Failure™ Magazine

No News is Good News?

What you haven’t heard about Africa.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History, Life

Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Photo by Justin Ide.

When it comes to Africa, Americans are conditioned to assume the worst. For hundreds of years the Western media have portrayed Africa as a poverty-stricken, disease-wracked, war-torn continent with dismal prospects for the future. As a result, Americans have long associated the “dark continent” with AIDS, famine, corruption, genocide and the like. But according to Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Special Africa Correspondent for National Public Radio and author of “New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance” (Oxford University Press), African nations are making dramatic, fundamental changes that have the potential to radically improve the state of affairs continent-wide. Failure interviewed Hunter-Gault about the latest developments in twenty-first century Africa, and why Americans are oblivious to the changes.

What motivated you to write “New News Out of Africa”?
The book grew out of three [McMillan-Stewart] lectures that I gave at Harvard University. The audiences were very interested in Africa, but I could tell from the questions they asked that they didn’t have a clue about [recent] developments on the continent. The questions revolved around what I call the four D’s of the African apocalypse—death, disease, disaster and despair. When I sat down to write the book I tried to focus on things I thought were important for Americans to know about Africa.

What is the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)?
NEPAD [conceived by five African presidents] lays out new rules of the road for African leaders. For too long Africans have suffered from corruption, mismanagement of resources, repression of women, and oppression of citizens in general. The new theme that many African leaders are espousing is not to come to the West with a begging bowl, but to come with something to offer. If they get control of their economies and their governments, and if they begin to recognize women’s rights and human rights, then when they need support from the West they will have earned it. They believe this is a good bargain and everybody wins. Once Africa gets back on its feet everybody benefits, because the West can make use of the Africa’s vast resources and so can Africa.

Can you explain what the African Union (AU) is and what it is doing to fight corruption and human rights abuses?
The AU is the successor to the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The OAU’s mission was to fight and end colonialism and apartheid. In 1994 that mission was complete. So out of that came the AU, which is an organization of African leaders who meet and try to deal with the problems on the continent. NEPAD [pronounced neh-pad, not kneepad] was born out of that; it’s what I call the first-born of the AU.

As I said, the organization has come out with new rules of the road that include a peer review mechanism where eminent African persons go into other African countries to judge governments. This is revolutionary because during the OAU’s existence borders were sacrosanct. No matter what happened inside a country, no other nation would interfere. Now these peer review mechanisms have been put in place to assess the behavior of government leadership.

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