17/04/2012

Afua Hirsch, from The Guardian, on reporting in Africa

Appealing reflections on Africa are moving forward this month!

Please, read this article by Afua Hirsch on the Guardian: 


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/15/west-lazy-reporting-africa?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038


The west's lazy reporting of Africa

Once in a while we see a positive 'Africa season' – then western media revert to sensationalist and stereotypical coverage


"Bad stuff, obviously, happens in Africa just like everywhere else – and no one is denying that those issues should be reported, but their coverage would be greatly improved if it were led by journalists whose mentality were not shaped by the Hugh Trevor-Ropers of this world", she writes, Hugh Trevor-Ropers being an English historian who declared in 1963 that “there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness."


She adds later on: 'Africa is not, as the New York Review of Books reported recently, "plagued by countless nasty little wars". Nor can aviation within the continent, as Condé Nast Traveller recently suggested, be summarised by a "combination of political corruption, civil wars, numerous rogue carriers, airplanes at the end of their life cycles"...'

Afua Hirsch is the Guardian's west Africa correspondent based in Ghana. She makes here a loud and clear call. 

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