The New York Times’ tribal atavism

Sean Jacobs — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:29:00 +0000

With few exceptions (some of the correspondents covering apartheid South Africa — when the nature of the ‘conflict’ was obvious — and more recently the writing of its West Africa Bureau Chief, Howard French), the New York Times‘ Africa coverage has noticeably deteriorated.

Case in point is the reporting that accompany the political violence in the wake of open electoral fraud in Kenya. There, Jeffrey Gettleman, the paper’s East Africa bureau chief’ has made a name (more notoriety) for his missives from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Gettleman’s first post-election report set the tone, when he wrote about ‘… an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya.’ Although more recently he has softened his tone somewhat with references to the political uses of tribalism and the more immediate causes of the elections (and is even crediting a Kenyan with doing some of the reporting), he (and his editors) can’t let go of the discredited tribalism angle.

Gettleman’s ignorance and biases do not start in Kenya, however, as his earlier reporting from Somalia confirms. Last Christmas, as a historian friend reminds me, Gettleman arrived on the scene in the Somali capital Mogadishu, just in time to channel the US government line on the Ethiopian invasion and the dismantling of the Islamic Courts there. His ignorance and bias were palpable.

Given the New York Times’ position in the hierarchy of US media and the fact that it is one of the only newspapers with dedicated African coverage — about what the rest is doing with the Kenya story, for example, the less said) — Gettleman’s reporting has not eluded close observers of African politics.

For the last month, the participants on H-Africa, an email listserv of African academics interested in the continent’s history and politics, have been dissecting Gettleman’s reporting.

It includes discussion of the a-historical use of tribe, Gettleman’s experience as a journalist and of Africa before he got the job (we learn that he had very little), as well as highlighting the practice of some publications (the New York Times is a chief offender) to often delete any record of offending content (following public complaints) when articles from the papers’ print editions are uploaded onto their websites.

Some of the participants suggested complaining officially to the Times’s editorial board or its foreign editor. Good luck.

You can read all the contributions, including some colorful ones, here and here.

It must be black-on-black violence

Sean Jacobs — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:53:00 +0000

The post-election violence in Kenya has, not surprisingly, brought out the worse in mainstream Western (particularly United States, and of course the more conservative British) media.

For example, the New York Times’ correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman went on about ‘an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya ..’

He’s been writing like that since before the elections. However, they have not had it their own way. It is true that Gettleman’s own paper offered space to Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina to set the record straight. But that’s one Wainaina piece (or anything offering a counter-narrative) to Gettleman’s daily tribal drumbeat.

Nevertheless there is a counter-narrative slowly filtering through: on websites, blogs and cellphones or even internet-only initiatives linked to mainstream sites (such as the UK Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ initiative where commentators such as Wainaina, Richard Dowden, Dowden again, Meera Seval, and Victoria Brittain (admittedly, mainly Europeans, but at least they are informed) provided some good analysis and historical context about the long-standing and more recent causes of the tragic outbreak of violence (which should be condemned at all cost) over the last few weeks.

Other worthwhile contributions came from Bill Minter’s AfricaFocus Bulletin (including, Minter reprinting a 1997 background paper from the Africa Policy Information Center on ‘tribe’), at Paul Zeleza’s collective blog by Wanda Njoya and Zeleza himself, Tavia Nyongo, Macharia Gaitho, Vincent Magombe, and David Anderson (author of ‘Histories of the Hanged’).

For me the best take on Western journalism’s practices (well, the practices of foreign correspondents in Africa with few exceptions) goes to Canadian-born journalist, Arno Kopecky,(he writes in the Globe & Mail) in a piece in his own newspaper, Kenya’s own Saturday Nation:

‘… I’ve enjoyed watching the subtle interactions that place between the growing pool of competitors for the most shocking photo, the saddest story, the most heroic reporting. We drive from one lynching to another, from burnt churches to dispersed rallies, like children chasing marbles. It takes a fair amount of cynicism to fly around the world just to watch people’s lives fall apart. I spoke with one photographer, for instance, moments after he’d returned from a riot in Mathare; he was heart-broken, not by what he saw, but because he had put his camera on the wrong setting and none of the bodies he had photographed turned out well.’

You can read the whole thing here.

Africa is a Country » Jeffrey Gettleman

The New York Times’ tribal atavism

It must be black-on-black violence