E-mail a friendCharlayne Hunter-Gault
airdate June 22, 2006
Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a two-time Emmy- and Peabody-winning journalist with more than 40 years in the business. After beginning her career with The New Yorker, she spent 20 years with PBS, worked for CNN in Johannesburg and has had two stints at NPR. The South Carolina native made history as the first African American woman to attend and graduate from the University of Georgia and wrote of her experience in her memoir, In My Place. Her new book, New News Out of Africa, reveals the good news from the continent.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Tavis: Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an award-winning journalist who spent nearly 20 years right here on PBS with the 'McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.' She went on to cover Africa for both NPR and CNN, serving as CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief. Her new book is called "New News Out of Africa, Uncovering Africa's Renaissance.' She makes her home these days in South Africa, but joins us tonight from New York City. Charlayne, nice to have you on the program.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault: It's great to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: I'm excited to jump into this conversation with you, specifically because there are three things, three new ways of covering and looking at Africa that you suggest that we need to pay attention to, and I wanna get to that right away. Let me start, though, with the obvious question. Since you make South Africa, the continent of Africa, your home these days, what is the new news out of Africa?
Hunter-Gault: Well, it's everything that isn't being covered. Generally, the media cover death, disease, disaster, and despair. What I call the four D's of the African apocalypse. And there is so much going on on the continent these days, in terms of the movement towards Democracy, in terms of Africans attempting to take control of their own destinies, solve their own problems.
African reporters trying to get the space to tell their own stories. And these stories are not getting across to the western markets, in particular America. And so there is a lot of what I call new news, which isn't necessarily good news. Because there are still problems on the continent. But news in terms of things that people don't know.
Tavis: Mm. Let me jump right to these three issues that you suggest that we need to grapple with, and quite frankly, to reformulate how we cover Africa, if, in fact, we're going to give Africa the respect as a continent, and those countries therein the respect they deserve. You start out by suggesting that the media has to come in right. If you're part of the media, covering the continent, you gotta come in right. Talk to me about that.
Hunter-Gault: That means check your predispositions, your preconceptions at the door, and as I've said in the book, you have to go there to know that. On the ground, the realities often are different from the perceptions that even journalists have who haven't been on the continent. Who have been educated, or not educated, in the same way most Americans have, through media.
So when they get there, they're looking for the same stories that have been in the media, on television, in print all along. And I'm saying that it's important, as it was for me to check my preconceptions at the door, and let the people on the ground, the facts on the ground, dictate where you go and what you do.
Tavis: So one, you say come in right. Secondly, you mention something I wanna come back to. You said, to know there, you have to go there. Is that really happening these days, though, with regard to world news organizations? Are people really putting people on the ground to cover, good or bad, what comes out of this continent? Are there even stringers?
Hunter-Gault: Not in the main. I don't think that there is a major U.S. network presence anywhere in Africa, with the possibly exception of CNN. That none of them has any full time people on the ground. They've got stringers and others, but it still continues to be the parachute journalism that we've traditionally had, where journalists drop into a crisis, right now Darfur, and that's all justifiable, of course.
But they jump into the crisis, and they leave the crisis. And normally, the crisis is a crisis. And you never see the average, ordinary citizens who are struggling with the crisis on a daily basis, and maybe in some instances making some headway. Because you just don't have time to get out there and see them. But if you spend a little time on the ground, if you don't subscribe to the whole notion of if it bleeds, it leads, and if you really try to uncover, as I have said as my subtitle to the book, uncover the Africa renaissance, I think that there are a lot of things that would emerge that are in terms of what I call new news.
Tavis: Before I get to this renaissance that you wanna uncover, talk to me more about what you call Afro-pessimism. Afro-pessimism.
Hunter-Gault: Well, Afro-pessimism has been the prism through which many journalists and many policymakers and others have viewed the continent. It has to do again with looking at it through the prism of its disease, its death, its disaster, its despair. I think that there was an African American journalist who may have been the impetus for that phrase when he was there reporting the genocide in Rwanda, and really the sickening things that happened as Hutus, the majority tribe there, murdered the minority Tutsis.
And I think that the fact that there was so much of this death and despair that he despaired. And that sort of fed this Afro-pessimism, this thinking that there's nothing in Africa that's worth anything other than looking at the conflict, looking at the despair, looking at the disease, and the disaster. That that has framed many of the perceptions of Africa, up until this day.
Tavis: All right, so if there is, in fact, a renaissance that needs to be uncovered, what is that renaissance being built around?
Hunter-Gault: Well, it's more of a grand vision and a hope than it is at this point a reality. But the African leadership has taken a position that it has to get its economic house in order; that it has to get its governance house in order. That it has to begin to insist that governments respect human rights of citizens, respect their civil rights, and that journalists, journalists also are a part of this, who want space to tell their own story.
And the African Union has put in place something called the New Partnership For African Development, which says that we kind of do it alone, but we will take the lead in doing all the things I just mentioned, in exchange for help from the west. Because as you know, because of a variety of reasons, most African countries are very poor, and need a support until they can get their feet back up on the ground.
Tavis: As you know, Charlayne, you can't talk about Africa without talking about HIV and AIDS, and that's not as much a negative as it is a reality. I think you and I both can see that. That said, you also have to know that the story of Jacob Zuma, the former Vice President of South Africa, having sex with this young woman and then suggesting that he protected himself afterwards by taking a shower, as if somehow that prevents HIV, that story got major play here Stateside. How did that story, right quick, get covered in South Africa?
Hunter-Gault: It got covered massively, because everybody realized the ridiculousness of that position, and how much it continued to feed the confusion in the minds of South Africans. And as it spread around the continent, Africa's, the big challenge right now is getting people to appreciate that something can be done about their status if they're HIV-positive. But they have to know, they have to go, and they have to get tested.
And that's just not happening. And so you get all of this confusion about what it is that you're supposed to do in order to prevent AIDS, in order to treat AIDS. And it has been a very sad day in the history of an otherwise very good history of a new Democracy making its way.
Tavis: Let me ask you finally, just a few seconds here, for those who are of African descent, or for that matter, those who care about the continent who wanna get a more balanced view of what's happening on the continent, what do you suggest we do here stateside? How do we get that information?
Hunter-Gault: Well, first of all, you buy my book. (Laughs) And then from there, the Internet has revolutionized how people access information. I was speaking with a group of people this week in New York, policymakers and others from the UN, from aid agencies, and giving them some Internet websites that they could go to. 'Independent Online,' IOL.
Those are some of the newspapers in South Africa. The 'Weekly Mail and Guardian.' But also I think, Tavis, that Americans, I think, have to give the lie to the notion that people in America are not interested in Africa. And as you correctly said, it's not just African Americans; it's Black people, it's White people, it's people who have some concerns about the global community, and wanna understand the entire world. So there's a policy, those who make the policy at news organizations need to get the message that Americans really are interested in the African continent.
Tavis: Well, we will send them that message by starting with the purchase of the new book by Charlayne Hunter-Gault of PBS fame, "New News Out of Africa, Uncovering Africa's Renaissance.' Charlayne Hunter-Gault, welcome back this way for a few weeks, at least, I'm sure, and thank you for the book. Nice to have you on the program.
Hunter-Gault: Thank you, Tavis, and thank you for your book.
Tavis: Thank you very much. Up next on this program, Oscar-nominated actor Thomas Haden Church. Stay with us.
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