media

When Democracy dies, the ruler can make his own laws.
Democracy dies also when the press is silenced or banned, and freedom of expression is destroyed.

But in Africa we have the jungle-drum, grapevine, call it what you want. The people don't have newspapers, radios and televisions, and news travels through the air, just as it always has done.

To this can be added the ability of African people to repeat a story exactly as they heard it. It is an ability that has developed to preserve oral history over the pre-literate millennia. It was practised over hundreds of generations so that now the ability is practically in our genes.

Thus when someone hears the Word on the street in Zimbabwe, that person might take it as being mostly accurate. Some recent stuff is pretty interesting.

One example of the Word on the Bush Path in recent weeks is the story regarding the headman’s cattle and the Cold Storage Commission (CSC) cattle truck. (Note: the CSC is a ‘parastatal’ organisation that was set up by the Rhodesians to assist ranchers. It was retained by the incumbent Zanu PF regime because it was both useful and lucrative - for the new lootocrats anyway).

We all know that the traditional media outlets often provide biased coverage of Africa, if at all. So where do you go if you want to get a more nuanced picture of the continent?

Blogs, of course.

Some of my recommendations on where to get started:

• African Path: The uber-blog for African news, featuring some of the top bloggers and writers from across the continent. Sign up to their mailing list to receive regular updates.
• Global Voices Sub-Saharan Africa coverage - the BEST place to get an introduction to the range of bloggers in Africa.
• Afrigator: an aggregator of African blogs.
• Blog Africa: another aggregator of African blogs.
• African Women Blogs: an aggregator focusing specifically on women bloggers.

My graduate thesis was about The Daily Show and its relationship to media and politics, and so I grew almost embarrassingly excited when someone in the house told me that Evo Morales (who is featured prominently in the Why Democracy? film Looking for the Revolution) had been Jon Stewart's guest last week. It's a decent 8-minute interview, and it's interesting to hear the crowd's positive response to Morales' various acheivements that don't jive so well with official US policy. The interaction between Stewart, Morales, and Morales's translator is pretty hilarious, too.