After spending one year in the United States, I realize how ignorant Americans are about Africa. For example, a woman felt sorry for me because she thought that everyone in my country, the Ivory Coast, was starving. Of course she was making a direct connection with the starvation problem in Somalia, which was at that time of the year receiving great coverage. She did not know where the Ivory Coast was located, and apparently Somalia and the Ivory Coast meant the same thing to her.

Africa’s receptiveness to Western fashionable concepts and theories appears to have suffered little from repeated demonstration of inappropriateness. The list of inapt imports is long and quite familiar to the older generation of Africanist academics who had a hand in fashioning and disseminating them. It began with the imperative of the “nation-state” that was to be forged in the process of national integration and institution building. Economic development was to come via industrialization, “import substitution” and diversification of exports, and social modernization would follow the passing of traditional society. Political development had a complex formula: “constitutionalism” and “rational legitimacy,” “interest articulation, aggregation and representation,” “functionally specific” bureaucratic institutions, and “prescriptive” as opposed to “ascriptive” recruitment.

As references to the “Evil Empire” on American television recede into memory, sublime images of Africa as a dark continent nevertheless remain an enduring presence. This, despite the debate in foreign policy and media circles about the need to redefine now the role of the press in coverage of global affairs. No doubt, the media, television especially, have provided compelling images of the changing world order: Tiananmen Square, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, Somalia, Bosnia, the Soviet coup and the Berlin Wall. To most Americans, vivid memories of these events are in all likelihood shaped by images gleaned from CNN or one of the three networks.

In a report released on September 16, 1993, Amnesty International came up with an apt description of the current human rights situation in Zaire as consisting of “violence against democracy.” In a violent backlash against the democratization process, the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko has plunged the country into “its worst human rights crisis since the end of the civil war in the early 1960s.” More than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced in ethnic cleansing in the Shaba and North Kivu provinces. Moreover, repeated looting, extortion, and other acts of violence by Mobutu’s army have endangered the lives of millions of people all over the country, particularly in the major cities.

Complaints about Africa’s media image have been voiced for years, and for long little seemed to change. Civil wars, famine, squalor and primitivity have continued to dominate the headlines and to paint a grim image of mankind’s ancestral home. The recent media fixation on Somalia is but one in a series of this one-dimensional coverage. In the early 1960s, the anarchy in Katanga (Zaire) dominated the news and defined Africa. In the late 1960s, it was the Nigerian civil war and the consequent misery in “Biafra.” In the 1970s, the real and conjured eccentricities of Uganda’s Idi Amin became the African news. Political conflict in Zimbabwe and South Africa dominated much of the 1980s, until the starvation of Ethiopians eclipsed everything else. Recently, the grim images were of Somalia. While these events warranted the press attention they received, their coverage to the near exclusion of non-crisis modem African life has left a severe knowledge gap and perpetuated a historical image problem.

This paper focuses on the issue of human rights with respect to women’s land rights in Zimbabwe. The concept of human rights is particularly pertinent because of the debates on land reform and the activities of the land Commission exploring possibilities for the reform of land use in Zimbabwe.

This paper takes the position that the human rights of women are inalienable and an integral and indivisible part of universal human rights, which we define to include the right to full and equal participation of women with men, in the political civil, economic, social and cultural life at all levels. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which is one of the International instruments that explicitly focuses on women’s human rights, is quite comprehensive in its coverage. Consisting of 30 articles, CEDAW covers women’s human rights in all aspects of their lives—political, economic, social and cultural rights.

This essay addresses how recent changes in electronic media may impact upon what the rest of the world sees of Africa on television. Its predictions are disheartening, especially to Africanists and communications scholars who have well documented the longstanding insufficiency of African news coverage. And my conclusions contrast with those of the big television news companies, who, with a “good for business, good for everyone” mentality, like to believe that the new media market and nifty new technologies can only mean more and better coverage of every part of the planet.

American media coverage of Angola’s first multi-party elections, held on 29-30 September 1992, was based on a number of misconceptions which were derived from an enduring Cold War perspective, a deference to the Bush administration agenda and a conviction that free and fair elections were synonymous with “democracy.”

Human rights is an issue that is broader than ordinarily understood. Its ramifications cover political, economic, social and cultural rights. Almost every nation has made constitutional provisions guaranteeing these rights. The purpose of the constitutional provisions is to defend, by institutionalized means, the rights of human beings against abuses of power committed by the organs and agencies of the state. Notably enough, however, each nation emphasizes those human rights that it frequently respects and observes. Thus, the United States emphasizes, for example, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of religion as if those aspects that it emphasizes constitute the entire human rights.

Our students read magazines. Many of us, as professors, assign popular news magazines in our classes for the discussion of current events. This essay examines the coverage of Africa in Time and Newsweek to explore the images they present to their readers.

A meaningful understanding of the causes of political violence in South Africa and youth’s role in its dénouement must consider some of the historical background to the national struggle for human rights and youth’s specific involvement thereof. The phenomenon of adolescent marchers and activists who characterized the resistance to Apartheid over the last decade has had sequelae and antecedents that reflect the core of the South African dilemma.

One of the results of the New World Information and Communication Order debate was the invigoration of international communication research on images and coverage of nations in the world media. Specifically, the images of Africa outside the continent became a major research question in Western communication scholarship. The results of these studies contend that several variables such as 1) event characteristics, including deviance, interest, and timeliness; and 2) country characteristics, including economic, political, and cultural significance, proximity and national security, appear to affect the ways one nation is covered by the media of another nation.

The modern human rights movement, as it is known today, is largely the product of the horrors of the mainly European war of 1939-45. Its rise is mostly a direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. The two principal documents of the movement—the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—largely establish negative rights that either limit or prohibit altogether government intrusion into the so-called “private realm.”

In an article I wrote in the pages of this journal in 1976, I expressed considerable scepticism about the prospect of African governments drafting a human rights convention for Africa or establishing a regional human rights body similar to the European and Inter-American Commissions on Human Rights. Even though there had been calls for the creation of such a human rights mechanism as early as 1961, at the Lagos Conference on the Rule of Law, organized by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), I thought that the time did not yet “seem propitious for such a move.”

The word “black,” referring to Africans and people of African descent, is essentially a social and political construction, historically articulated and contemporarily invented and reinvented. As a social and political category, the meaning of “black” varies through contestation over the term. Yet, in its dominant use in white American and European culture, “black” refers to a static set of trans-cultural and essentialized racial characteristics. What is “black” is “not white.” As Frantz Fanon reminds us, “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” Thus, “black” in relation to “white” is made different.

In the popular media and in the minds of many people resident in the northern hemisphere, Africa has two major attributes: an environment filled with exotic forms of life and landscapes, and an environment threatened with ecological collapse and human suffering. These themes often work together, providing a base from which everything from international campaigns to basic research are launched. Like all broad generalizations, these are based on small amounts of truth and large amounts of fiction, and like all generalizations, their indiscriminate application can be—and has been—extremely destructive. As these ideas are elaborated, Africans are either not mentioned at all, or are cast in the role of destructive agents. The choice of “Ecology and Environmental Issues” as the overall theme for the 1993 African Studies meetings provides an opportunity to explore and dispel these perceptions—as well as the risk of contributing to their perpetuation.