Correspondents And Experts At Large
Telling the West African Story
by Elizabeth Ohene
"They are annoying but on a good day one can see the amusing part of their pompous prose and one can even play the part of the savage native for them so that they can keep up their illusions".Some of them are still innocents abroad in spite of their reputations at home as hard-nosed cynics that nobody can hoodwink.
— Elizabeth Ohene unscrambles the foreign correspondents' reporting of events in Third World countries.
Such foreign correspondents in Africa are usually irritating but you can forgive them. Their copies invariably tend to answer the type of questions that the earnest British or American citizen would ask a Chanaian, Nigerian or Ivorian citizen at a cocktail party in Oxford or Harvard. 'Hmm, Ghana that was a British colony wasn't it, no wonder you speak such fluent English, does everybody speak English in your country; oh how very clever".
They march into countries in Africa with mentalities only marginally different from the missionaries and explorers of 150 years ago. Invariably they bring out excellent copy if they happen to be writing about starving children, shanty towns and shoeless teenage boys playing an animated game of football on a crowded and dirty Lagos street, except of course their 'football' was an orange!
A picturesque description of intricate and elaborate headgears, multi-coloured "wraps" and huge robes is regarded as absolutely essential to give an atmosphere of the country the correspondent has visited.
Gradually but ever so gradually it is seeping through that there are many different countries and peoples in Africa and correspondents are no longer trying to sound as though Nairobi were a Sunday afternoon's ride from Ouagadugoo!
And then, of course, there are the correspondents who are indignant if the first taxi driver they meet at the airport doesn't appreciate their importance - he is, after all, the correspondent for the Times you know and the Washington Post is not used to waiting for anybody, this is the paper which single-handedly drove the most powerful man in the world out of office, why should the almighty's representative in Sierra Leone wait for a junior Minister?
Their copies are equally predictable; the left-wing regime, the Soviet-backed government, the Western-oriented leader, they want to know whether the regime agreed with the United States on Afghanistan or was being swayed by Soviet propaganda. They tend to be rather partial to statistics, 75 percent of the population of this West African country is illiterate, 90 percent of the marriages are polygamous and 60 per cent of all children under five suffer from malnutrition and are likely to die before their twentieth birthday. Where they got these figures from remains a mystery, the important thing is that they have a ring of authority to them and fits into the house-style of their quality papers.
They are annoying but on a good day one can see the amusing part of their pompous prose and one can even play the part of the savage native for them so that they can keep up their illusions.
It is when they get back and are desk-bound and start editorialising that they become decidedly unfunny. "Nigerians are very tolerant of their rulers; "It is a backwater war between two desert warlords, it is not worth getting western nations involved in and possibly getting killed over". "If there is anybody in Ghana that can turn that country around, it is young Jerry Rawlings."
Quite unbelievable how when it comes to commenting on events in the developed world they are so unwilling to be forthright in their views and every opinion is hedged with "maybes", "probablys" and "observers believe" and yet feel no qualms at all about offering as fact quite preposterous ideas about a country they spent a week in.
Even these, one can tolerate, after all one only needs to remember that when they were going to school, the dark continent was as impenetrable to their teachers' minds as the jungles in which the continents peoples were supposed to live in.
It is those of them who go out to countries in Africa to play out their own fantasies that cause the greatest harm. They are eager to lend their support to any cause, the weirder the better, for as long as they have the security of their own countries to return to, they would enthusiastically support "revolution" in Ghana or Liberia or Ivory Coast. Every spurious theory is called an original and dynamic to suit a country's special needs. They bend over backwards to give excuses for any failings their adopted regimes might have.
Thus The Guardian's Victoria Brittain has not found it in her to con demn the abduction and murder of three Ghanaian High Court judges and a retired major her energies have been better spent demonstrating to the world how those opposed to the Rawlings regime have been exploting the murders to bring down her pet regime.
Reading her articles on Ghana and the class struggle, the rich and the poor working class, one gets quite baffled about how she made her divisions and what measure she used.
If it were not a whole country at stake, she could be funny, but her enthusiasm sometimes outshines that of her pets especially in the proxy war she has been waging with the United States. While she claimed to have the evidence of American involvement in the coup attempt of June 16, from Ghana, the Ghanaian press was quoting The Guardian as the source of the evidence of American guilt.
It came as something of a surprise the other day, to read a story on the front page of The Guardian, entitled "FO pays boot money to Ghana," never mind that it had been cited as an example of the silly season stories. The story which was under the headline of the paper's political correspondent said that the Foreign Office had provided £100,000 to buy boots, berrets and mess tins for the Ghanaian Army to help improve its morale.
The FO was also quoted as saying that this will have "a useful side-effect for consular protection" which according to the paper, is the Foreign Office's way of saying that it will reduce the risk of undisciplined soldiers threatening the British community in Ghana.
It also emerged in the story that the FO had acceded to the request because the civilian population in Ghana including 1,500 Britons was at risk from the Ghanaian Armed Forces.
Now, anybody who had been reading the Guardian's coverage of events in Ghana for the past year and a half must have been surprised by this story for nowhere in all the stories about Ghana in the paper and the many broadcasts on Ghana by Ms. Brittain over the BBC World Service where she is described as "The Guardian's Africa expert", had there ever been a suggestion that the Armed Forces in Ghana was undisciplined or posed any danger to the civilian population.
It was quite amazing that the constant line of the paper that the regime in Ghana was a popular peoples' revolution beset by opposition from conservatives, professionals, students, disgruntled politicians and rich crooks who had settled in the UK, supported by the Israeli and American secret services, it was strange that one "silly season" story should have been allowed to ruin. the entire image without a word of explanation from the paper's Ghana expert.
It is understandable that some of these correspondents get a little heady. somewhat with the red-carpet treatment they are given when they get out to these countries. It is not everyday that their arrival at Heathrow Airport attracts attention from anybody, so when they are met on the tarmac at Accra Airport and whisked away through VIP doors, it is not surprising that they would overlook little things. like starvation in the country.
When an insignificant reporter is transformed into a confidant of a Head of State, it does not take very long for the reporter to start seeing himself as a Henry Kissinger, creating history. How many of his colleagues back in London, after all, can claim to have sat up chatting with a Head of State until 2.a.m. and who can ever match your cocktail party story about being escorted by armoured tanks through the deserted streets of Accra at 3 a.m. after spending an evening with the ruler of a country?
The Onassises of this world have. their own private islands where they can indulge their every whim, a little patch of West Africa where one can rise above the faceless mass of humanity on commuter trains in London should not be discarded lightly.
If such instant experts can add to the chance of becoming somebodies, a bit of a slap and tickle and financial remuneration, they take to the task of becoming propagandists for petty dictators with an enthusiasm that would have shamed Goebbels.
It would surely help if such experts declared their interest and do not pretend to be giving unbiased reports. They might also attach more weight and credibility to their professed belief in the joys of revolution for their little patches of the earth if they would sub ject themselves to the medicine they are giving to others.
What about a People's Defence Committee of the SWI and Workers Defence Committee for the oppressed workers of The Guardian for example. Surely there are rich people and exploiters in these areas and the oppressed people there too need to throw off their yokes! How would Lord Anthony Gifford Q.C. and a member of the House of Lords react to himself or a member of family going on trial for his life before a People's Court whose Chairman's judicial experience consists in two undistinguished years at the bar and this in a court from where there is no appeal.
This Lord Gifford Q.C. is giving lectures in Ghana about how splendid a job Public Tribunals are doing meting out revolutionary justice in Ghana and how the judicial system bequeathed to Ghana by Britain favoured the privileged in the society, sits in the House of Lords, the highest court in the UK and he need never have opened a book in his life nor have half the wit of a court jester, he would still have qualified to sit there simply because he happens to have a father called Lord Gifford.
Why don't these do-goodies and the Lady Giffords of this world try and change the lot of the poor and oppressed in their own backyards before they go to spread the gospel around countries like Ghana. One might ask Lord Gifford if there are some people in Britain who are "too rich, powerful or too chiefly to be subjected to the laws of the state" and if there are why he has not suggested the setting up of Public Tribunals to bring such a reality.
And has Lady Gifford been distributing Books for Development among the underprivileged in their country or they been so careful in choosing where they live that they are unaware there are poor and underprivileged people in the UK?
Nigeria currently attracts a different sort of expert. Since President Shagari is not a Sergeant turned President, nor a President for life, nor the all-knowing and since he does not claim to be introducing or experimenting with a system undreamt of anywhere else, he does not fit into the mould of your average African leader.
Having oil, of course, helps, since newspaper Editors tend not to forget about the volume of trade that the UK conducts with Nigeria.
The chances are very slim therefore that any one person on the paper would be allowed to hold total and unchecked sway over all things Nigerian that would find their way into the paper.
Copies therefore tend to concentrate on fly-overs springing up overnight and corruption, (not of the correspondent's own knowledge but of allegations by Nigerians themselves).
Outside Nigeria, the emphasis is on the chronic parking tickets of the Nigerian embassy, and how with the help of Arab Sheikhs, Nigerians have sent property prices in London's west end up into the sky.
It was a pleasant change therefore when Nduka Odizor took Wimbledon. by storm earlier this year. Suddenly it was the dint poor families of Nigeria that were in the headlines. Not a single paper omitted to mention that Odizor, the sensation of Wimbledon '83 used to walk barefoot in Lagos as a child and each paper went to great pains to point out that the young Duke now makes enough money to look after the whole family back in Lagos.
Odizor does not know that he did more for Nigeria's image through his humble origins than he could have done even if he had emerged victorious at the end of the ceremony.
Between the adventurers, the romantics, the downright hypocrites, the innocents the uninformed, the do gooders and those who go to have a break from civilisation, the West African story by the time the experts tell it comes out unintelligible to all except to those who tell it.
