The overall Western attitude towards Africa is that the continent is trapped in a tribal time warp. The Western media plays a vital role in perpetuating this misconception. Milton Allimadi points out that Western journalists and editors still have the same colonial attitude towards Africans. “…Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis,” writes Allimadi.

Africans must insist that Western media stop referring to Africans as “tribesmen” and to conflicts in Africa as “tribal.” Not only is it demeaning and racist, but it clouds many complex issues and exonerates incompetent journalism, with even deadly consequences.

For example, when the Rwandan civil war erupted in genocide, Time magazine and most major Western publications, including The New York Times, referred to the conflict as ‘tribal’. Moreover, the Clinton Administration, as part of its argument against major international intervention to halt the killings, reasoned that ‘tribal’ conflicts could not be halted. Western reporters were then absolved from terrible reporting which ignored the fact that the war had been going on for four years before the genocide; that Uganda had trained and armed Tutsi refugees into a guerrilla army and sent them into Rwanda because it wanted to get rid of them from Uganda; and, that the French had for years armed the Rwandan army, giving its government the false belief that they did not have to seriously negotiate with the refugees who wanted to return home. All these factors were subsumed under the rubric of ‘tribalism’.

When Africans ask another African what tribe he or she is from, it does not have the same meaning or carry any of the racist and demeaning connotations as when the word is used by Westerners, especially by journalists. There is no better way to explain this than to borrow from the late Okot p’Bitek, the Ugandan author. “Western scholarship sees the world as divided into two types of human society,” wrote p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), “one, their own, civilized, great, developed; the other the non-Western peoples, uncivilized, simple, undeveloped. One is modern, the other tribal.” P’Bitek added, “And when we read of ‘tribal law,’ ‘tribal economics,’ or ‘tribal religion,’ Western scholars imply that the law, economics or religion under review are those of primitive or barbaric peoples.”

Western journalists and editors, I maintain, still have the same attitude towards Africans. Not much has changed since the earliest days when Western reporters first started to cover African countries on a widespread basis.

Although articles about Africa in newspapers such as The New York Times date back to the 19th Century, it was only after the Independence movement swept across the continent in the 1960s that most Western publications started sending reporters to Africa on a consistent basis. Many lessons can be learned from that early engagement. For example, when The New York Times sent Homer William Bigart to cover decolonization in West Africa, the reporter expressed disdain for Africans in a personal letter to his foreign editor, Emanuel Freedman, back in New York, in early 1960s.

“I'm afraid I cannot work up any enthusiasm for the emerging republics,” Bigart, a respected reporter who had already twice won America’s highest journalistic honour, the Pulitzer Prize, wrote. “The politicians are either crooks or mystics. Dr. Nkrumah is a Henry Wallace in burnt cork…I vastly prefer the primitive bush people. After all, cannibalism may be the logical antidote to this population explosion everyone talks about.” Wallace was a racist Southern politician in the United States at the time.

One might wonder how Freedman, editor at America’s most prestigious newspaper responded to this instance of undiluted racist expression from his correspondent. Was he admonished? Was he recalled from his assignment? Hardly. On the contrary, Freedman chimed in with his own celebration of alleged African barbarity. “This is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your peerless prose from the badlands is continuing to give us and your public,” Freedman wrote to his reporter in a letter dated March 4, 1960. “By now you must be American journalism's leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa. All this and nationalism too! Where else but in the New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?” The reference to a nickel was to the fact that the Times in those days cost five cents.

These repugnant views towards Africans, held by the reporter and his editor, correlated perfectly with the “articles” published about Africa. The Times’ foreign editor, and his reporter did not take Africa seriously, to say the least, and this attitude, and disposition towards Africa is still very much reflected in much Western writings about the continent.

For example, after Bigart left Ghana and “reported” from Nigeria, an article was published in The New York Times, on January 31, 1960, under the contemptuous headline, “Barbarian Cult Feared in Nigeria.” In the news article, Bigart expressed the same disdain contained in his personal letter: “A pocket of barbarism still exists in eastern Nigeria despite some success by the regional government in extending a crust of civilization over the tribe of the pagan Izi,” he wrote. He further added, “A momentary lapse into cannibalism marked the closing days of 1959, when two men killed in a tribal clash were partly consumed by enemies in the Cross River country below Obubra…”

There were several other articles written by Bigart, and published by The Times, during this period. On the most momentous period in Africa’s history, America’s premier newspaper decided to ridicule and insult the continent, and generate feelings of contempt towards Africans amongst its readers.

This essay will not explore the many reasons that occasioned this so-called ‘journalism’. Suffice it to say that by the time reporters like Bigart arrived on the continent, the Western psyche had been conditioned by centuries of Western writing to accept only the worst from Africa, therefore the ‘journalism’ had to conform to the readers’ expectations of cannibalism, savagery, backwardness, primitiveness, diseases, and all the other negative attributes.

For example, today when we read the ‘journals’ of the so called ‘explorers’ such as H.M. Stanley, Samuel Baker, and others, who chronicled their adventures in Africa, it is clear that many of the accounts and encounters and conquests over African ‘savages’ were concocted - figments of their imagination. Yet, these were the writers whose books are still consulted by ‘modern’ Western reporters today.

So conditioned were writers and editors to expect the ‘backwardness’ that when the ‘savages’ did not cooperate, the ‘journalism’ was simply manufactured to fit. For example, when Lloyd Garrison, a Times reporter and descendant of the famous American abolitionist once filed a story from Nigeria in the late 1960s, he received the shock of his life. By the time his article was published in The Times, editors had taken it upon themselves to insert a scene about “primitive” Nigerians, even though the reporter himself had not encountered them - it was purely imagined and concocted by his editors in New York.

“The reference to ‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves’ is slightly misleading and could, because of its startling quality, give the reader the impression there are a lot of tribes running around half naked,” Garrison complained, in a letter to the infamous editor, Freedman, dated June 5, 1967.

“Tribesmen connote the grass-leaves image. Plus tribes equals primitive, which in a country like Nigeria just doesn't fit, and is offensive to African readers who know damn well what unwashed American and European readers think when they stumble on the word,” he added.

It is therefore ironically tragic that 40 years later, The New York Times and most other Western publications are yet to take the advice and warning of the then New York Times correspondent. One also wonders how many ‘tribal’ scenarios are still concocted by Western writers who travel to Africa. That is why it is even more important that Africans insist that Westerners stop using the ‘tribalism’ as an excuse for lack of in-depth reporting.

• Allimadi is the publisher of The Black Star News, a weekly newspaper in New York, and the author of The Hearts Of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa (Black Star Books, 2003).
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