How Should We Cover Africa?

He has a series of posts from his trip to Africa. Truly some heart-wrenching accounts of seeing people who are literally starving.

When I contribute to an organization like the Red Cross or Care, I never designate it for a particular disaster, because the ones that come to our attention because they are in the news usually get more donations than they can use, while other problems don't get enough.

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/how-should-we-cover-africa/

July 1, 2011, 3:35 PM
How Should We Cover Africa?
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

My Sunday column is a misnomer: it’s not really a column and it will appear online Friday, rather than Sunday. It’s the cover story for our new Sunday Review section, which used to be the NY Times’s Week in Review section, and it’s going up early on the Web.

At one level it’s the story of this year’s win-a-trip journey, my fifth with a university student. But it’s also an attempt to address a broader discontent about the way lots of us — me included — write about Africa. The problem is that we in journalism invariably focus on Africa’s wars, poverty and humanitarian disasters, and aid agencies and academics do the same.

If you look at my coverage of Africa, I’ve spent far more time in Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Niger — some of the most forlorn countries on the continent — than in bustling dynamos like Botswana or Ghana. The upshot is that I fear we sometimes create a public perception of Africa as a basket case, in a way that discourages tourism and business investment. If that’s the case, then our efforts to help Africa only hurt it.


On the other hand, it seems to me that the basic problem with eastern Congo is that it’s undercovered rather than overcovered: this is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has had far fewer column inches than any other major conflict. Likewise, the 1 million kids a year who die of pneumonia, overwhelmingly in Africa, deserve more coverage, not less. Same with maternal mortality, malaria, fistula, hunger and so on.

I’m proud that my coverage on some African challenges feels as if it has helped spotlight the challenges and led to lives saved. So what do we do to call attention to problems without exaggerating them in the public mind?

I don’t think there’s any easy answer to this conundrum, but one thing I try to do from time to time is remind readers that the grim scenes I portray in Sudan or Congo are not representative of Africa as a whole. That’s essentially the aim of this Sunday piece, to provide a broader context and a reminder that plenty is going on that is very hopeful. But this kind of balancing is invariably occasional and incomplete. It’s already very difficult to get readers interested in Africa (whenever I write about Africa, my column readership plunges), and a good news column not tied to a crisis (“Benin Thrives!”) would frankly have zero readership. That’s one advantage of the win-a-trip journey, in that it creates a narrative device to step back and encourage readers to see a larger truth about African success.

So I welcome your comments on the article itself, and on the win-a-trip contest (time to start planning for next year’s, which some readers suggested should look at problems at home instead of abroad). But I also welcome feedback on this broader challenge: how do we adequately cover the disease and poverty of Africa, without leading readers to an unfairly grim perception of the entire region?
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