cultural products embraced abroad. And in Africa, Chinese television shows have become immensely popular — at least according to the Chinese state news media.
This week, People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Communist Party, reported that Africans have given Chinese television shows a warm reception. It described a Ugandan taxi driver as professing his love for the Chinese romantic comedy “Let’s Get Married” as soon as the writer stepped into his cab. And it quoted a Tanzanian professor as saying that his countrymen wait in front of their television sets in anticipation of a new Chinese program.
“More and more African peoples are gaining an understanding of Chinese society by watching contemporary Chinese television dramas, and becoming interested in China,” the article said.
Enthusiastic articles about friendly ties between China and other countries, particularly developing countries, are a common feature of state news media. But the emphasis in state news reports on the popularity of Chinese cultural products in Africa underscores the importance Chinese leaders place on winning cultural influence abroad.
In 2011, only two Chinese companies participated in Discop Africa, an important annual trade show for producers, buyers and distributors in the television industry in Africa. But by 2012, the number had jumped to 10, according to Variety magazine.
Chinese and Kenyan employees of the Xinhua news agency watching a CCTV news program in Xinhua's Nairobi bureau.Credit Sven Torfinn for The New York Times
That same year was also the start of a vastly expanded Chinese news media presence in Africa with the state broadcaster China Central Television opening its CCTV Africa production center in Nairobi, Kenya. The state news agency Xinhua has signed partnership agreements with local news outlets in what a Kenyan newspaper editor described as part of “a full-on charm offensive” by the Chinese news media.
Discop estimates that there are about 42 million households with televisions in sub-Saharan Africa, a low figure given the region’s population of 840 million. However, the market is growing.
The Chinese company StarTimes Media Group is riding the waves of that trend, with support from the Chinese government and funding from the Export-Import Bank of China to sell its digital TV packages in Africa. The company is building an $80 million headquarters in Nairobi, complete with a dubbing center where Chinese programs can be translated into various local languages, including Swahili. It says that it has signed up four million subscribers across Africa.
Liu Dong, a cultural attache at the Chinese Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, told People’s Daily that the five Chinese television series, including family-oriented soap operas, being broadcast in Tanzania were chosen by the embassy in cooperation with China’s national broadcast authorities and have been “very well received.”
Chinese leaders have made it clear they want CCTV and other media to enhance China’s image in Africa.
Speaking at the opening of CCTV Africa in Nairobi in 2012, the Chinese ambassador to Kenya, Liu Guangyuan, told guests, among them the Kenyan vice president, that he wanted the network to project “the real picture of China-Africa exchanges and cooperation.”
“Under the current unjust international media order, some people from a few countries are always distorting the fact of the friendly ties between China and Africa,” he said, without specifying which countries.
Still, some analysts suggest that Chinese news media and entertainment offerings face significant challenges in Africa.
“Over all, I must say that I am quite skeptical about the popularity of Chinese media in Africa up until now,” said Howard W. French, author of “China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa” and a former New York Times correspondent in Africa and China.
“I spent most of the summer in East Africa, and people I spoke with in several countries said that not only did they not watch Chinese TV, but that they generally didn’t know other people who did, either,” Mr. French said.
One problem, certainly for news programs, is the tightly controlled nature of the Chinese news media and the “stodgy and euphemistic” delivery by anchors, he said.
Though CCTV Africa’s programs are presented by local journalists, the content appears very much in line with Beijing’s goals of promoting a positive view of China.
Bob Wekesa, a Ph.D. candidate at the Communications University of China, conducted a study of CCTV’s current affairs discussion program “Talk Africa” and found that “all but one of the shows that relate to China is thumbs up for the image of China,” which was also the most discussed single country. The United States fares less well, Mr. Wekesa found.
“Probably the two episodes during which the interviewees are not in a U.S.-bashing position are one where a philanthropic guest is interviewed and the one about the re-election of President Barack Obama,” Mr. Wekesa wrote in his report.
The channel’s tendency to skirt over what it deems delicate topics is unlikely to endear it to local viewers, Mr. French said.
“The problem with this is that, in a great many African countries, the media scene is quite diversified, and Africans are quite used to having problems, including ‘sensitive’ problems, raked over directly, with space for lots of contending points of view,” he said.
“Beyond that, in most African countries, access to foreign media, whether it is the BBC, Radio France, Al Jazeera or what have you, is high. The CCTV product doesn’t hold up well by comparison.”
Terence Ranger and the Jagged Geometry of Zimbabwe
Percy Zvomuya
Percy Zvomuya celebrates the thoughts and texts of groundbreaking historian Terence Ranger, who died on 2 January 2015
In 2004, after Terence Ranger had delivered a paper at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), I went up to him to greet him, make a few comments about his lecture and introduce myself as Zimbabwean. I know, he responded.
Ranger’s paper, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe,” was one in which he critiqued the use of history by Zanu PF. The lecture came at the moment when the arc of the social and economic crisis had taken a sharp, jagged turn into the unknown and Zimbabwe’s history, and Zanu PF’s principal role in it, had become handy and expedient.
“There has arisen a new variety of historiography which I did not mention in my valedictory lecture. This goes under the name of ‘patriotic history’. It is different from and more narrow than the old nationalist historiography, which celebrated aspiration and modernisation as well as resistance. It resents the ‘disloyal’ questions raised by historians of nationalism. It regards as irrelevant any history which is not political. And it is explicitly antagonistic to academic historiography,” Ranger argued.
The irony and force of his argument wouldn’t have escaped anyone vaguely familiar with the historian’s work. His two books: Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (Heinemann), which came out in 1967, and The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (Heinemann),which came out three years later, in 1970, are, by his own admission, nationalist historiography “in the sense that they attempted to trace the roots of nationalism”.
The two books, which the more literate of the nationalists must have read and re-read, came out a critical juncture in the nationalist struggle: in 1963, Robert Mugabe and others had broken away from Zapu to form Zanu; in 1965, Ian Smith had announced the Unilateral Declaration of Independence; because of Smith’s intransigence, armed struggle had been adopted and, in 1966, the first shots had resounded in the limestone and dolomite country of Chinhoyi. The two books were useful not only in understanding the heroic past of struggle and revolution but, also, how that 1896-97 war against the British settlers and its mythic protagonists – Nehanda, Kaguvi and Murenga – linked up with the nationalist present fight. The name Zimbabwe, coined by nationalist Michael Mawema, after the majestic stone walls in Masvingo, was part of this reclamation of a great romantic past of empire and its attendant monuments. Although the Great Zimbabwe monument pointed to a fully-fledged civilization, its sophistication and neat geometries were of no use at that point. What they were looking for in their past was mess and gore, the battle axe and the shield, in other words, revolutionary violence.
*
Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism (Weaver Press), Ranger’s memoir of his time in Rhodesia before he was deported by Smith’s government in 1963, came out in 2013. In the preface, Ranger wrote, “this book is about a primitive stage of Zimbabwean historiography. It is also about the ways in which politics and history interacted. The men I discussed history with were the leaders of African nationalism; my seminar papers were sent to prisons and restriction areas. Both they and I were making political as well as intellectual discoveries.”
He then made a provocative comparison with another colonised people, neither Asian nor African, but European. “I had worked previously on Irish history. Now I found again a context in which history was too much important to be left to historians.” The hegemony of patriotic history, the way that history has been abused and misused, has also taught us that history is too, too important to be left to politicians.
Robert Mugabe plays a starring role in these narratives; he has, naturally enough, made the most use of this patriotic history. Ranger, writing about Mugabe in the aftermath of his arrival from Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in the early 1960s, observed that “Mugabe was new to us and lying low in the National Democratic Party (NDP)”. The NDP is one of several nationalist parties that was formed and banned by the Rhodesians. “We watched him closely to try to pick up some clues.” They saw a “rare playful moment” at a dinner table one evening. After wolfing down his food, Mugabe turned to his friend and fellow nationalist Leopold Takawira, and said, “I am surprised at you, Leopold. As a good Catholic you are eating meat on Friday.” An “upset” Takawira pointed out that Mugabe himself had also eaten meat. “Ah, but I am not a good Catholic.”
Ranger’s oeuvre is vast and stirring. If his early works easily fell prey to the machinations of the nationalists, his later works were much more sophisticated. There are the early works Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97 (Heinemann) and Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study (James Currey). Co-edited with Ngwabi Bhebhe is the book Ranger titled Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (James Currey). He also wrote a portrait of a very political family, the Samkanges, titled Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920-64. (James Currey). There is another collaboration with Bhebhe, again as co-editors, Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War ( James Currey).
Most of his work, even though national in scope, had a northern Zimbabwean slant. But in his later years, he took a decidedly southern outlook. The first of these books was Voices From The Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (James Currey) and with his two students, Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland (James Currey) and Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern African City (University of Western Cape). Then there was, with Eric Hobsbawm, the celebrated tome, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press), a co-edited book that showed how “continuity with the past” is constructed by use of rituals, symbols and practices, how some of the things we view as traditions are, in fact, invented.
*
A former schoolmate once described Ranger as an “ordinary boy”, so ordinary, in fact, that he failed his mathematics, was dismal in French, and failed Latin so frequently that he went to Oxford a term late. Not that he was any better in the sciences, a faculty that would have been useful in his father’s electro-plating factory. So how did an ordinary boy collaborate with some of Europe’s most formidable minds? How did he stake out a ringside seat as witness to the first stirrings of African nationalism? How did he become midwife to generations of exceptional historians? How did he do it? Well, for starters, he had a brain for literature and history.
“My parents gave me what I needed to feed on – countless holiday visits to cathedral towns and castles, and a reasonably well stocked library at home (which contained most of dikkens, for example),” he wrote.
Ranger’s education on Africa, if we are mad enough to conscript some of the racist writings of Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad as being about Africa, hadn’t exactly prepared him for his career. “I have often thought about the odd effects of such a literary education which has left no trace on my adult responses to Africa. We did not know any Africans personally; there were no African boys at Highgate School, though there were Greeks and Armenians and German Jews.”
Oxford, of course, would not educate him about Africa. “The core of the History Honours syllabus was a continuous knowledge of English history. I heard about Africa only in the context of Prince Henry the Navigator.” His graduate supervisor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, would gain notoriety in African/Africanist circles when he said, “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa. The rest is largely darkness.”
Yet it was also at Oxford that he met one Carl Rosburg, who was researching and writing on the history of the Mau Mau, work which would culminate in the book, The Myth of “Mau Mau”: Nationalism in Kenya. “Like all proper young Englishmen I regarded Mau Mau as the height of barbarity, and I was astonished when Rosburg insisted that it was instead a rational nationalist movement. A few years later it was Rosburg who introduced me to the Southern Rhodesian African nationalist leaders.”
Before deciding to settle in Africa, at the age of 27, Ranger almost accepted a position at a university in Malaysia. But he happened to read a piece in The Times by Basil Fletcher, then vice-principal of the recently opened University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now University of Zimbabwe). “The college, its copper roofs gleaming in the sun, was a beacon of hope between the white nationalism of South Africa and the black nationalism of East Africa. It stood for partnership and multi-racialism. At once I decided that this was the place for me.”
The rest, as they used to say, is history.
If Ranger’s life is an object lesson for whites, those born on the continent or arrivants, then it is perhaps in how he arrived in Africa and then, as in the cliché, he set out to find himself and steered clear of the play of stereotype and received routine. “I was a married man with two-thirds of a doctoral thesis written. But there was a lot I did not know. I did not know whether I had physical or moral courage; whether I could bear being wildly unpopular; whether I could take –or follow – a lead; whether I could throw myself into a cause; whether my historical imagination could expand to embrace a whole new civilization.”
Ranger has now gone. He is not only a chief protagonist in the invention of a tradition and a mythology, but a whole historiography. When his historiography had been exploited by the Zimbabwean state, he was one of the first to revise and interrogate his initial ideas. Not that he should have done so because a new generation of Zimbabwean historians, some of them his students, were at hand to critique their teacher.
Jesus, that good Nazarene, in his attempt at disrupting the student-teacher hierarchy, once said that the student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. And one of Ranger’s most fascinating students is Sabelo Gatsheni-Ndlovu who, like all good students, has up turned Ranger’s early nationalist historiography on its own flag-bedecked head. Writing in the introduction of his Derridean book, Do Zimbabweans Exist?, Gatsheni-Ndlovu argues that his work’s aim is to transcend studies “in the service of nationalism” by scholars such as Ranger, David Martin and Phyllis Johnson. “These texts were easily appropriated by the Harare regime because they celebrated nationalism, painting a false impression of nationalist actors as heroic figures and selfless people who genuinely worked and died for the masses.”
In Ranger, politics and history, nationalism and scholarship, intersected in a jagged geometry rarely seen.
Zimbabwe, Africa, will forever be in his debt.
Terence Ranger, 1929 – 2015
Percy Zvomuya
- on January 9, 2015
- in People, Real Politik
Percy Zvomuya celebrates the thoughts and texts of groundbreaking historian Terence Ranger, who died on 2 January 2015
In 2004, after Terence Ranger had delivered a paper at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), I went up to him to greet him, make a few comments about his lecture and introduce myself as Zimbabwean. I know, he responded.
Ranger’s paper, “Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the struggle over the past in Zimbabwe,” was one in which he critiqued the use of history by Zanu PF. The lecture came at the moment when the arc of the social and economic crisis had taken a sharp, jagged turn into the unknown and Zimbabwe’s history, and Zanu PF’s principal role in it, had become handy and expedient.
“There has arisen a new variety of historiography which I did not mention in my valedictory lecture. This goes under the name of ‘patriotic history’. It is different from and more narrow than the old nationalist historiography, which celebrated aspiration and modernisation as well as resistance. It resents the ‘disloyal’ questions raised by historians of nationalism. It regards as irrelevant any history which is not political. And it is explicitly antagonistic to academic historiography,” Ranger argued.
The irony and force of his argument wouldn’t have escaped anyone vaguely familiar with the historian’s work. His two books: Revolt in Southern Rhodesia (Heinemann), which came out in 1967, and The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (Heinemann),which came out three years later, in 1970, are, by his own admission, nationalist historiography “in the sense that they attempted to trace the roots of nationalism”.
The two books, which the more literate of the nationalists must have read and re-read, came out a critical juncture in the nationalist struggle: in 1963, Robert Mugabe and others had broken away from Zapu to form Zanu; in 1965, Ian Smith had announced the Unilateral Declaration of Independence; because of Smith’s intransigence, armed struggle had been adopted and, in 1966, the first shots had resounded in the limestone and dolomite country of Chinhoyi. The two books were useful not only in understanding the heroic past of struggle and revolution but, also, how that 1896-97 war against the British settlers and its mythic protagonists – Nehanda, Kaguvi and Murenga – linked up with the nationalist present fight. The name Zimbabwe, coined by nationalist Michael Mawema, after the majestic stone walls in Masvingo, was part of this reclamation of a great romantic past of empire and its attendant monuments. Although the Great Zimbabwe monument pointed to a fully-fledged civilization, its sophistication and neat geometries were of no use at that point. What they were looking for in their past was mess and gore, the battle axe and the shield, in other words, revolutionary violence.
*
Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism (Weaver Press), Ranger’s memoir of his time in Rhodesia before he was deported by Smith’s government in 1963, came out in 2013. In the preface, Ranger wrote, “this book is about a primitive stage of Zimbabwean historiography. It is also about the ways in which politics and history interacted. The men I discussed history with were the leaders of African nationalism; my seminar papers were sent to prisons and restriction areas. Both they and I were making political as well as intellectual discoveries.”
He then made a provocative comparison with another colonised people, neither Asian nor African, but European. “I had worked previously on Irish history. Now I found again a context in which history was too much important to be left to historians.” The hegemony of patriotic history, the way that history has been abused and misused, has also taught us that history is too, too important to be left to politicians.
Robert Mugabe plays a starring role in these narratives; he has, naturally enough, made the most use of this patriotic history. Ranger, writing about Mugabe in the aftermath of his arrival from Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in the early 1960s, observed that “Mugabe was new to us and lying low in the National Democratic Party (NDP)”. The NDP is one of several nationalist parties that was formed and banned by the Rhodesians. “We watched him closely to try to pick up some clues.” They saw a “rare playful moment” at a dinner table one evening. After wolfing down his food, Mugabe turned to his friend and fellow nationalist Leopold Takawira, and said, “I am surprised at you, Leopold. As a good Catholic you are eating meat on Friday.” An “upset” Takawira pointed out that Mugabe himself had also eaten meat. “Ah, but I am not a good Catholic.”
Ranger’s oeuvre is vast and stirring. If his early works easily fell prey to the machinations of the nationalists, his later works were much more sophisticated. There are the early works Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97 (Heinemann) and Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study (James Currey). Co-edited with Ngwabi Bhebhe is the book Ranger titled Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (James Currey). He also wrote a portrait of a very political family, the Samkanges, titled Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920-64. (James Currey). There is another collaboration with Bhebhe, again as co-editors, Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War ( James Currey).
Most of his work, even though national in scope, had a northern Zimbabwean slant. But in his later years, he took a decidedly southern outlook. The first of these books was Voices From The Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (James Currey) and with his two students, Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland (James Currey) and Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern African City (University of Western Cape). Then there was, with Eric Hobsbawm, the celebrated tome, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press), a co-edited book that showed how “continuity with the past” is constructed by use of rituals, symbols and practices, how some of the things we view as traditions are, in fact, invented.
*
A former schoolmate once described Ranger as an “ordinary boy”, so ordinary, in fact, that he failed his mathematics, was dismal in French, and failed Latin so frequently that he went to Oxford a term late. Not that he was any better in the sciences, a faculty that would have been useful in his father’s electro-plating factory. So how did an ordinary boy collaborate with some of Europe’s most formidable minds? How did he stake out a ringside seat as witness to the first stirrings of African nationalism? How did he become midwife to generations of exceptional historians? How did he do it? Well, for starters, he had a brain for literature and history.
“My parents gave me what I needed to feed on – countless holiday visits to cathedral towns and castles, and a reasonably well stocked library at home (which contained most of dikkens, for example),” he wrote.
Ranger’s education on Africa, if we are mad enough to conscript some of the racist writings of Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad as being about Africa, hadn’t exactly prepared him for his career. “I have often thought about the odd effects of such a literary education which has left no trace on my adult responses to Africa. We did not know any Africans personally; there were no African boys at Highgate School, though there were Greeks and Armenians and German Jews.”
Oxford, of course, would not educate him about Africa. “The core of the History Honours syllabus was a continuous knowledge of English history. I heard about Africa only in the context of Prince Henry the Navigator.” His graduate supervisor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, would gain notoriety in African/Africanist circles when he said, “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa. The rest is largely darkness.”
Yet it was also at Oxford that he met one Carl Rosburg, who was researching and writing on the history of the Mau Mau, work which would culminate in the book, The Myth of “Mau Mau”: Nationalism in Kenya. “Like all proper young Englishmen I regarded Mau Mau as the height of barbarity, and I was astonished when Rosburg insisted that it was instead a rational nationalist movement. A few years later it was Rosburg who introduced me to the Southern Rhodesian African nationalist leaders.”
Before deciding to settle in Africa, at the age of 27, Ranger almost accepted a position at a university in Malaysia. But he happened to read a piece in The Times by Basil Fletcher, then vice-principal of the recently opened University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now University of Zimbabwe). “The college, its copper roofs gleaming in the sun, was a beacon of hope between the white nationalism of South Africa and the black nationalism of East Africa. It stood for partnership and multi-racialism. At once I decided that this was the place for me.”
The rest, as they used to say, is history.
If Ranger’s life is an object lesson for whites, those born on the continent or arrivants, then it is perhaps in how he arrived in Africa and then, as in the cliché, he set out to find himself and steered clear of the play of stereotype and received routine. “I was a married man with two-thirds of a doctoral thesis written. But there was a lot I did not know. I did not know whether I had physical or moral courage; whether I could bear being wildly unpopular; whether I could take –or follow – a lead; whether I could throw myself into a cause; whether my historical imagination could expand to embrace a whole new civilization.”
Ranger has now gone. He is not only a chief protagonist in the invention of a tradition and a mythology, but a whole historiography. When his historiography had been exploited by the Zimbabwean state, he was one of the first to revise and interrogate his initial ideas. Not that he should have done so because a new generation of Zimbabwean historians, some of them his students, were at hand to critique their teacher.
Jesus, that good Nazarene, in his attempt at disrupting the student-teacher hierarchy, once said that the student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. And one of Ranger’s most fascinating students is Sabelo Gatsheni-Ndlovu who, like all good students, has up turned Ranger’s early nationalist historiography on its own flag-bedecked head. Writing in the introduction of his Derridean book, Do Zimbabweans Exist?, Gatsheni-Ndlovu argues that his work’s aim is to transcend studies “in the service of nationalism” by scholars such as Ranger, David Martin and Phyllis Johnson. “These texts were easily appropriated by the Harare regime because they celebrated nationalism, painting a false impression of nationalist actors as heroic figures and selfless people who genuinely worked and died for the masses.”
In Ranger, politics and history, nationalism and scholarship, intersected in a jagged geometry rarely seen.
Zimbabwe, Africa, will forever be in his debt.
Terence Ranger, 1929 – 2015
Six African presidents attended Paris Charlie Hebdo unity rally. Why are so many outraged?
12 JAN 2015 00:05LEE MWITI
Part of the reason is that none of their countries are categorised as free, with marches there either banned or restricted, and the media targeted.
Gabon president Ali Ben Bongo (right) and other world leaders in Paris on January 11, 2015. His rights record often comes in for scrutiny. (Photo, Getty)
WORLD leaders don’t picket every day. Indeed Sunday was the first time the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Israel and the United Nations among over 40 others marched in the same demonstration and in the same city.
Alongside them in Paris were hundreds of thousands who marched in a show of unity and defiance against terrorism, following last week’s horror attacks in the French capital that claimed 17 lives and wounded nearly 20 others. In France alone, it’s estimated 3.7 million came out all over the country, with one million in Paris.
And then there were “The Six”; the presidents of Mali, Niger, Togo, Benin, Gabon and Senegal, understandably all former colonies of France and a reminder that Francafrique remains alive and well.
The world was last week left reeling after terrorists attacked the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacring 12 people.
Another gunman shot dead four people in a kosher supermarket in the French capital, while a policewoman was also killed in a separate attack.
Africa is no stranger to terrorism: Boko Haram early this month pulled off their deadliest single day of terrorism, with 2,000 people feared dead. Mali, Niger, Kenya, Libya, Egypt and a whole host of African countries continue to be held hostage by a mortley of terror merchants, from Al Shabaab and Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa.
In this sense the presence of the six African leaders was justifiable—the 9/11 attacks in the US are now recognised for highlighting the “globalisation” of terrorism. Any country in the world is now fair game for those who would use violence to achieve their goals, aided by among other factors vastly improved world travel and communication.
But the question can also be asked—why haven’t the continent’s leaders similarly marched in any African capital to show their fortitude against terrorism? Far too often terror attacks in the region are politicised, the security of citizens subjugated and confined to convenient “us-against-them” chiffoniers.
Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta once attributed terror attacks that claimed over 60 lives in the country’s coast to “local political networks”, alleging members of his ethnic group were being targeted.
Instead, Africa’s anti-terror fight is run by the West, who fund everything from the crafting of security policies, to the training of elite units. The opportunity and interest for the West is obvious—its multinationals are among the biggest beneficiaries.
France president Francois Hollande for example remains a major player in Africa’s security; he has intervened in almost every terror hotspot from Mali to Central Africa and Niger, and is currently busy setting up a counter-terrorism force that would hunt down terrorist groups in Sahelian countries, with the operational command in Chad looking out for Niger, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Gabon, which will all either host troop bases or satellite units.
Boko Haram, sympathetic to both the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has for years run amok in north-eastern Nigeria, and is now further looking to regionalise the conflict with Cameroon, Chad and Niger in its sights. Yet the only semblance of impetus by the region’s leaders was after Hollande called a high-profile security summit in Paris, where leaders agreed to wage “war” against extremists.
African leaders often protest that they do not have the capacity to fight sophisticated terrorists. Yet the fight does not need radical “paradigm shifts”. the buzz phrase of the myriad of think tanks and security consultants who earn a living from studying terrorism on the continent.
Small focused steps have infinitely bigger results than the latest weapons from the West—fight corruption, share resources equitably, implement existing laws, end marginalisation.
The marches in Paris and other European cities on Sunday were also in favour of liberty and the freedom of opinion and expression. These are not just quaint terms, they are captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
Yet despite all being signatories of the UN charter, none of the African countries whose top leaders were in Paris are categorised as “Free” by democracy Watchdog Freedom House.
The organisation classifies countries as either “Free,” meaning there is open political competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties and independent media; “Partly Free,” meaning there is corruption, weak rule of law and ethnic strife; and “Not Free,” in which basic political and civil liberties are absent.
In nearly all the six countries at the Paris rally executives continued to consolidate power, marches and protests are ironically, either banned or clamped down upon, judiciaries wilfully weakened and media outlets either suspended or legislated out of existence, a trend that several media watchdogs faithfully document every year.
The continent’s rights organs, ordinarily among the last refuges for the oppressed, continue to be ornamental. The African Union Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is based in Banjul, The Gambia where president Yahya Jammeh is regularly criticised for major rights transgressions. It is a toothless body, and its record is poor—only last week did it begin to hear its first freedom of expression case.
The general disregard for rights in Africa in these and many other ways thus makes a mockery of the presence of its leaders in Paris chanting Liberte! Those that died in Paris deserve much better.
The author is deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian Africa.
12 JAN 2015 00:05LEE MWITI
Part of the reason is that none of their countries are categorised as free, with marches there either banned or restricted, and the media targeted.
Gabon president Ali Ben Bongo (right) and other world leaders in Paris on January 11, 2015. His rights record often comes in for scrutiny. (Photo, Getty)
WORLD leaders don’t picket every day. Indeed Sunday was the first time the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Israel and the United Nations among over 40 others marched in the same demonstration and in the same city.
Alongside them in Paris were hundreds of thousands who marched in a show of unity and defiance against terrorism, following last week’s horror attacks in the French capital that claimed 17 lives and wounded nearly 20 others. In France alone, it’s estimated 3.7 million came out all over the country, with one million in Paris.
And then there were “The Six”; the presidents of Mali, Niger, Togo, Benin, Gabon and Senegal, understandably all former colonies of France and a reminder that Francafrique remains alive and well.
The world was last week left reeling after terrorists attacked the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacring 12 people.
Another gunman shot dead four people in a kosher supermarket in the French capital, while a policewoman was also killed in a separate attack.
Africa is no stranger to terrorism: Boko Haram early this month pulled off their deadliest single day of terrorism, with 2,000 people feared dead. Mali, Niger, Kenya, Libya, Egypt and a whole host of African countries continue to be held hostage by a mortley of terror merchants, from Al Shabaab and Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa.
In this sense the presence of the six African leaders was justifiable—the 9/11 attacks in the US are now recognised for highlighting the “globalisation” of terrorism. Any country in the world is now fair game for those who would use violence to achieve their goals, aided by among other factors vastly improved world travel and communication.
But the question can also be asked—why haven’t the continent’s leaders similarly marched in any African capital to show their fortitude against terrorism? Far too often terror attacks in the region are politicised, the security of citizens subjugated and confined to convenient “us-against-them” chiffoniers.
Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta once attributed terror attacks that claimed over 60 lives in the country’s coast to “local political networks”, alleging members of his ethnic group were being targeted.
Instead, Africa’s anti-terror fight is run by the West, who fund everything from the crafting of security policies, to the training of elite units. The opportunity and interest for the West is obvious—its multinationals are among the biggest beneficiaries.
France president Francois Hollande for example remains a major player in Africa’s security; he has intervened in almost every terror hotspot from Mali to Central Africa and Niger, and is currently busy setting up a counter-terrorism force that would hunt down terrorist groups in Sahelian countries, with the operational command in Chad looking out for Niger, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Gabon, which will all either host troop bases or satellite units.
Boko Haram, sympathetic to both the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has for years run amok in north-eastern Nigeria, and is now further looking to regionalise the conflict with Cameroon, Chad and Niger in its sights. Yet the only semblance of impetus by the region’s leaders was after Hollande called a high-profile security summit in Paris, where leaders agreed to wage “war” against extremists.
African leaders often protest that they do not have the capacity to fight sophisticated terrorists. Yet the fight does not need radical “paradigm shifts”. the buzz phrase of the myriad of think tanks and security consultants who earn a living from studying terrorism on the continent.
Small focused steps have infinitely bigger results than the latest weapons from the West—fight corruption, share resources equitably, implement existing laws, end marginalisation.
The marches in Paris and other European cities on Sunday were also in favour of liberty and the freedom of opinion and expression. These are not just quaint terms, they are captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, contained in the Charter of the United Nations.
Yet despite all being signatories of the UN charter, none of the African countries whose top leaders were in Paris are categorised as “Free” by democracy Watchdog Freedom House.
The organisation classifies countries as either “Free,” meaning there is open political competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties and independent media; “Partly Free,” meaning there is corruption, weak rule of law and ethnic strife; and “Not Free,” in which basic political and civil liberties are absent.
In nearly all the six countries at the Paris rally executives continued to consolidate power, marches and protests are ironically, either banned or clamped down upon, judiciaries wilfully weakened and media outlets either suspended or legislated out of existence, a trend that several media watchdogs faithfully document every year.
The continent’s rights organs, ordinarily among the last refuges for the oppressed, continue to be ornamental. The African Union Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is based in Banjul, The Gambia where president Yahya Jammeh is regularly criticised for major rights transgressions. It is a toothless body, and its record is poor—only last week did it begin to hear its first freedom of expression case.
The general disregard for rights in Africa in these and many other ways thus makes a mockery of the presence of its leaders in Paris chanting Liberte! Those that died in Paris deserve much better.
The author is deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian Africa.
Instagramming Africa
March 10, 2014
Everyday Africa is an Instagram-based project aiming to document moments from daily life. It was founded in 2012 by the American photojournalist Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill (I first met Austin through his soccer blogging at Vanity Fair (somebody had to do it) in the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup). Initially featuring the work of mostly American foreign correspondents, it now also includes the work of a number of African photographers, like Nana Kofi Acquah (featured before on Africa is a Country), Emeka Okereke and Andrew Esiebo. Chances are you’ve heard of it already as Everyday Africa has received a lot of positive press. Everyday Africa is definitely an important initiative in the north where one-dimensional, highly constructed images of Africans are the norm and so, a while back, I sent Peter some questions (a number of AIAC’ers pitched in too), which he answered. The exchange is below.
Can you talk about the original impetus for Everyday Africa. It was started by American journalists and photographers writing, documenting and reporting in and about Africa, right?
Austin Merrill and I were traveling in Ivory Coast in March 2012, as a writer / photographer team covering the continued strife a year after the country’s post-election violence and the cocoa trade that is the root of turmoil there. Austin is intimately familiar with the country, having lived there at a couple different points in his life, and I had been there before as a photojournalist, and had lived several years “next-door” in Ghana. During the March 2012 trip we began shooting photos on our phones, very casually, and it occurred to us that those images felt much more familiar to us than the ones I was “professionally” shooting for the story we were there to tell.
Having outlined that story above – as you can imagine, it was a bit preconceived. I think often about the process of photojournalism – going into a story, you often feel you “know” the images needed to tell it. If it’s a story with phrases like “continued ethnic violence,” you feel you need photos of refugees, burned down homes, survivors with horrific stories to tell, etc. These are the images that will make sense to the reader; that he or she will find palatable. But there’s an inherent contradiction here: if we’re giving the reader images he or she already expects, then the story reinforces preconceptions and doesn’t teach anything new. Along the way, we also see a lot of daily life moments, but we often pre-edit these out of our story by not even photographing them. Austin and I decided to photograph them.
A couple months later, we were both on the continent again, at the same time but in different locations – he in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, me in Uganda. We kept shooting on our phones, and this time around started a Tumblr blog so we could share the images with each other and a wider audience in real time, or close to it. In the months that followed, we found that a lot of our colleagues shared our frustrations with coverage of the continent and were excited to have an outlet for the day-to-day images. We migrated to Instagram (but kept the Tumblr too) to extend our reach, and things grew rather quickly.
Why is it important for non-Africans to tell African stories?
I’m of the opinion that any culture should be examined both internally and externally. There are, of course, many aspects of a culture that outsiders can’t access or understand fully. On the flip side, it’s easy for people within a culture to put blinders on when examining themselves, whereas an outsider brings a different critical view. At times, Everyday Africa has been criticized purely on the grounds that an outsider should never tell someone else’s story, period. I couldn’t disagree with that statement more – imagine if Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t write about America, or Robert Frank didn’t photograph America. (Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head – one could go on and on here.)
The real issue is that, generally speaking, I don’t think foreign journalists or photographers turn a sincere eye on Africa – instead, they follow the preconceptions I’ve been outlining. They (or should I say, we) tend to parachute in, cover the same well-trodden ground, and move on, without giving the story the same voice they would if covering a similar story in the states or Western Europe. See the ever-popular “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina, who puts it far better than I ever could. Another good read along this theme is Slate Magazine’s new “If It Happened There” feature, covering US news as if it were foreign news. And it’s also worth noting that there are some great exceptions – people who have moved in for the long-haul and write about Africa just as they would anywhere else.
While I’m open to the criticism that we don’t have enough African photographers – which we’ll get into below – I also feel it’s very important to acknowledge that one of my personal goals for this project, initially, was a critique of the function and methodology of Western photojournalism. My experience was not a unique one – if I’m traveling in Ivory Coast and shooting a predetermined narrative, but I’m seeing all this other stuff along the way that doesn’t fit that narrative, then guess what? The same thing is happening to most other Western photographers doing the same work. This is how photojournalism is often responsible for perpetuating what is not necessarily an outright lie but certainly a reinforcement of stereotypes. Without daily life imagery of normal and even mundane situations, the West will still thinks of Africa as poor and starving with no exceptions, the Middle East as explosively violent at all times and in all places, etc. So, while of course it’s important – vitally, crucially important – to see what “everyday Africa” means from the perspective of Africans, it’s also vitally important to point fingers at the notion of photojournalism and poke holes in it, not only the way it is carried out but also the way it is read by an audience.
A quick story: I was once traveling in Europe with a close American friend who I grew up with. My only previous travel at that point had been in the Middle East (this was years ago), so I started talking about that. My friend exclaimed, “I would never travel in an Arab country… What do I know that’s good about them!?” I was very startled. I thought, no matter what the nightly news tells you, there’s a lot to assume that’s good and shared by every culture: a love of family, the care taken in preparing and consuming a good meal, an appreciation for music. The list goes on. But that’s exactly it: if we aren’t shown that those things exist, it’s difficult for an unfamiliar audience to assume that they do.
One more question along those same lines: This is an initiative run by two white, non-Africans to document and market African culture. What do you say to people who question your motives?
To start with, I disagree with the term “market” here, only because the point of Everyday Africa is not to present any one view. My aim is for something more experiential, something that fits the stream (Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) as a narrative. Meaning, we’re not trying to counter the “war and poverty” narrative by giving a “happy Africa” narrative – instead we’re trying to present Africa as it would appear if one were to simply go outside and walk around. (I recognize that that’s a problematic statement – my walk is different from your walk, and no matter what, different people will choose to photograph different things on different days. You can’t see everything, and you can’t photograph everything you see.) But the point is that we don’t go looking for certain pictures the way a photographer would when trying to market one aspect of Africa or another – we’re not trying to sell you any one view of what Africa is.
The reason I feel it’s important this work be shown is that, as I said above, it’s important for non-Africans documenting Africa to acknowledge that they generally see a lot more than what they can show in traditional media. That said, yes, in some ways it is problematic. (I often wonder if it would feel less problematic if we had chosen a different name. If I told you that we were non-Africans who wanted to show the parts of Africa we feel are familiar but don’t usually get to show, you might think that’s great. When I say we’re calling it “Everyday Africa”, you might think we’re getting presumptuous.)
We’re addressing this with some new phases in our work. As the popularity and inertia of the project spiraled much quicker than we had anticipated – which, by the way, is a great sign that we’re not the only people who felt this was a gap in coverage of the continent – we had to put some serious thought into what it was we had on our hands. What are the two most important elements? That in calling it “Everyday Africa”, we should be looking at what that means from a variety of perspectives. And that the photographs are from phones, the great technological democratizer of imagery – it’s such a cliché to talk about the overwhelming popularity of mobile phones in Africa that at this point it’s barely worth mentioning. And increasingly, those phones have cameras, and people are documenting their own lives.
Now, we’re trying to create a new platform, one that allows for anyone to post images, so those stories can be shared widely, and we can look at what daily life in Africa means from a greater range of perspectives. We’re trying to create a platform that allows the viewer to sort the images by country – all the images from Liberia, from South Africa, etc. – but far more interesting is that they will also be able to sort them based on who the photographer is, be it farmer, businessman, African photographer, Western photographer, tourist, tour guide, villager, mother, nurse, etc., however the photographer identifies himself or herself. As professional photographers, we have made nice pictures – but to me it’s potentially much more interesting to be able to click a button and see every photo taken by a teacher, for example, regardless of country, and see how they view the world around them.
We’re very happy with what we’ve accomplished so far, though we may have already reached our pinnacle of popularity in the Western editorial world. But for us, that’s just a starting point.
Can you describe a few unique visual aesthetic trends that you’ve been able to observe in the self-imaging of Africa?
March 10, 2014
Everyday Africa is an Instagram-based project aiming to document moments from daily life. It was founded in 2012 by the American photojournalist Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill (I first met Austin through his soccer blogging at Vanity Fair (somebody had to do it) in the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup). Initially featuring the work of mostly American foreign correspondents, it now also includes the work of a number of African photographers, like Nana Kofi Acquah (featured before on Africa is a Country), Emeka Okereke and Andrew Esiebo. Chances are you’ve heard of it already as Everyday Africa has received a lot of positive press. Everyday Africa is definitely an important initiative in the north where one-dimensional, highly constructed images of Africans are the norm and so, a while back, I sent Peter some questions (a number of AIAC’ers pitched in too), which he answered. The exchange is below.
Can you talk about the original impetus for Everyday Africa. It was started by American journalists and photographers writing, documenting and reporting in and about Africa, right?
Austin Merrill and I were traveling in Ivory Coast in March 2012, as a writer / photographer team covering the continued strife a year after the country’s post-election violence and the cocoa trade that is the root of turmoil there. Austin is intimately familiar with the country, having lived there at a couple different points in his life, and I had been there before as a photojournalist, and had lived several years “next-door” in Ghana. During the March 2012 trip we began shooting photos on our phones, very casually, and it occurred to us that those images felt much more familiar to us than the ones I was “professionally” shooting for the story we were there to tell.
Having outlined that story above – as you can imagine, it was a bit preconceived. I think often about the process of photojournalism – going into a story, you often feel you “know” the images needed to tell it. If it’s a story with phrases like “continued ethnic violence,” you feel you need photos of refugees, burned down homes, survivors with horrific stories to tell, etc. These are the images that will make sense to the reader; that he or she will find palatable. But there’s an inherent contradiction here: if we’re giving the reader images he or she already expects, then the story reinforces preconceptions and doesn’t teach anything new. Along the way, we also see a lot of daily life moments, but we often pre-edit these out of our story by not even photographing them. Austin and I decided to photograph them.
A couple months later, we were both on the continent again, at the same time but in different locations – he in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, me in Uganda. We kept shooting on our phones, and this time around started a Tumblr blog so we could share the images with each other and a wider audience in real time, or close to it. In the months that followed, we found that a lot of our colleagues shared our frustrations with coverage of the continent and were excited to have an outlet for the day-to-day images. We migrated to Instagram (but kept the Tumblr too) to extend our reach, and things grew rather quickly.
Why is it important for non-Africans to tell African stories?
I’m of the opinion that any culture should be examined both internally and externally. There are, of course, many aspects of a culture that outsiders can’t access or understand fully. On the flip side, it’s easy for people within a culture to put blinders on when examining themselves, whereas an outsider brings a different critical view. At times, Everyday Africa has been criticized purely on the grounds that an outsider should never tell someone else’s story, period. I couldn’t disagree with that statement more – imagine if Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t write about America, or Robert Frank didn’t photograph America. (Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head – one could go on and on here.)
The real issue is that, generally speaking, I don’t think foreign journalists or photographers turn a sincere eye on Africa – instead, they follow the preconceptions I’ve been outlining. They (or should I say, we) tend to parachute in, cover the same well-trodden ground, and move on, without giving the story the same voice they would if covering a similar story in the states or Western Europe. See the ever-popular “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina, who puts it far better than I ever could. Another good read along this theme is Slate Magazine’s new “If It Happened There” feature, covering US news as if it were foreign news. And it’s also worth noting that there are some great exceptions – people who have moved in for the long-haul and write about Africa just as they would anywhere else.
While I’m open to the criticism that we don’t have enough African photographers – which we’ll get into below – I also feel it’s very important to acknowledge that one of my personal goals for this project, initially, was a critique of the function and methodology of Western photojournalism. My experience was not a unique one – if I’m traveling in Ivory Coast and shooting a predetermined narrative, but I’m seeing all this other stuff along the way that doesn’t fit that narrative, then guess what? The same thing is happening to most other Western photographers doing the same work. This is how photojournalism is often responsible for perpetuating what is not necessarily an outright lie but certainly a reinforcement of stereotypes. Without daily life imagery of normal and even mundane situations, the West will still thinks of Africa as poor and starving with no exceptions, the Middle East as explosively violent at all times and in all places, etc. So, while of course it’s important – vitally, crucially important – to see what “everyday Africa” means from the perspective of Africans, it’s also vitally important to point fingers at the notion of photojournalism and poke holes in it, not only the way it is carried out but also the way it is read by an audience.
A quick story: I was once traveling in Europe with a close American friend who I grew up with. My only previous travel at that point had been in the Middle East (this was years ago), so I started talking about that. My friend exclaimed, “I would never travel in an Arab country… What do I know that’s good about them!?” I was very startled. I thought, no matter what the nightly news tells you, there’s a lot to assume that’s good and shared by every culture: a love of family, the care taken in preparing and consuming a good meal, an appreciation for music. The list goes on. But that’s exactly it: if we aren’t shown that those things exist, it’s difficult for an unfamiliar audience to assume that they do.
One more question along those same lines: This is an initiative run by two white, non-Africans to document and market African culture. What do you say to people who question your motives?
To start with, I disagree with the term “market” here, only because the point of Everyday Africa is not to present any one view. My aim is for something more experiential, something that fits the stream (Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) as a narrative. Meaning, we’re not trying to counter the “war and poverty” narrative by giving a “happy Africa” narrative – instead we’re trying to present Africa as it would appear if one were to simply go outside and walk around. (I recognize that that’s a problematic statement – my walk is different from your walk, and no matter what, different people will choose to photograph different things on different days. You can’t see everything, and you can’t photograph everything you see.) But the point is that we don’t go looking for certain pictures the way a photographer would when trying to market one aspect of Africa or another – we’re not trying to sell you any one view of what Africa is.
The reason I feel it’s important this work be shown is that, as I said above, it’s important for non-Africans documenting Africa to acknowledge that they generally see a lot more than what they can show in traditional media. That said, yes, in some ways it is problematic. (I often wonder if it would feel less problematic if we had chosen a different name. If I told you that we were non-Africans who wanted to show the parts of Africa we feel are familiar but don’t usually get to show, you might think that’s great. When I say we’re calling it “Everyday Africa”, you might think we’re getting presumptuous.)
We’re addressing this with some new phases in our work. As the popularity and inertia of the project spiraled much quicker than we had anticipated – which, by the way, is a great sign that we’re not the only people who felt this was a gap in coverage of the continent – we had to put some serious thought into what it was we had on our hands. What are the two most important elements? That in calling it “Everyday Africa”, we should be looking at what that means from a variety of perspectives. And that the photographs are from phones, the great technological democratizer of imagery – it’s such a cliché to talk about the overwhelming popularity of mobile phones in Africa that at this point it’s barely worth mentioning. And increasingly, those phones have cameras, and people are documenting their own lives.
Now, we’re trying to create a new platform, one that allows for anyone to post images, so those stories can be shared widely, and we can look at what daily life in Africa means from a greater range of perspectives. We’re trying to create a platform that allows the viewer to sort the images by country – all the images from Liberia, from South Africa, etc. – but far more interesting is that they will also be able to sort them based on who the photographer is, be it farmer, businessman, African photographer, Western photographer, tourist, tour guide, villager, mother, nurse, etc., however the photographer identifies himself or herself. As professional photographers, we have made nice pictures – but to me it’s potentially much more interesting to be able to click a button and see every photo taken by a teacher, for example, regardless of country, and see how they view the world around them.
We’re very happy with what we’ve accomplished so far, though we may have already reached our pinnacle of popularity in the Western editorial world. But for us, that’s just a starting point.
Can you describe a few unique visual aesthetic trends that you’ve been able to observe in the self-imaging of Africa?
To start with, these are topics – Africa’s self-imaging and photographic practice, related to identity – that have been written about at length and by experts, which I am not. (A recent example that comes to mind is Edwidge Danticat’s piece in Harper’s, “Look At Me”, which is basically a survey of The Walther Collection’s current exhibition on African photography, but still a wonderful overview.) The strongest tradition in African photography, in my opinion and many others’, is portraiture. On the professional level, there are numerous classic examples – Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita – moving toward the more modern, metaphoric, and conceptual – Samuel Fosso, Nandipha Mntambo, etc. George Osodi’s portraits of Nigerian kings have been popular lately, and are an interesting collision of the traditional and modern. We (Everyday Africa) have been lucky to work with Andrew Esiebo lately – his portraits in barbershops are great. (To write in great detail on all these names would be impossible, but suffice it to say that these are artists I feel anyone interested in this topic should familiarize themselves with!)
What I find striking (and less written about and discussed, although Danticat touches on it) is how this tradition is rooted on a functional level. In my experience, living in rural Ghana, photography is about seeing what a person looks like, connecting with them, remembering an event or a time or place. My Ghanaian friends wanted important events in their lives to be documented, but with posed portraiture, not with candid documentary images as is more common in the states. I have a series of pictures called Life Without Lights, all shot at night, looking at the lack of electricity in rural northern Ghana – when my friends saw the dark images, they didn’t understand why I liked them, why I made pictures in which you can’t see the subject’s face.
So there is this obsession with the photograph as a means of identity that ranges from the functional to the high-concept in African portraiture – which perhaps interests me coming from a Western photojournalism tradition because we get so caught up in making a “good” photograph or an “artsy” photograph, like my Life Without Lights work, that we sometimes forget to make a “meaningful” photograph, if that makes sense.
As far as Western trends that Africans practice, I’ll speak to what I know best, which is photojournalism, and simply say this: it’s always wonderful to see how much more intimate photojournalism of Africa is when Africans are also behind the camera. David Goldblatt comes to mind, as does Akintunde Akinleye’s World Press Photo winning image.
How this all plays out in Everyday Africa is that it’s been very obvious that the photos made by African photographers on our feed tend to be the most intimate. This goes for the work of Nana Kofi Acquah and Andrew, who I’ve mentioned, as well as Jide Alakija, a wedding photographer who joined us for the special Nigeria segment. We also featured some work from Swazi students learning photography in a class calledMy Future, My Voice, and it was incredible – simple, intimate moments of the students’ friends and family members.
How does the historical imagined Africa of the West figure into your vision of the content? How does it figure into the ways Africans see themselves?
I think “imagined” is a key word here. What I find troubling is that the exotic and /or degrading version of Africa we’ve grown used to in photography can actually cause Africa to become imaginary in the Western mind – to occupy the same part of our brain as fantasy and adventure. Take myself for example – I grew up reading Tolkien and watching Star Wars, then went through that late teens / early twenties phase of becoming politically aware and wanting to learn more about “the world” (vast that it is), simultaneously began studying photography and particularly exotic images of far-off places… and all of that manifested itself into my becoming a volunteer and moving to Ghana, with undefined desires to find adventure and help people. I’m hardly alone in this path.
So for my own photography in this project, I want to cut through the photos that create that very imaginary Africa – or, in the nature of the stream, to show them alongside of images that are more familiar. Basically, if I could turn back time and show this project to my 21-year-old self, I’d want him to understand that when his plane landed in Ghana, he would also see things that were familiar.
But at this point – I can really only speak for myself. We have so many contributors now, and I don’t give any of them much direction.
Who curates Everyday Africa? Can anyone submit images and post them?
We’ve done a variety of things on our feed. If there are no special segments happening, then there is a group of 14 or so photographers who have the login info and post freely – I’ve just asked them to try to space out their posts by a few hours, so that we keep a robust, steady flow. I don’t direct them on what images to post, generally.
We’ve done several special features on the feed and are trying to do more – we’re trying for one week per month. Sometimes this is simply the work of one photographer who is just joining us. Other times it is more interesting – for example, when Nichole Sobecki joined us, Sarah Leen, Director of Photography at National Geographic, selected Nichole’s photos and posted them with commentary. The most fun, most interesting thing so far was a recent segment on Nigeria: Helon Habila, the Nigerian author, selected the work from four photographers – Jide Alakija, Andrew Esiebo, Glenna Gordon, Jane Hahn – and posted their photos with his commentary. We’ll be doing other things along these lines, and some even more creative ideas that I don’t want to give away just yet.
And while the long-term goal is to have a new platform that anyone can contribute to, we also plan in the short-term to have a segment of user-submitted photos (we get them all the time), hopefully sometime soon.
Many of the Everyday Africa photos are candid shots taken of people on the street. For decades a debate has persisted among photographers regarding the ethics of street photography. Some see no problem with capturing images of unsuspecting strangers while others bemoan street photography’s frequent evasion of subjects’ consent. How does this ethical issue of consent come into play when foreign photojournalists like you engage in street photography in African countries?
I believe in street photography, and the photographer’s right to photograph candid street scenes. Of course, if someone tells me not to photograph them, I don’t photograph them – but in the interest of preserving a scene, I’m a fan of candid photography, regardless of the location. I’d be delighted to see more street photography shot by Africans in America or Europe. In fact sometimes I do see it, on Instagram.
My favorite function of the Instagram feed has been to post “live” images, which I feel are even more impactful in countering stereotypes; not only do our photos have an ‘everyday’ feel, but they also seem closer and more familiar when we are able to say, “this just happened thirty seconds ago.”
Unfortunately, that hasn’t been practical in terms of keeping a steady flow on the feed. Many of our contributors (including the African ones) only live on the continent part-time, and we’re often dealing with connectivity issues. So it’s often more practical to post a batch of images after a trip, rather than during. Nana Kofi, for example, was traveling in Ivory Coast recently and was rarely able to get online – but we saw his images once he got back online, at home in Ghana.
Can you say something about the kinds of phones used by photographers who contribute to Everyday Africa?
At this point almost all of our images are from iPhones. When we mention that, we get accused of being walking advertisements for Apple – but frankly, I couldn’t care less which phone the images are made on. They just happen to mostly be from iPhones. I’m sure that will change as time goes on. Just a few days ago, in fact, Nana Kofi revealed on his Facebook page that he’s been shooting more on his Android now, and the photos are beautiful! But I think so far, he may be the only one.
Will more African photographers be represented on Everyday Africa?
To be honest, we never sat down at the beginning of the project and said, “we want x amount of photographers from here, here, and here.” People just asked to contribute, and I generally said sure, and things grew quickly from there. There was never an intention to omit African photography. Looking back, if I had known how unwieldy this beast of a project would become, I probably would have tried to unroll things more slowly, choose photographers regionally, etc., but well, here we are.
I was really thrilled when Nana Kofi wanted to be a part. I love his work and he’s been one of our strongest contributors, and we’ve added more African photographers since then.
The desire for more African photographers is not at all in response to criticism. Of course we want more! Like I said, it all stems from wanting to view the continent visually from as many viewpoints as possible. So we want more African photographers, and eventually will open this up to people who aren’t professional photographers but are shooting pictures on their phones. One issue with getting more African photographers in the short term: the professionals who are strongly using Instagram often don’t need us! They have a better following and better feed than we do anyways!
Is the decision to include only pictures taken or sourced on the continent deliberate?
Yes, although we’ve toyed with the idea of doing diaspora segments. I’m sure it will happen sooner or later.
How do you deal with the challenges of covering Africa as a signifier for a range of meanings—a continent, as a diaspora, as land-mass filled with diverse people? When and why is essentializing “Africa” important? When is it dangerous?
I’m sure these are questions Africa is a Country have to deal with often! But, perhaps like yourselves, our feeling is that if the problem of stereotyping is continent-wide, then we can try to deal with it on a continent-wide basis. That said, there certainly is a danger. I’m heartened by the large volume of comments we get that are location-specific – “I’ve been there, I live there, it’s my favorite place, thanks for showing this place,” etc. – but I do worry that people scrolling through their phones simply see our photos in their feed, think “Africa sure is cool,” click the ‘like’ button, and move on. Then again, in some ways that’s what we want, for people not to have to think of the continent in such heavy terms all the time. We recognize that we can’t teach people about any one place in great detail, or outline the differences between the Ashanti and the Maasai – it’s simply not the purpose the project serves.
Imagine a Tumblr called “Everyday South America”, or “Everyday Asia.” Would it make The New Yorker? Get so much media play?
Great question. Thinking about The New Yorker and the editorial world as a whole, I think the answer is yes, if the photos were good. But in terms of the idea, and not the image quality – perhaps not. People realize that, while every region has its media-generated stereotypes, Africa has arguably been the most damaged by them – which means they recognize the need for a project like ours.
Finally, the New York Times recently featured an Instagram image on its front page (of Alex Rodriguez). What does that mean for news photography?
You saved the least interesting question for last – don’t ask me, ask a news photographer!
* Image Credit: “Two hawkers are heavily engrossed in a conversation at the beach where they sell beads” in Lagos, Nigeria by Nana Kofi Acquah.
http://africasacountry.com/instagramming-africa/
What I find striking (and less written about and discussed, although Danticat touches on it) is how this tradition is rooted on a functional level. In my experience, living in rural Ghana, photography is about seeing what a person looks like, connecting with them, remembering an event or a time or place. My Ghanaian friends wanted important events in their lives to be documented, but with posed portraiture, not with candid documentary images as is more common in the states. I have a series of pictures called Life Without Lights, all shot at night, looking at the lack of electricity in rural northern Ghana – when my friends saw the dark images, they didn’t understand why I liked them, why I made pictures in which you can’t see the subject’s face.
So there is this obsession with the photograph as a means of identity that ranges from the functional to the high-concept in African portraiture – which perhaps interests me coming from a Western photojournalism tradition because we get so caught up in making a “good” photograph or an “artsy” photograph, like my Life Without Lights work, that we sometimes forget to make a “meaningful” photograph, if that makes sense.
As far as Western trends that Africans practice, I’ll speak to what I know best, which is photojournalism, and simply say this: it’s always wonderful to see how much more intimate photojournalism of Africa is when Africans are also behind the camera. David Goldblatt comes to mind, as does Akintunde Akinleye’s World Press Photo winning image.
How this all plays out in Everyday Africa is that it’s been very obvious that the photos made by African photographers on our feed tend to be the most intimate. This goes for the work of Nana Kofi Acquah and Andrew, who I’ve mentioned, as well as Jide Alakija, a wedding photographer who joined us for the special Nigeria segment. We also featured some work from Swazi students learning photography in a class calledMy Future, My Voice, and it was incredible – simple, intimate moments of the students’ friends and family members.
How does the historical imagined Africa of the West figure into your vision of the content? How does it figure into the ways Africans see themselves?
I think “imagined” is a key word here. What I find troubling is that the exotic and /or degrading version of Africa we’ve grown used to in photography can actually cause Africa to become imaginary in the Western mind – to occupy the same part of our brain as fantasy and adventure. Take myself for example – I grew up reading Tolkien and watching Star Wars, then went through that late teens / early twenties phase of becoming politically aware and wanting to learn more about “the world” (vast that it is), simultaneously began studying photography and particularly exotic images of far-off places… and all of that manifested itself into my becoming a volunteer and moving to Ghana, with undefined desires to find adventure and help people. I’m hardly alone in this path.
So for my own photography in this project, I want to cut through the photos that create that very imaginary Africa – or, in the nature of the stream, to show them alongside of images that are more familiar. Basically, if I could turn back time and show this project to my 21-year-old self, I’d want him to understand that when his plane landed in Ghana, he would also see things that were familiar.
But at this point – I can really only speak for myself. We have so many contributors now, and I don’t give any of them much direction.
Who curates Everyday Africa? Can anyone submit images and post them?
We’ve done a variety of things on our feed. If there are no special segments happening, then there is a group of 14 or so photographers who have the login info and post freely – I’ve just asked them to try to space out their posts by a few hours, so that we keep a robust, steady flow. I don’t direct them on what images to post, generally.
We’ve done several special features on the feed and are trying to do more – we’re trying for one week per month. Sometimes this is simply the work of one photographer who is just joining us. Other times it is more interesting – for example, when Nichole Sobecki joined us, Sarah Leen, Director of Photography at National Geographic, selected Nichole’s photos and posted them with commentary. The most fun, most interesting thing so far was a recent segment on Nigeria: Helon Habila, the Nigerian author, selected the work from four photographers – Jide Alakija, Andrew Esiebo, Glenna Gordon, Jane Hahn – and posted their photos with his commentary. We’ll be doing other things along these lines, and some even more creative ideas that I don’t want to give away just yet.
And while the long-term goal is to have a new platform that anyone can contribute to, we also plan in the short-term to have a segment of user-submitted photos (we get them all the time), hopefully sometime soon.
Many of the Everyday Africa photos are candid shots taken of people on the street. For decades a debate has persisted among photographers regarding the ethics of street photography. Some see no problem with capturing images of unsuspecting strangers while others bemoan street photography’s frequent evasion of subjects’ consent. How does this ethical issue of consent come into play when foreign photojournalists like you engage in street photography in African countries?
I believe in street photography, and the photographer’s right to photograph candid street scenes. Of course, if someone tells me not to photograph them, I don’t photograph them – but in the interest of preserving a scene, I’m a fan of candid photography, regardless of the location. I’d be delighted to see more street photography shot by Africans in America or Europe. In fact sometimes I do see it, on Instagram.
My favorite function of the Instagram feed has been to post “live” images, which I feel are even more impactful in countering stereotypes; not only do our photos have an ‘everyday’ feel, but they also seem closer and more familiar when we are able to say, “this just happened thirty seconds ago.”
Unfortunately, that hasn’t been practical in terms of keeping a steady flow on the feed. Many of our contributors (including the African ones) only live on the continent part-time, and we’re often dealing with connectivity issues. So it’s often more practical to post a batch of images after a trip, rather than during. Nana Kofi, for example, was traveling in Ivory Coast recently and was rarely able to get online – but we saw his images once he got back online, at home in Ghana.
Can you say something about the kinds of phones used by photographers who contribute to Everyday Africa?
At this point almost all of our images are from iPhones. When we mention that, we get accused of being walking advertisements for Apple – but frankly, I couldn’t care less which phone the images are made on. They just happen to mostly be from iPhones. I’m sure that will change as time goes on. Just a few days ago, in fact, Nana Kofi revealed on his Facebook page that he’s been shooting more on his Android now, and the photos are beautiful! But I think so far, he may be the only one.
Will more African photographers be represented on Everyday Africa?
To be honest, we never sat down at the beginning of the project and said, “we want x amount of photographers from here, here, and here.” People just asked to contribute, and I generally said sure, and things grew quickly from there. There was never an intention to omit African photography. Looking back, if I had known how unwieldy this beast of a project would become, I probably would have tried to unroll things more slowly, choose photographers regionally, etc., but well, here we are.
I was really thrilled when Nana Kofi wanted to be a part. I love his work and he’s been one of our strongest contributors, and we’ve added more African photographers since then.
The desire for more African photographers is not at all in response to criticism. Of course we want more! Like I said, it all stems from wanting to view the continent visually from as many viewpoints as possible. So we want more African photographers, and eventually will open this up to people who aren’t professional photographers but are shooting pictures on their phones. One issue with getting more African photographers in the short term: the professionals who are strongly using Instagram often don’t need us! They have a better following and better feed than we do anyways!
Is the decision to include only pictures taken or sourced on the continent deliberate?
Yes, although we’ve toyed with the idea of doing diaspora segments. I’m sure it will happen sooner or later.
How do you deal with the challenges of covering Africa as a signifier for a range of meanings—a continent, as a diaspora, as land-mass filled with diverse people? When and why is essentializing “Africa” important? When is it dangerous?
I’m sure these are questions Africa is a Country have to deal with often! But, perhaps like yourselves, our feeling is that if the problem of stereotyping is continent-wide, then we can try to deal with it on a continent-wide basis. That said, there certainly is a danger. I’m heartened by the large volume of comments we get that are location-specific – “I’ve been there, I live there, it’s my favorite place, thanks for showing this place,” etc. – but I do worry that people scrolling through their phones simply see our photos in their feed, think “Africa sure is cool,” click the ‘like’ button, and move on. Then again, in some ways that’s what we want, for people not to have to think of the continent in such heavy terms all the time. We recognize that we can’t teach people about any one place in great detail, or outline the differences between the Ashanti and the Maasai – it’s simply not the purpose the project serves.
Imagine a Tumblr called “Everyday South America”, or “Everyday Asia.” Would it make The New Yorker? Get so much media play?
Great question. Thinking about The New Yorker and the editorial world as a whole, I think the answer is yes, if the photos were good. But in terms of the idea, and not the image quality – perhaps not. People realize that, while every region has its media-generated stereotypes, Africa has arguably been the most damaged by them – which means they recognize the need for a project like ours.
Finally, the New York Times recently featured an Instagram image on its front page (of Alex Rodriguez). What does that mean for news photography?
You saved the least interesting question for last – don’t ask me, ask a news photographer!
* Image Credit: “Two hawkers are heavily engrossed in a conversation at the beach where they sell beads” in Lagos, Nigeria by Nana Kofi Acquah.
http://africasacountry.com/instagramming-africa/
AfriLeaks website to expose abuses in Africa
Journalists are hoping that the public will leak more information to them via the internet
A whistle-blowing website which aims to expose politicians and businessmen who abuse power in Africa has been launched by media and campaign groups.
AfriLeaks will give people a chance to leak sensitive information anonymously.
The site's founders say it is an attempt to boost investigative journalism to expose widespread corruption and human rights abuses.
It will also help circumvent growing surveillance by governments and corporate firms, they say.
Afrileaks, made up of 19 media outlets and activist groups, says it is committed to "speaking truth to power".
'Digital safety'
"You will be able to send us documents and select which of our member organisations should investigate it," it says.
"We've designed a system that helps you to share these materials while protecting your own identity, so that it becomes impossible to identify you as the source of the leak."
Edward Snowden has been exiled in Russia since leaking details of US surveillance programmes
Most of the 19 are newspapers and include South Africa's Mail & Guardian, Kenya's Daily Nation and Nigeria's Premium Times.
The Mail & Guardian says AfriLeaks is modelled along the lines of Europe's GlobaLeaks with the aim of making whistle-blowing safer.
"In the post-Snowden world in which we live, with government and corporate surveillance a reality, it has become critically important for journalists and whistle-blowers to take every precaution to ensure their digital safety," the paper reports.
The US wants to put ex-security contractor Edward Snowden on trial for leaking to the media in 2013 details of mass surveillance programmes. He is exiled in Russia.
Correspondents say newspapers in multi-party democracies in Africa have often exposed corruption and human rights abuses.
The challenge AfriLeaks faces is to get whistle-blowers in repressive states like Eritrea and Sudan, where control over the internet is tight, they say.
Journalists are hoping that the public will leak more information to them via the internet
A whistle-blowing website which aims to expose politicians and businessmen who abuse power in Africa has been launched by media and campaign groups.
AfriLeaks will give people a chance to leak sensitive information anonymously.
The site's founders say it is an attempt to boost investigative journalism to expose widespread corruption and human rights abuses.
It will also help circumvent growing surveillance by governments and corporate firms, they say.
Afrileaks, made up of 19 media outlets and activist groups, says it is committed to "speaking truth to power".
'Digital safety'
"You will be able to send us documents and select which of our member organisations should investigate it," it says.
"We've designed a system that helps you to share these materials while protecting your own identity, so that it becomes impossible to identify you as the source of the leak."
Most of the 19 are newspapers and include South Africa's Mail & Guardian, Kenya's Daily Nation and Nigeria's Premium Times.
The Mail & Guardian says AfriLeaks is modelled along the lines of Europe's GlobaLeaks with the aim of making whistle-blowing safer.
"In the post-Snowden world in which we live, with government and corporate surveillance a reality, it has become critically important for journalists and whistle-blowers to take every precaution to ensure their digital safety," the paper reports.
The US wants to put ex-security contractor Edward Snowden on trial for leaking to the media in 2013 details of mass surveillance programmes. He is exiled in Russia.
Correspondents say newspapers in multi-party democracies in Africa have often exposed corruption and human rights abuses.
The challenge AfriLeaks faces is to get whistle-blowers in repressive states like Eritrea and Sudan, where control over the internet is tight, they say.
AFileaks?
Rigby.
The #1 Rated Mixtape of all Time
the true size of Africa is fuggin crazy