I was, to be honest, prepared to be defensive about a recent Mail & Guardian article titled “Can 'someone in a Hotel Room’ Report on All of Africa.” After all, I think it is perfectly possible for someone to engage in commentary if they have the background and intelligence and understanding even if they are not on the scene. “Reporting” per se may be difficult, but certainly writing ought to stand on its own merits. If I write something on this blog I’m not certain if it becomes more valid if written from Johannesburg rather than in Odessa, Texas, though obviously anyone committed to Africa wants to get there as often as possible.
The piece is instead about a rather disturbing phenomenon — the tendency of even the largest newspapers to have a single correspondent for the entire African continent. As the M&G article argues, “When one considers that Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most-populous continent, taking up 20% of the Earth's land area and accounting for 14% of the world's population, the question of whether it can be covered by one person should be ludicrous.” Compounding the problem is the fact that many of those correespondents do not enter the job with any particular background on or experience in Africa. So not only do most newspapers, if they have anyone in Africa at all, only send one person, but that person may not even have any serious African bona fides. These tendencies once again reveal the ways in which “the West” marginalizes Africa.
