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Spread the good news

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Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports there’s more happening in Africa than we thought.


In 1997, when I landed in Mali, West Africa, as a volunteer with the U.S. Peace Corps, my knowledge of the place was based mostly on broadcasts of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia and the fantasies of Joseph Conrad. The first night, I was awakened by a distant thumping and couldn’t go back to sleep as I imagined my hosts drumming around a fire, enacting some ancient, possibly savage, rite. It was only through the light of many days that I learned the noise was from women pounding millet and sorghum, which they rose before dawn to do for the day’s meals.

The root of my assumptions about Mali and Malians was a diet of bad news — and badly reported news — on Africa that even the most discriminating Western publications have found difficult to resist. “[We] constantly face an American view of Africa that’s been mediated through stereotypes,” Frederick Cooper, a historian at New York University, once told me. “For an Africanist, reading The New York Times was just as depressing in 2004 as it was in 1964, or probably worse. In 1964, they were at least reporting on new things happening. Instead every reporter wants to rewrite “Heart of Darkness.”

Most foreign coverage of Africa is by journalists who parachute into a place and wrap a story in a matter of hours or days; they don’t know the background and fail to give adequate context to the issues and events they are covering. Instead, they fall back on what journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault calls “the four D’s of the African apocalypse — death, disease, disaster, and despair,” plus corruption, which have become a convenient short-hand for most news about the continent. In Hunter-Gault’s latest book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2006), she argues that there is a world of news to report beyond this and that Africa is now experiencing the earliest quivering of a rebirth that values democracy, human rights, civic life, and women’s empowerment. Hunter-Gault takes this argument a step further by insisting that the endlessly bleak and clichéd accounts have actually colored the rest of the world’s perception of Africa, discouraging foreign engagement and investment, and leading to pessimism and confusion there and elsewhere.

Hunter-Gault, who won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards for her coverage of Africa, is well-suited to make this case. She was first sent to South Africa in 1985 on assignment for PBS’ MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and was till recently the Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN. She bases her assertions on her own detailed reporting — including multiple interviews with Nelson Mandela, his successor as president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, and a host of other high-level government officials — and the work of a small group of colleagues. She starts the book with what she knows best both professionally and personally: South Africa’s transition from apartheid to real democracy, weaving in her own experience in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, during which she helped desegregate the University of Georgia as its first black woman student.

For Hunter-Gault, 1994, the year apartheid officially ended and South Africa held its first truly democratic election, was a major turning point for all of Africa. The transition has not been without its challenges, she writes. South Africa, for example, has more than five million people living with HIV — the highest number in the world — and a staggering majority of the population was, until a decade ago, totally disenfranchised from education, health care, civic life, and professional opportunities.

The journalist acknowledges this in her deconstruction of the South African government’s policies on HIV/AIDS, affirmative action, and the economy, but also offers nuggets of hope and progress. While president Mbeki has been criticized for his ambiguity on the extent of the AIDS crisis, she gives him the benefit of the doubt and touts the country’s program of free antiretroviral drugs, and the fact that it spends far more than any other African nation (about $2 billion between 2003 to 2006) on treating the disease. She also discusses the country’s urgent efforts to increase access to education and employment for its majority black population. This is critical if South Africa is going to compete in a global market, but it has also overwhelmed many universities, whose budgets are contracting under the burden of so many needy students. Hunter-Gault contends that this dire problem has spurred innovations, such as the CIDA (Community and Individual Development Association), a free university for business and management education supported by corporate donors.

Based on her American experience, she notes that the sudden creation or implementation of laws can take generations to be fully felt. “It is through the prism of the United States’ history that I daily bear witness to the changes occurring in South Africa, and that is the yardstick against which I measure its progress.” But in this dance forward — and back — Hunter-Gault sees South Africa as the most powerful black-led country in the world and believes that it has the potential to lead not only its own Renaissance but that of an entire continent.

With South Africa at the helm, all of Africa is taking its first uncertain, but meaningful, steps toward democracy. She writes: “[T]here is a second wind blowing through the continent today: the forty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa are attempting to break free of the lingering legacy of colonialism, as well as many of the demons of their own design.” This new movement, she says, is most evident in the founding of NEPAD, or New Partnership for African Development, in 2001 and the formation of the African Union in 2002.

NEPAD, led by South Africa’s Mbeki, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, has vowed to eliminate poverty by concentrating on sustainable growth and development, promoting Africa in the global arena, and accelerating the empowerment of women. The African Union, meanwhile, replaced the Organization of African States, originally formed in the 1960s to support decolonization across the continent, but subsequently used as a bulwark for defending dictators’ sovereignty (and oppression) of their respective nations. The new organization has its eye on African unity and development, through the creation of democracy and conflict resolution. Hunter-Gault acknowledges that these institutions are young and must still prove their mettle in the face of ongoing tensions in Central Africa and the genocide taking place in Darfur.

But for the world to hear and understand any of the changes afoot, they must be well reported. Those on the frontlines of reporting this “new news” are African journalists. Many still contend with limited training or access to computers and the Internet, as well as government harassment and threats — Zimbabwe and Sudan presenting the direst cases of silencing foreign and domestic journalists alike. Yet there is an increasing crop of independent, homegrown media, who are providing a more nuanced perspective of the events and people in Africa. Even in the harshest of conditions, Hunter-Gault cites instances where “guerilla type-writers” are getting the word out, posting their stories surreptitiously in the continent’s burgeoning Internet cafés.

However, African journalists cannot report the news alone. Hunter-Gault advises more collaboration between Africans and their foreign colleagues both to help cover extremely sensitive stories, where the international press may be more immune to government pressures and retaliation, and to gain more informed perspectives by working closely with counterparts on the ground.

Above all, she counsels journalists to “come in right” — or report the news honestly and fairly — an expression taken from an encounter she had with a member of the Black Panthers, while covering that organization in Harlem in the 1970s for The New York Times. “[This phrase] has served me well, making me particularly sensitive to trying to strike a balance between stories of war, conflict, corruption, poverty, pestilence, and disease, on one hand, and on the other, stories that tell us of the people who live amid all that and yet survive, endure, and sometimes prosper despite the odds. These people are the embodiment of new news, but they rarely, if ever, hold news conferences.”

Without downplaying the real challenges facing African nations, Hunter-Gault should not be dismissed for her optimism. With the rise of the Internet, foreigners have fewer excuses than ever for ignoring what happens there, while African journalists and citizens are increasingly discovering the power of information. Africa may have experienced a Dark Ages, replete with foreign invasion, pestilence, societal breakdown, oppression and exploitation — from within and without. And yet, if we look closely as Hunter-Gault suggests, we might see the first stirring of the continent’s own, true Renaissance.

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The beauty of difference

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, On Beauty, is many things. Chief among them: an homage to differences.



(The Penguin Press)

For those of mixed heritage — who straddle more than one race, nationality, faith, class, or whatever else — uncovering a coherent identity can be a complicated emotional journey. There are multiple, potentially conflicting, avenues and models, and choosing one or melding several is difficult business. This may be part of why Zadie Smith — herself the product of an English father and Jamaican mother — returns to this endlessly rich topic in her third novel, On Beauty, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. As with her acclaimed debut novel, White Teeth, published when she was a mere 23 years old, and her less stunning second book, The Autograph Man, Smith ambitiously mines the cultural morass of mixed worlds. Now, with her latest work, she paints her most vivid portrait of the challenges and ecstasies of multiculturalism.

Her tool for this project is the skeleton of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, restyled by the liberal, chaotic family of Howard and Kiki Belsey, residents of the imaginary college town of Wellington, Massachusetts. As with Forster’s story, On Beauty opens with an awkward sexual meeting of two families of different ilk — the Belseys and the Kippses. An unlikely friendship grows between Mrs. Kipps and Kiki, resulting in one secretly bequeathing an invaluable object to the other. But whereas Forster focused almost exclusively on class and sex, Smith takes the plunge into the messy nexus of every potential category of identity and difference. Howard is a white British art history professor who escaped working class London for the almost ivy halls of Wellington University. Kiki, his intuitive and (now) obese black wife, grew up in rural Florida and works as a hospital administrator. At first glance, the Belsey family’s most glaring difference is written in black and white. But Howard, Kiki, and their three children navigate an array of cultural confrontations within their own home: intellectual versus intuitive, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, British versus American, secular versus Christian, and so on.

Each of the three children has latched onto some piece of what he or she perceives as the family’s true heritage, and has generally rejected the rest. Jerome, the eldest, has found God and turned to Monty Kipps, his father’s neoconservative nemesis in the culture wars, after a stint in London and a leave from Brown University. A Caribbean-British public intellectual and a famed man of faith, Monty has recently published a bestseller on Rembrandt — also the subject of a sprawling, perpetually unfinished treatise penned by Howard. Zora, the middle child, is a self-absorbed overachiever. She has taken the intellectual route, joining her father at Wellington, where she’s fast become an outspoken figure on campus, crusading for whatever may further her academic career. Levi, the youngest, has renounced his middle-class upbringing for the streets of Roxbury, where he swaggers under too-big hoodies and sagging denim, feigns poverty, and “hustles” DVDs alongside the truly desperate.

This already fragmented household is roiled by the revelation that Howard has had an affair. To add insult to injury, his lover is Kiki’s exact opposite: a white, exceedingly thin university colleague. Things get rockier still when Monty Kipps is invited to be a visiting scholar at Wellington, threatening Howard’s tenuous untenured position on campus, challenging affirmative action programs, and generally upsetting the college town’s (and the Belsey family’s) progressive equilibrium. The utopian ideals of the Belseys are further tested by a social experiment with Carl, self-taught poet/rapper, who is charitably folded into academic life, for a time.

In this fractured world, identity is an unpredictable and highly malleable phenomenon. Despite whatever ostensibly unites people — the same shade of skin, the same faith or lack thereof, the same aesthetic or intellectual mien, the same politics, the same weight, the same income or need for it — all of these only thinly connect one person to another in reality. Nothing is universal.

Again and again, characters are faced with embarrassment, rejection, or awkwardness when they assume too much likeness or difference based on outward appearances. Almost every character adjusts his or her language or manner to negotiate emotional situations and relationships, both intimate and distant. When Kiki gets ruffled over her kids’ behavior, she takes on the no-nonsense Southern parlance of her own mother. Likewise, when Howard visits his father, a butcher, in the drab old neighborhood of his youth, he hears “his own accent climbing down the class ladder a few rungs to where it used to be.” This mimicking of elders extends to the next generation of Belseys when Levi attempts to organize his co-workers against working on Christmas day at a music megastore. His normal voice dissolves into an urban drawl to woo LaShonda, an African American single mother of three. Unlike the mostly middle-class white kids who join the protest, Levi is shocked that LaShonda is eager to pick up the extra shifts at time-and-a-half.

Levi in particular collides with the world in his search for an authentic sense of self. In Wellington, he assumes every passerby is eyeing him suspiciously because of his skin color. And some are. However, even in Roxbury, where he at least externally fits in, he is divorced from those around him: “How strange it was to see streets where everybody was black! It was like a homecoming, except he’d never known this home.”

Smith often blunts these interactions with curious humor. In one scene, for instance, Levi is taking a break from protesting for fair wages for his “crew” of mostly Haitian immigrants who work $4-an-hour jobs or hawk knockoff purses on the street. When his brother Jerome appears walking the family dog, Levi introduces his friends, who’ve “got his back.” He then says of the dog, a Wienerschnitzel, “And this is my little foot soldier. He’s my lieutenant. Murdoch always got my back.”  

Ironically, the weakest and most tedious moments occur where Smith attempts to bend her characters, particularly Kiki and Mrs. Kipps, into Forster’s scenes. The too close adaptation of Forster’s dialogue between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox seems out of step with Smith’s otherwise cleverly updated story. The book would likely have worked just as well without the overly obvious nods to Forster.

Smith is strongest when she orchestrates jarring social interactions: Howard’s sexual exchanges with a student or his meeting with his racist father, and the Belsey children’s slow awakening to the politics of suffering. Despite the creeping sadness and depravity of such scenes, Smith does not leave the reader with a completely bleak outlook on this jumbled landscape. There are no clear or tidy answers but, like Forster, she shows that as long as one deals with others in good faith, one can find unbounded beauty in differences.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: