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A Struggle to Be Heard: The Unique Role of Senegal's Independent Press
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10304 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
3,315 Words |
| Author
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Ben Barber
Ben Barber is the State Department correspondent for the
Washington Times. |
In the village of Keurmoussa, an hour's drive from Dakar, Senegal, a woman sits on a straw mat in the sandy courtyard of her home. She is hungry for news, and her tiny transistor radio is beside her all day. The woman is typical of most Senegalese: She cannot read any language and cannot speak French, the language that dominates the public life of Senegal. "Sometimes my son gets a copy of Soleil, the government paper, and he reads it to me," she comments.
The only news she receives in Wolof, her native language, is from government-run broadcasts that carefully omit the criticisms and scandals that scream from the headlines of the few independent French-language papers in the capital. Nevertheless, as she sits with her children and her husband's second wife, the woman says she knows that Senegal's president has just been accused of paying secret salaries to members of parliament. This scoop, exposed by the feisty independent newspaper Sud Quotidien, has percolated through Senegal despite the blackout the government mass media applied to it.
A developing free press
The spreading of the story about secret salaries is part of the cutting edge of Africa's information revolution. Indeed, Senegal's reporters have proved innovative in dealing with the four major problems that block the development of the free press in Francophone Africa. Reporters have endured a lack of physical, legal, or economic security; some have been bribed, sued, threatened, and even attacked. The nation has a tradition of subservience to powerful political, economic, tribal, and colonial authorities. There is also an inherited French intellectual-authoritarian tradition that tends to reinforce antidemocratic tendencies, leads journalists to personalize their reporting, and interferes with objectivity. Finally, there is a cultural schizophrenia that derives from an elite who speak, think, and write in French in public life, while local African languages are used in the daily lives of most people.
Even when government controls and restrictions are lifted, journalists confront the fact that the majority of the population is unable to afford or understand the independent French-language press. A second barrier is the journalists' own cultural background: Senegalese journalists think of themselves as elite urban intellectuals. They rarely write about the problems of daily and rural life experienced by the average person. When the free press does dig up stories on corruption, waste, and injustice, the news is often ignored by a society long accustomed to allowing its
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