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Filling blanks around the globe - humans first

Thursday, November 20, 2008

YOU WOULDN'T BE A SELF-RESPECTING newspaper Editorial Board - or a civic-minded broadcaster or blogger - if you hadn’t issued your own “Memo to the President-Elect”. Much of the sage advice flying around has centered on foreign policy, of course, to get America’s proper place in the wider world re-established with honor.

Unsurprisingly, it's the the two overseas wars started by the Bush administration which get the lion’s share of punditry - much of it now making the hard-to-contest assumption that Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State.

 

But what’s the chance that the first US President with origins in Africa will be impelled to prioritize an end to what has been called “Africa’s First World War”? This war has figured as effectively one big gap in the Bush team's international agenda, but in the dire killing fields of the sadly misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo, nearly six million people have died since hostilities broke out 10 years ago – and a total of nine different countries’ troops have gotten involved, eager for the rich plunder to be looted from among Congo’s abundant natural resources.

 

That extraordinary number of active on-the-ground armies has now reduced essentially to two – the Congolese national army loyal to President Joseph Kabila versus the rebel force FDLR, comprising ethnic Tutsis led by Laurent Nkunda. This Tutsi army functions as a proxy for neighboring Rwanda, no matter how loudly that country continues to deny the fact to the international media. More ominously still, BBC reporters have now recorded sightings once again of both Zimbabwean and Angolan troops.

 

The violence continues despite periodic peace “agreements” and despite the presence of the biggest United Nations peace mission in the world, numbering 17,000 soldiers. Only yesterday 44 community groups in Congo’s blighted eastern region (ranging from women’s associations to church parishes) sent a desperate letter to the UN’s Security Council complaining about its force as “powerless” and “ineffective”, and demanding a bigger, stronger presence.

 

In part their message read: "We don't know which saint to pray to; we are condemned to death by all this violence and displacement. We have been abandoned".

 

These protesting groups comprise what the dogged field reporter Mark Doyle of the BBC believes is an “authentic voice” of the Congolese people. Notice I say people.

 

That may seem obvious. Ah, but …

 

I've noticed during this conflict, as in other long-running African stories, some western media falling into what I’ve called a “stereotype trap”, and opting for alternative, new “angles” - almost always of a predictable kind - to the numbingly perpetual human misery being reported.

 

It was with a correspondent's sinking sense of over-familiarity that I saw this week a headline in the normally judicious New York Times. It proclaimed a new slant, over a story by Jeffrey Gettleman: “Congo Violence Reaches Past Human Sufferers to Endangered Mountain Gorillas”.

 

Of course an endangered species can often present an affecting narrative … but given the circumstances - currently about 250,000 uprooted human inhabitants of the region - it’s a pretty poor journalistic priority.

 

Across Congo's eastern border earlier this year, Cynthia McFadden of ABC News told her viewers that she and her team "found ourselves with one day 'extra' in Rwanda". And so, what did she do? She filed a report tagged ¨Rwanda´s Famous Apes¨.

 

IT'S AS IF NEWSROOMS SUBCONSCIOUSLY (or maybe even consciously, I fear) ask themselves “What does the audience know about Rwanda and Africa’s Great Lakes region? Oh, the 1994 massacre of Tutsis, yes – but in movies, what? … it’s 'Gorillas in the Mist', isn’t it? Let’s give ‘em gorillas”.

 

Or to take another country - and I’ve seen this particular stereotype far too many times – “What do people know about Kenya? Pampered and decadent old colonial types, of course, in the style of 'White Mischief' or 'Out of Africa'. It’s time for new a piece on that.”

 

Not to pick on the hard-working Gettleman, but he’s the Times’ most recently appointed East African Bureau Chief, based in Kenya - and he wasn’t long in the job there before he sent the obligatory report on an English aristocrat (whom he dutifully described as a ¨cravat-wearing scion¨ of his family) in a sensational, gin-and-tonic-soaked murder case.

 

Hardly the most important news out of Africa, given everything else going on.

 

Meanwhile the front-and-center story, of the devastated Congolese people, has the French press strongly activated (- they’re never especially enamored of animals, and they also have an activist national leader already in place to rally behind). They are playing up President Nicolas Sarkozy's determination to make the UN Security Council boost the peace mission by a further three thousand troops and police. Britain's Gordon Brown, too, without as much of a media chorus behind him, is pushing to get the Council to vote on the issue as soon as today.

 

For its part, the Obama-Biden team has not gone on record to propose anything specific for dealing with the Congo problem. But it’s worth recalling that, as a senator, Barack Obama sponsored a Congo aid bill in December 2005, and helped to write legislation aimed at stabilizing the country in October 2007, devoting $52 million in US funds to the effort.

 

**CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN EVERY WEEK - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

 

 

IT WAS ABOUT THAT SAME, LONG-TROUBLED PORTION OF AFRICA that novelist Joseph Conrad famously wrote this, just over a century ago now:

 

“When I was a little chap I had a passion for maps … At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there' … But there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after."

 

I share that enthusiasm for maps, which the background design of this website is quietly intended to celebrate - and as with Conrad’s character Marlow, the passion dates from childhood, in my case often spent poring over maps with a favorite uncle who was a merchant seaman.

 

So you might imagine how much I’m jazzed by this week’s 15th anniversary publication of the Oxford Atlas of the World, from - where else? - that great Walton Street repository of all human knowledge, the Oxford University Press.

 

OUP’s Editor of Atlases, Ben Keene - who was educated in anthropology before landing this (to my mind) unbelievable plum position - sighed a little at the web-influenced triteness of my questions. But he told me that his 584-page hard-cover Leviathan (it's also sixteen-inches-by-twelve-by-three in size, eight pounds in weight) will easily hold its own against all internet mapping applications. "A book atlas is still the perfect medium to show how geography is the study of space, and how places relate to each other in space – and it still does that job better than any screen imagery can.”

 

“Besides”, Keene said, “We sell 20,000 to 25,000 copies every year. The Atlas certainly hasn’t outlived its usefulness”.

 

You won’t have any argument from me on that.

 

THAT "HANKERING" AFTER AFRICA IS SOMETHING ELSE I share with Marlow, as this column demonstrates almost weekly.

 

I’m off there again this weekend. My next dispatch will be from the southern end of the continent.

 

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