Stepping onto the tarmac the warm Kigali air greets me. I breathe in deeply, as if it is the first breath I ever took. I push away the thought of enduring the stale air once again for my 22-hour return flight in just six weeks time.
Australia seems another world away as I adjust my physicality to another time and place that is at once familiar to me, and yet, still so foreign.
As I leave the airport, the natural movement of Kigali brings a smile to my tired face. The frustration of having my small framed body squeezed between two large men in the middle isle seats of the aircraft for fourteen and a half hours from Melbourne to Doha begins to fade. I stare out the car window and feel the wind blowing away my fatigue. I am alive again.
As we drive across town from the airport to Nyamirambo I am reminded of my homeland Tasmania, Australia’s southern island state. The green and hilly landscape that defines Rwanda is also a touristic feature of my home.
We share similar size capital cities and indeed my island home could even fit snug within this country’s European defined-borders. Just as Rwanda prides herself at being situated in the heart of Africa, some say the shape of Tasmania is that of a heart.
And so, at the same time I am far from home, I am not far at all.
It is the rich and storied landscape of the African continent that led me here, first in 2009, then four consecutive times until today. Like others before me of my kind – European writers, journalists and media producers – I come with the intent to tell Africa’s stories to the world.
Certainly, African life has provided a constant source of fascination for the ‘European gaze’, resulting in a vast array of documentaries, books, films, articles, photographs and commentary, mostly from the perspective of the outsider.
While the outsider too is gazed at (as the foreigner so often is, e.g. the recitation of ‘muzungu-muzungu’), it is the ‘gaze’ of the European that has been the most ‘productive’, or one could say, exploitative, for it is this gaze that has led to the dominant modes of representation of Africa and its people. According to Adinoyi-Ojo, this has led to an “unevenness of cross-cultural exchange”.
It is true that the World Wide Web has linked different parts of the world creating more diversity in who speaks but within this ‘global village’ there are limited and specific speakers who dominate the dialogue.
As Morley and Robins point out, the conversation is one-way, in which “the West speaks and the Rest listen”. Various African scholars argue that the domination of Western perspectives has led to the African continent and its people being “systematically misrepresented”.
Of course today, these misrepresentations are being challenged by local media producers, especially film-makers, who are reconquering and revising images of Western representation about Africa, reclaiming their rights to represent themselves and co-construct a world about themselves.
My mission in 2009 was perhaps no different to many other Western journalists who seek to journey to Africa and tell its stories. I had come to Eastern Congo to tell the story of the plight of refugees in Goma.
Many would say it is a cliché story for the Western media. Of course it is a story that needs to be told but it is not a simple story as most people know, and if such a story is over-simplified, as Western journalism is so often accused of when reporting Africa, such a story fails to adequately inform its audience, and instead the reportage distorts, misrepresents and even perpetuates existing stereotypes of Africa.
I had spent just five days gathering people’s stories from several refugee camps. In that time I came to realize I had not the knowledge or the expertise to be telling this complex refugee story. The story required someone with a deep insight into the issues in the region.
Furthermore, for the first time in my life as a journalist I began to feel uncomfortable taking people’s stories. It became clear to me that the dialogical engagement between myself and the people I was seeking stories from was critically uneven.
A post-colonial critique may pose the questions, how is telling the story of the Other, in this case the refugee, not “simply a form of surveillance and neocolonization”? And is the desire to have access to and to know the Other yet another “colonizing gesture”? For Homi Bhaba, asking questions and demanding answers is a significant strategy of “surveillance and exploitation” which re-ensures the authority of the colonizer.
Thus the question arises, is it possible for Western journalists and media producers to escape their cultural Eurocentrism in order to articulate a critical narrative of Africa?
I came across a similar experience when I was telling what could be labeled as another ‘cliché’ story, that of the life of the Pygmy, the Indigenous People of Central Africa. For this story, I reached a community who were renowned for their pottery work.
I was taken back when one woman accused me of being yet another Muzungu coming to conduct research on ‘them’, who would then return to her comfortable life, most likely profiting from her story, and yet their life would not improve, just as it hadn’t done so in the past when other researchers or journalists had come seeking their stories.
The woman’s words made me think critically about my role as a Western media practitioner drawing stories from Africa and why I felt I needed to tell these stories. On the other hand, I did not wish to be a ‘parachute’ or ‘fly-in/fly-out’ journalist who after getting a story was never to be seen or heard of again.
I yearned to strengthen my knowledge of the region, and as the friendships I made grew and deepened, I felt almost an obligation to visit and revisit. Upon each visit I found it difficult to return home.
I had grown very fond of Rwanda in particular. I was fortunate that I was able to come and go and fund the travel through telling stories. After visiting Kibuye for the first time I was compelled to share the mysterious and untouched beauty of this tranquil place so I wrote a travel article, something I so rarely do.
As for my role as a radio documentary producer, I began to critique and reflect on how I told African stories, why I felt compelled to tell them, and ask myself whether it was my place to do so.
This reflection led me to critique Western journalism’s liberal individualistic paradigm which perhaps can be problematic when Western journalists are reporting in places where community takes precedence over the individual, thus another question is posed: Can the West’s “individualistic ethos” understand the nature of community that is intrinsic to African societies?
Some scholars have argued instead for a communitarian journalism that “deepens connections between members of community both near and far”, and attempts to “locate connections from group to group, culture to culture” and to emphasise the profound “commonalities” between human beings.
Creating shared connections between peoples of different cultures certainly instills a sense of communality amidst humanity’s diversity. But such an aspiration is distinctly different to the West’s “Us vs Them” style of storytelling which at its worst can create divisionism.
It is the ethics of representation, or more specifically, the representation of Africa in the Western mainstream media, which I have come to explore more deeply, not only as a media practitioner and as part of my PhD research but as someone who has become deeply connected to people in Rwanda both in country and within the Diaspora.
Based on my own personal experiences telling stories from this region, my research question is this: does the Western libertarian journalism model serve well the stories that are told from Africa? Or is another form of journalism required – a hybrid form of journalism – one that is informed by local knowledge systems and African ethical roots, as well as the virtues of Western journalism?
Working self-reflexively as a media practitioner in Africa, I have begun to question the set of frameworks I use to interpret and to understand the life of people here. I can use the following metaphor to emphasize this point: When on a moto to Kigali city centre I was given a helmet with a cracked and damaged wind-screen and so my view of things around me became distorted and unclear.
I could see that the helmet wind-screen is like the Western lens in which I view Africa and tell its stories. However, it is the poignant statement by Michel Foucault that I may rest my morals, and may help me determine whether I am in a position to continue telling Africa’s stories at all: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.”
The Author is an Australian Journalist (PHD Student)
