I am a supportive reader of the Pambazuka email newsletter....and I enjoy the contents. However, I am always troubled by Pambazuka's editorials which continually interview and quote voices that are not African but of persons in Europe or North America working on Africa. Let's take the case of the recent ACHPR's ruling on the violation of the social and economic rights of the Ongoni people in Nigeria. With the exception of one Lagos-based organization, the rest of your interviews were with "Western" people in London and New York working on Africa. Indeed with such a ruling coming from Africa where in fact African people were affected and actively involved in the campaigns, petition and court case, it is a great disservice to us that no African voices were represented. This appears as a reinforcement of "the West can speak for us", they know better about Africa. I greatly benefit from your newsletter but I'd also wish to see a fair and just representation of our voices as Africans--we are indeed smart and deserve credit!
Pambazuka News replies: Your point regarding editorials is no doubt a valid one. However, I can assure you that we in no way intend not to reflect African voices in our editorials. To use your example of the ACHPR's ruling on the Ongoni people in Nigeria, we felt it was important that we provided our readers with commentary on this important ruling. While the editorial we used may have been written by a 'Western' source, we felt that there was great value in what it was actually saying. There were no other editorials at the time which we could have used. Should we then not have provided our subscribers with this information simply because it came from a 'Western' source? In addition, because we research stories from a wide range of sources, in most cases we cannot be held responsible for the sources which other organisations choose to quote.
We endeavour to provide our subscribers with information about Africa from as many sources as possible - last week we featured about 150 news stories, commentaries, book reviews, jobs and letters drawn from over 50 information sources. Hopefully these all reflect a wide range of African voices.
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