Mary Harper
Whenever I come back from a reporting trip to Somalia, people ask me if I was scared, if I was shot at, if I came across any pirates, starving people or terrorists. They assume I have been in great danger and that I have seen terrible things. They think either I am battle-hardened and brave, or that there is something deeply wrong with me for wanting to go to such a place and to try to tell its story.
They look a bit disappointed when I tell them there wasn’t any shooting on the day I visited Mogadishu, that the pirate I met appeared gentle and civilized, and that I feel safer in the Somali city of Hargeisa than in almost any other part of Africa, or Europe for that matter.
There are doubtless dangerous, difficult and devastating things happening in Somalia, and I could report on only those if I chose to. But I would have to develop a form of tunnel vision, leaving out all the other things I see and hear. Maybe what I have to say about Somalia is not so simple or dramatic, but it does, I hope, let people know that there is more to the place than drought, piracy, state failure and Al Qaeda linked terror.
Somalia is in many ways the journalist’s dream. On one level, it conforms to a stereotypical vision of Africa that is now way out of date but continues to sell newspapers, attract audiences and generate Internet hits. As Ian Birrell of the British newspaper, The Observer, writes, it has all the “four horsemen of the supposed African apocalypse”: hunger, poverty, disease and conflict.
But it has a whole lot more. Somalia has oil, it exports more live animals than any other country in the world, it is home to Africa’s biggest money transfer company, and it has one of the cheapest, most efficient telecommunications networks on the continent. It would however be as misleading to only focus on the positive things about Somalia as to concentrate on the negative.
During the years I have spent reporting on Somalia, I have come across two main types of foreign journalist there, or sometimes one who is a combination of both. There are of course many exceptions.
First, there is the Rambo-style war reporter, dressed in flak jacket and khaki, posing against bullet-scarred buildings and ducking from time to time as the noise of war booms and crackles nearby.
Then there is the Florence Nightingale/ Mother Teresa type of journalist, motivated by the desire to ‘make a difference’, to encourage their audiences to ‘do something’ about the problem, perhaps to dig into their pockets to make a donation, or, if they are powerful enough, to intervene in some way. This kind of journalist is a favourite with some aid agencies, as they are an effective way of getting their messages across to a mass audience.
I once annoyed an aid organisation by refusing to play this game. I was taken to visit what I was told was a serious humanitarian disaster in northern Somalia. Tens of thousands of refugees were said to be fleeing a serious outbreak of fighting.
When we arrived at what I was told was a major settlement for the displaced, we went immediately to see a local official. He told us the exact number of displaced, and read out a long shopping list of what was needed. When I asked to see all of these people, he and the aid workers became agitated. It turned out there were nowhere near as many displaced people as he claimed. But inflating the numbers suited him because he would receive a flood of supplies, and it suited the aid workers because the supposed scale of this ‘emergency’ kept them in their jobs.
It could have suited me as well. I could have photographed a hungry child, flies buzzing around its face, an anguished mother standing by. I could have sounded dramatic and compassionate. Instead I filed a report on exactly what I had seen, something that did not go down well with the aid workers or the local official.
The Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, has recently written a scathing attack on ‘How Not to Write about Africa. In an article for the British newspaper, The Guardian, he criticizes heavily what he says is the reliance of Western journalists on humanitarian organisations: “To make your work easier, you need, in your phone, the number of the country directors of every European aid agency… In this age, all local knowledge is carried by aid organizations. These organizations speak human rights, and because they do so, we know that they are good, objective and truthful.”
Binyavanga Wainaina highlights an important point. He suggests that some journalists are perhaps sometimes a bit too quick to adopt as ‘the truth’ press releases from aid agencies. This is not to underestimate the courageous and essential work done by many in the aid community, especially during humanitarian disasters. What they do is important, and the job of a journalist is to report it.
But it is also the job of journalists to try to be balanced, objective and fair. Aid agencies and human rights groups are an important source of information, as are politicians, members of the business community, rebel groups and ‘ordinary people’. It is our job to attribute the information we receive from them, and to seek out other perspectives.
I have noticed while reporting humanitarian issues that the ‘recipients’ of assistance sometimes say what they think the aid workers want them to hear. Although it is important for journalists to listen to and report on what aid agencies have to say, it might sometimes be a good idea to try to slip away from them, and speak independently to those who are suffering. I did this on a recent trip to the vast Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, home to more than half a million Somalis. I’m not sure I would have heard the same stories from the refugees if an aid worker had been standing by.
One of the best pieces of advice I have ever had about reporting was given to me by my first boss at the BBC, the legendary editor of the Focus on Africa radio programme, Robin White. As he sent me off on my first trip to Somalia, he said, “Do not decide on the story before you get there. Wipe away your preconceptions. When you arrive, open your eyes and ears, and tell us what you see and what you hear. That will be the story.”
Mary Harper is Africa Editor at the BBC World Service. She has reported on Somalia and other parts of Africa for the past twenty years. Her book, ‘Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State’ was published by Zed Press in February 2012.