African Media and Conflict
By Abiodun Onadipe and David Lord
Acknowledgements
This second reworking of our original paper titled African Media and Conflict, published in 1997, was made possible by the assistance of a wide range of African and non-African journalists, journalists’ organisations and others, who have been directly involved at different times in Conciliation Resources’ African media programming.
First of all we would like to thank Anne Busby, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Bruce Jones, and Michael Wolfers for helping us to get started in looking at the issues involved, which formed the basis of the first version of this paper.
Michael and Anne acted as trainers in election coverage workshops for working journalists held in Sierra Leone and The Gambia in 1996, carried out in collaboration with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists and the Gambia Press Union. Richard Olu Awonoor-Gordon, then Secretary General of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, played an important role in the planning and delivery of both those workshops, as the principal organiser in the first case, and as a resource person in the second.
Those experiences put Conciliation Resources firmly on the track of developing ongoing media programming aimed at improving basic skills and encouraging working journalists to focus on the violent and non-violent conflicts surrounding them in their professional and personal lives.
The first African Media and Conflict paper was a work in progress that pulled together some of the experiences of CR, analysis of African conflicts, how the media functions in those conflicts, some concepts of conflict resolution and preliminary thoughts on how, in their own particular circumstances, African journalists might be able to have more of a constructive impact on political, social and economic conflict. To help with that thinking we enlisted the aid of a small advisory group made up of area and professional specialists. The group -- Dr. Abiodun Alao, Penny Dale, Desmond Davies, Dr. Thémon Djaksam, Dr. Funmi Olonishakin, Chidi Odinkalu, and Michael Wolfers -- has made invaluable suggestions and comments on how to tackle the issues and problems faced by African journalists.
In May and June of 1998, Dr. Abiodun Onadipe, CR’s Media in Conflict programme co-ordinator, travelled to Accra, Monrovia and Lusaka with Peter du Toit, a South African conflict resolution trainer and journalist, to consult with gatherings of journalists from 11 countries in West and Southern Africa and to carry out a needs assessment with those on the media frontlines in those countries. The active planning and organisational support of the West African Journalists Association, the Press Union of Liberia and the Zambian Institute of Mass Communication were indispensable to the success of that assessment. We would also like to express our gratitude to the individual journalists who so candidly shared their views, suggestions and comments during the consultations. Their fascinating and forthright input makes up the core of this revised version of African Media and Conflict.
Last, but far from least, we are deeply grateful to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands, for its financial support in the recent development of our media programming. We would also like to thank the United States Institute of Peace for its patient backing of often-postponed training work in Sierra Leone. We are also indebted to the UK Department for International Development for its initial support for CR’s media in conflict activities.
Despite all the expert help, we ask readers to excuse errors of fact, emphasis and interpretation. They are the authors’.
Abiodun Onadipe
David Lord
Top | African Media and Conflict contents
