By Joan Mower
Freedom Forum International Program Manager/Africa, Latin America

February 24, 1997

Joan Mower is a former Associated Press reporter in charge of Freedom Forum's international programs in Africa. Freedom Forum, a media foundation, has an endowment of $800 million, with which it operates media training projects worldwide. Mower was a principal organizer of Freedom Forum's media seminar in South Africa last November, where ways were discussed to help its fledgling black press. Most recently she was asked by the U.S. Information Agency to participate in a journalism workshop in Rwanda in February.

South Africa's feisty media, dominated to date by white-owned conglomerates, have a long tradition of challenging government -- both before and after apartheid.

Yet President Nelson Mandela, elected in 1994, complains -- as do others in his government -- that media are too critical of the country's first black-ruled government. And editors recognize the need for training and affirmative action to advance blacks, long denied equal opportunity, into the media newsrooms and boardrooms.

Botswana is another example of a country with a lively and relatively free press. So is Benin.

And Mali, breaking rank with its neighbors, has allowed its press wide latitude. The result: a media resurgence and thriving democracy. Before an autocratic regime was toppled in 1991, Mali had one newspaper and one radio station. Today, the country has 60 newspapers and 40 radio stations.

Despite tough conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, fewer journalists were killed for doing their jobs there than in any other region of the world between 1985 and 1995, according to the New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Fifty-three African journalists were murdered in the 10-year period out of a total 456. Rwanda, scene of ethnic genocide, saw 15 journalists killed, followed by Somalia, nine, and Angola and South Africa, six each. The numbers increase dramatically if Algeria -- where 53 people died as Islamic fundamentalists targeted journalists -- is added to the mix.

However, all is not sweetness and light with the press in Africa.

Ten days before Freedom Forum's media seminar, "Journalists Under Fire: Media Under Siege," opened in South Africa last November, Pius Njawe -- editor of the Cameroonian newspaper Le Messager and a scheduled panelist -- was jailed on charges of insulting the president and the National Assembly in a satirical article.

Njawe's jailing epitomizes working conditions for African journalists. As Liberian reporter Maureen Sieh wrote: "Journalists don't win Pulitzers for exposing corruption and abuses. ... They risk getting killed, intimidated, harassed, jailed, and burned out of their offices."

Press freedom groups also decry conditions under which African journalists work.

"Few leaders appeared willing to tolerate the free speech they promised fellow citizens," according to "Attacks on the Press in 1995," an annual survey published by the CPJ.

In October, Reporters San Frontieres, a Paris-based organization, listed at least 31 African journalists in prison and at least eight killed in 1996. The group denounced "these attacks on press freedom."

Freedom House, the New York-based organization that monitors political rights and civil liberties, says that about 80 percent of the African population does not have access to even partly free domestic media.

Another troubling development, according to Johann Fritz, director of the International Press Institute, is the way "overly sensitive" African political leaders "use the criminal court system to settle personal grievances." In some cases -- Rwanda and Burundi are two -- some media have been used to incite ethnic and tribal hatred, Fritz said.

In spite of difficulties, which include financial and technological roadblocks, African journalists remain courageous and committed, for example:

-- In Nigeria, foreign-based Radio Kudirat International's founders vow to keep broadcasting despite the military dictatorship's desire to shut them down. The Nigerian Union of Journalists recorded 110 press freedom infringements since 1994, and four leading journalists remain in jail.

-- In Zambia, Fred M'membe, editor of The Post, continues publishing in the face of constant intimidation.

-- In Ethiopia, independent journalism flourishes even though 50 journalists were jailed between 1993 and 1995.

-- In Kenya, journalists maintain high standards despite government regulation and dozens of attacks on journalists over the last two years.

-- In Zimbabwe, journalists created an independent weekly after being convicted of "criminal defamation."

These experiences occur against a backdrop of limited economic resources. Equipment -- telephones, computers and faxes -- is spotty across much of the continent.

Yet press observer Jeanette Minnie, executive director of Johannesburg's Freedom of Expression Institute, a watchdog group, says, "I detect positive changes in the region." As proof she cites the creation of regional associations, such as the Namibia-based Media Institute of Southern Africa, and the increase in information through Internet access in Africa and overseas.

Exiled publisher Kenneth Y. Best, who was driven out of both Liberia and The Gambia, says stamping out press freedom has contributed to the woes of Africa, which is generally worse off than it was before the independence movement of the 1960s.

"Resistance to multiparty politics and freedom of speech and of the press has been a primary cause of the chaos that has swept across Africa over the last 30 years, leaving the continent in a sorry economic and social state," Best wrote in Nieman Reports at Harvard University.

More than foreign aid, Best said, "I am convinced the free flow of information and ideas is the most important catalyst for economic and social development and prosperity" on the continent.