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Picturing advances in freedom

Thursday, July 5, 2007

National holidays like yesterday’s Fourth of July. Oh yes, and the immobility of post-surgery convalescence. These are two things that definitely encourage you to catch up with media genres you may otherwise treat cursorily - in my case glossy magazines and cable TV.  I’ve seen a lot of both since being medically forced to put my feet up, literally.

I emerge sorry that I didn't much earlier read through July’s special Africa edition of Vanity Fair, a magazine in whose company I don’t normally spend much time unless I’m sure of a shower soon afterward (a distaste or prejudice that kicks in even more strongly with Britain’s Tatler). But this VF Africa issue, the result of a guest-editorship gig by post-punk musician and anti-poverty campaigner Bono, was somewhat different, I’m happy to report.

 

In media circles and among Afrophiles alike, the VF "special" has drawn the inevitable cynical criticisms, mostly centering on the magazine's often squirm-making celebration of glitzy consumerism, in editorial as well as advertising material, alongside Africa’s raw and gritty realities.

 

But there were, I believe, some notable successes. As often, pictures do the job best. Bono and his team chose a stunning portfolio from the photographer Antonin Kratochvil, who is Czech but was exiled long ago to a Paris base and co-founding membership of the VII photojournalism cooperative, and has described himself as a refugee as he travels the globe capturing the experience of, in many cases, Third World refugees.

 

In Zambia he photographed AIDS sufferers; each person twice, the second time being just weeks after he or she had begun treatment with anti-retroviral drugs. Thus we can sharply appreciate the dramatic transformation made possible for individuals like 28 year-old Silvia Ng'andwe, seen first in late March this year (above left) and again after 40 days of treatment (right) in May. The feature was titled, not over-exaggeratedly in my opinion, "The Lazarus Effect".

 

Not so long ago respectable journals of opinion were saying it was impractical to extend anti-retrovirals’ benefits (costing $10,000 a year per person in the rich West) to the poor and infrastructure-challenged continent of Africa.

 

Well, now a start has been made - thanks to a combination of the Kofi Annan-originated Global Fund for AIDS (and other diseases); governments, including to his rare credit George W Bush’s Administration; non-profits like the William J Clinton Foundation; and not least (the guest-editor has to be acknowledged, after all) some contribution from Bono’s own commercial consumer initiative Product (Red). Currently something like 28% of Africa’s AIDS victims - that’s 1.34 million people - are receiving the drugs, up from only 1% - or 50,000 people - five years ago. Such progress in winning freedom over needless deaths is well worth picturing.

 

 

 

 

ON THE OTHER HAND – AND THERE ALWAYS IS ONE when you report on Africa – the magazine also came up with some howlers. It assigned Sebastian Unger (author of The Perfect Storm) to report on China’s vast incursions into Africa - a crucially important issue to my mind, as regular readers of this column know. This writer, however, has struck me in the past as all too passionate for a story’s drama (and perhaps especially its goriest dramas) and more than a bit slapdash about simple facts.

 

Unger writes at one point that while China has long been involved politically in the continent, “it has been in only the last 10 or 15 years, however, that China has entered Africa with bulldozers, engineers, and construction crews”.

 

It seems Unger hasn’t heard about the astonishing (and, I have to say, very well-known) TanZam Railroad, that China built for the governments of Tanzania and landlocked Zambia, running from Tanzania’s capital and port city Dar-es-Salam well over a thousand miles inland to Zambia’s Kapiri Mposhi railhead, and climbing to a full 4,600 feet in altitude along the way. Using in large part its own “bulldozers, engineers, and construction crews” - who swarmed just about everywhere in their Mao Tse Tung-style uniforms across whole stretches of Central and East Africa - China completed this vast development project much longer than “10 or 15 years” ago. It was way back in 1976, to be accurate.

 

Unger also fell into some unfortunate impressionability, as he focused his reporting on Chinese support for Sudanese suppression of the Darfur region’s rebels, and of its massacred civilian population. He received a useful briefing from some leaders of the JEM, the Justice and Equality Movement of Sudan, and he goes to some length to convey evocatively the setting - plastic chairs bunched on an old rug beneath a tree - and the credentials of his briefers, including a doctor from London, a lawyer from Eritrea, and someone he calls “a professor-in-exile”. Unger claims: “They were possibly the most educated group of rebels in the world”.

 

I can only think Unger must have met very few groups of rebels during his time in this world.

 

 

AS WELL AS CHECKING HIS FACTS MORE THOROUGHLY, Unger might well have benefited from reading some earlier work from a fellow-contributor to VF's Africa edition, the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, a winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing. For Bono, Wainaina wrote a largely cheerful piece about his home country’s prospects. In 2005, though, in Britain’s literary quarterly Granta he gave the world the most wonderful, bitingly satirical (and hilarious) guide to “How To Write About Africa”. It is pinned to my bulletin-board. Let me excerpt just three bits of his “advice”: 

 

“The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular”.

 

“Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the 'real Africa', and you want that on your dust jacket."

 

“Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters.”

 

As I say, Sebastian Unger could possibly benefit from such reminders – and so can many other, more habituated writers about Africa, myself included.

 

 

 

SO, TO THAT OTHER MEDIA MODE, 24-HOUR CABLE NEWS, for which dedicated monitoring works best if the consumer is trapped (possibly with the leg elevated, like me) in a bed or chair.

 

When this week’s developing story on Britain’s latest wave of terrorist attacks first broke in the early hours of last Friday, I had a front-row seat for comparing differences among the main cable news practitioners.

  

You might already think 24-hour coverage is not really MSNBC’s game anyway – certainly not on the graveyard shifts or even just at offpeak times. And you'd be right. The network is, for instance, planning to soon switch to taped-only, no live material on Saturday afternoons, as it started doing on Sundays last December. But its lackadaisical response to car-bombs being found in London was especially striking to me – MSNBC staff actually appeared asleep at the wheel compared with the very alert dawn patrols of CNN and Fox News.

 

The show “First Look” at 5.00 am, then repeated at 5.30, seemed at pains to avoid the subject, and it was only given any noticeable (though still skewed) attention much later on, when anchor Joel Connable had to “toss” to the sister network CNBC Europe for a market report. "The discovery of what police in London are calling an explosive device is having a big effect on the markets there," said Cannable.

  

That business-based blinder-factor, as demonstrated here, reminded me of the ugly reaction on  Fox's service to the London Tube and bus bombs of two years ago. It seemed there, too, that the impact on financial markets took precedence, certainly when Foxman Brit Hume actually found himself saying (about an event, mark you, that killed 52 people and injured hundreds more): “When I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, ‘Hmmm, time to buy.’”

 

 

UNCONFINED JOY AT THE PICTURES AND SOUND OF ALAN JOHNSTON'S RELEASE. After more than three months of solitary confinement, repeated death threats, and at the end some rough physical treatment, the BBC's Gaza correspondent emerged to instantly return - without skipping a beat, it seemed - to reporter mode. He’s a man - a Scot, I’m glad to say - of considerable inner resource.

 

As he took care to point out swiftly, he had been buoyed by support from the thousands of listeners who called, through their world-wide online petition, for just such a peaceful outcome to his ordeal.

 

Among the avalanche of e-mailers and texters to the nowadays incongruous-sounding Bush House (the London HQ of the BBC’s World Service - nothing to do with any US Presidency) all of them eager to add their delight now Johnston was out of danger, was one well-wisher signing himself only Christopher, from Hoboken, New Jersey.  He had been initially scared by turning on the radio and hearing Johnson’s captivity being described in the past tense. Relief flowed when he learned that “this good and compassionate man and excellent journalist” was released, not dead.

 

Christopher's message continued:

“It's Independence Day here in the United States, the day we celebrate freedom (from, well, you, but that's water under the bridge!). Today I will be celebrating Alan's freedom as well as my own.”