One journalist’s journey from East Africa to Canada

and its professional trappings

BY GEORGE KAGAME




Adam Giambiore, the influential and highly newsworthy chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission is on facebook, with over 2500 friends that i can fairly assume he has never met. It is also said that David Miller the mayor of Toronto is subscribed on twitter another of a myriad networking forums on the internet.

So as I sent my request to Gambiore to be his friend on facebook with a personal note introducing myself as a community journalist, i never expected him to respond but his response was swift. And since then through his status updates, I get to know what the senior official is upto and can easily contact him for a comment should I have a story. My interest with the two big men in the politics of Toronto comes from the fact that as a journalist in Africa, its only the views of the big man that normally makes the story.

While to a large extent the big man in Canada is in most times willing to tell his story to a journalist as fast as it happens. It is one of ‘professional shocks’ that in the short time I have practiced journalism here, I have been able to get the powerful councillors, bigger politicians, theatre directors and even-after accreditation to cover the national assembly proceedings at one time I would talk to some of Canada’s most influential policy makers without necessarily going through the African Big Man culture of scheduling an appointment for a happening story a week sometimes a month earlier.

The internet, its fast speed and general availability in Canada is one of the most enduring revelations that i have witnessed as a visiting journalist. However, it is not about the internet or the politicians and social networking groups that I intend to write about-although that is worth an effort-but the differences I have come to experience as a practicing journalist in East and Central Africa and here Canada too-expected and ernomous as there are and the opportunities and challenges in the two parallel societies.

The media is in most cases responsible for the way different societies hold perceptions towards each other, it is with this in mind possibly that African intellectuals and politicians like to moan about the unfairness of the western media in covering issues, events, and personalities about and from the continent. The politicians and intellectuals say that the west and its media interest themselves in telling mainly the gruesome and brutal side of Africa and its stories, that the west lumps the continent as one and the same.

The same Africans never do anything to help the growth of African media to tell the real stories of Africa, or in most cases contribute to thwarting the growth of the industry. For us practicing journalists on the continent writing or reporting for African media houses, many times to get stories-bad or good-is easy but to get people wanting to get on record is extremely difficult, and the person is in most cases not separated from his profession, it goes for example in my own country that if a journalist wrote what a politician disagreed with, the journalist is made to pay the worst of prices, his job for example, arrest and in some cases street gung-go beatings.

Because in Africa there’s no culture of record keeping, the people involved in the business of records of what happens in the continent are historically unpopular with the powers that be, normally the African best writers, journalists and historians who try to record the events and issues of Africa are chased away to foreign lands.

It could be unreasonable arrogance, big man culture, ignorance, fear for upsetting their appointing authorities, (where i come from there is a very strict patriarch system where most power is resident in the brain of only one person-the president) and incompetence all a mixture of both but it is true to state that politicians in my country are weary of journalists and don’t take them serious at all.

Even a politician campaigning for votes in Africa will only meet a journalist at his biding in the process influencing local news at his convinience, and yet when a western journalist makes contact the same politician an appointment will be very swift.
African politicians are obsessed with speaking to western journalists, even when they always dismiss the stories these journalists post. The ones that are savvy enough to give press conferences do it in fact to mock journalism.

To start with, the media in my country operates in a very unfriendly environment compared to other African countries. First, because of the top down approach to journalism, the media in Rwanda like the security organizations in the country at the time participated in organizing the 1994 genocide which at its apex claimed close to one million innocent civillians.
As a result, today journalists are viewed with a lot of skepticism by society at large and they face the brunt of genocide ideology still prevailing in the country today.

A journalist will be treated by his sources depending on which ethnic side he is suspected to belong to. It goes that a Tutsi or Hutu journalist will be told different versions of the same story and also depending on which media house they report for. For all the advances registered in the country so far since the end of that conflict 15 year ago, the media remains the most maligned sector in the country and there’s still no will or concrete program by the government to develop it.

The government for its part does not take the profession serious enough while the public thinks that journalists are only singing the praise of the government. So it is not surprising therefore that one excited journalist once wrote that to be gay-it is still criminal in Rwanda is equivalent to the crime of genocide and no one ever opened a debate on the subject.

From the above, the media in Rwanda operates at an entirely different level with that in Canada(here the sources of news are very cooperative) but there are also some similarities especially when it comes to asking to see my story but only that the ones in Canada want a PDF file well as in Rwanda they will order me to send the story before it is published.

That said, before I came to Canada I never had pride in the work I did as a journalist. First, the people who the read the newspaper I wrote for are very few relative to the target market, and even the ones that read it never had any feedback so there was no way of seeing the good, bad and ugly of my work. But it is entirely different here, there’s a serious reading culture that if you are a journalist you most definitely have to research about your story before writing it because the audience is quite informed and quite active.

In the subway you will observe that most passengers are reading something from newspapers to novels, magazines, bibles, journals. Even children read here. As a journalist I’m always proud seeing people emmersed in a newspaper reading or filling a crossword puzzle.