More African countries are moving up into the top half of the Reporters Without Borders annual press freedom index each year thanks to their progress in the fight against impunity and the abolition of prison terms for press offences such as libel and slander and the printing of inaccurate news, says the Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2005 published by Reporters without Borders. While those that usually respect press freedom – Cape Verde (29th), South Africa (31st), Mauritius (34th) and Mali (37th) – kept their positions in 2005, Mozambique jumped from 64th to 49th place.

Zambian police have launched a manhunt for the controversial editor of its only daily newspaper after an editorial comment which apparently insulted President Levy Mwanawasa, a spokesperson for the paper said, according to a report in South Africa’s The Star, republished on www.journalism.co.za The Post managing editor Amos Malupenga said police had summoned editor Fred M'membe to appear at a local police station for questioning.

As prospects grow of a global flu pandemic, it is important for governments to recognise that responsible science journalism can play a significant role in limiting its impact, says the website SciDev.Net. "It would be difficult to imagine a better example of the need for responsible science journalism than avian influenza, or 'bird flu'. Health officials across the world warn that the H5N1 virus could spark a global pandemic of human flu that, many are already predicting, could cost million of lives. It is already becoming clear that effectively communicating accurate information about the disease will be essential to efforts to contain it."

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo is in Cote d'Ivoire trying to broker a deal over who should become that country's next prime minister. "We've spoken with all the parties and asked them to make recommendations, or suggestions, on whom they would like to nominate to take up the position of prime minister," Obasanjo said.

The purpose of this guide from the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) is to give principals and senior school management information on using and managing ICT resources so that they can provide leadership in their schools. The guide also considers some implications of the use of the computer and related resources for teaching and learning. The authors hope that it will also be a valuable resource for other senior members of the school staff, and for School Governing Bodies.

Dissatisfied with the quality of current South African search engines, Alistair Carruthers has built Jonga which he hopes will become the first stop for South African Web searches when it launches later this month, Tectonic News reports. "Jonga is the result of over two years of development in my spare time as a pet project. It has evolved into something that was never intended to be a commercial or revenue generating venture, but purely an exercise to see whether or not I could create a search engine that would become the first place Internet users would go if they wanted to search for anything South African and also be able to compete with other existing commercial search engine-related sites," says Carruthers.

African journalists are under pressure to tell the African story differently after it became apparent that they follow the Western perspective when reporting on their continent. Africa has been subjected to negative reporting in the international media where it is always associated with strife, hunger, famine and other bad things. The positive side of Africa is never projected. All this might change after editors from across Africa decided to form a continent-wide forum of editors after meeting in Johannesburg from October 15 to 17.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Lesotho has acted decisively to ensure that public and private media have equal access to public information about the upcoming Commonwealth Speakers' Conference in Lesotho starting on 2 November 2005. On 31 October, media houses in Maseru - which include the Lesotho Defence Force Public Relations Office, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Southern African Press Association (SAPA) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) - were refused information at the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Lesotho about the Commonwealth Speakers' Conference. The reason given by the authorities was that the information would first be transmitted to the government-owned and controlled Radio Lesotho before being transmitted to the independent media.

Reporters Without Borders has written to the Moroccon authorities to draw attention to the plight of Abderrahmane El Badraoui, the former editor of the weekly Al-Moulahid, who has been in prison in Morocco since January 2002. He was physically attacked on 26 October by a guard, Mustafa Dindla, who had taken to subjecting him to extortion. After complaining about the guard's behaviour to the prison's deputy governor, Mr. Badraoui was attacked by the guard and two inmates, who hit him with keys and then gave him a beating.

The Southern Africa Editors’ Forum (Saef) and the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) have condemned the detention and harassment of the editor of the Gambian newspaper, The Independent, by that country’s intelligence agents, according to a statement. Musa Saidykhan was taken from his office in Banjul after he had written a story in his newspaper about how South African President Thabo Mbeki, had promised to help Gambian journalists by interceding with the government there over media repression. At the recent TAEF launch conference in Johannesburg, Saidykhan asked President Thabo Mbeki to raise the unsolved murder of Gambian journalist Deyda Hydara last December with the Gambian authorities.

Mediators from Darfur's main rebel group arrived at a unity meeting on Sunday to try and reconcile its two leaders whose differences have stalled African Union-sponsored talks to end the conflict in western Sudan. The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) began its congress to elect a new leadership amid heavy security on Saturday, after delaying it for many days awaiting the arrival of its President Abdel Wahed Mohamed el-Nur.

A Citizens' Summit on the Information Society (CSIS) will be held in Tunis, on November 16-18, 2005, coinciding with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The CSIS will be another milestone in the long tradition of UN conferences and Summits being complemented with events organized by citizen groups. Previous such events met with great success, for example during the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994), the Beijing Conference on Women (1995) or the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development (2002).

A new investigation by the toxic trade watchdog organization, Basel Action Network (BAN), has revealed that large quantities of obsolete computers, televisions, mobile phones, and other used electronic equipment exported from USA and Europe to Lagos, Nigeria for "re-use and repair" are ending up gathering dust in warehouses or being dumped and burned near residences in empty lots, roadsides and in swamps creating serious health and environmental contamination from the toxic leachate and smoke. The photo-documentary report entitled "The Digital Dump: Exporting High-Tech Re-use and Abuse to Africa," exposes the ugly underbelly of what is thought to be an escalating global trade in toxic, obsolete, discarded computers and other e-scrap collected in North America and Europe and sent to developing countries by waste brokers and so-called recyclers.

A generator rumbles behind the two-roomed building, which looks like one of the maize mills that dot Kenya's rural landscape. But, you're not likely to find a harvest of any sort in here - rather, food for thought. This is an internet café in a sleepy, rural part of Emuhaya constituency, about 500 kilometres from the capital, Nairobi. Information and technology experts estimate that only two percent of Kenyans with access to the internet live in rural areas. For those who have managed to log on, however, life has never been the same since.

Reporters Without Borders has voiced relief that the Zimbabwean authorities have abandoned the prosecution of 44 Daily News journalists who were to have been tried by a Harare court on 12 October on charges of working without an accreditation issued by the Media and Information Commission, the government-controlled body set up to regulate the news media. The 44 journalists and their defence lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, went to the court on 12 October but none of the court officials including the judge in charge of the case knew about the hearing.

The Zimbabwean government is well known for its repressive treatment of critics and independent journalists. A crackdown on the press over the past five years has left the country with no independent daily newspapers, no private radio news coverage, and only two prominent independent weeklies. What is less documented is the toll that this crackdown takes on the country's journalists, including those who flee overseas and struggle to rebuild their lives in exile, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

"We have produced a Special Issue of Mapambano which contains much of the material we have circulated on the on going campaigns on the Referendum in Kenya set for November 21st. We are on the "No" side although we believe that neither the "No" nor "Yes" sayers are an alternative to the political crisis in Kenya."

This website i-witness offers journalists tools to report on the information society, and a place to discuss the challenges – and opportunities – they face.

In the focus on Africa in 2005, it has often been hard to find African voices as opposed to European “experts”, while self-proclaimed saviours like Bob Geldof have been all to quick to declare, for example, that ‘a great justice has been done’ by the G8 meetings. A recent report by Ligali, an organisation that campaigns for social, economic and cultural equality on behalf of the African community in Britain, highlights these contradictions and concludes that the solutions to Africa’s problems do not reside in the corridors of Westminster or the White House but will come from African people themselves.

Africa is helpless. Africa is poor. Africa is, according to the song, a ‘world of dread and fear’ (Do They Know It’s Christmas? (Feed the World) written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure)

These myths have pervaded the British psyche and its media for decades. The ignorance, racism and misinformation that inform these culturally and politically constructed illusions were particularly prevalent earlier this year preceding the G8 Summit at Gleneagles. The Summit and the subsequent rowdiness stirred by its supporters - the most boisterous and arrogant of who was the musician, Bob Geldof – ensured that people throughout the British Isles were forced to confront one of the greatest injustices perpetrated by humankind on their fellow human; the reality of how centuries of economic and human exploitation that has resulted in the people of the Continent of Africa facing poverty, malnutrition, disease and ultimately, cultural disempowerment.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to seriously and intelligently discuss the issues and solutions that relate to Africa’s development and empowerment was lost as an overtly racist motivation informed the media agenda and ensured that not only were the same old myths propagated about Africa but that new ones were added to the mix. In addition, the guilt complex that inhabits the British psyche was easily pacified by white wrist bands or, as in the case of many a right-wing newspaper editor, by attempting to dissolve any sense of responsibility that people in the West might feel for repairing the damage their politics and economies have inflicted on African countries.

As an organisation whose primary work currently involves monitoring the media for offensive representation and actively challenging the inaccuracies and inequality inherent in that representation, we have noted the flourishing trend of myth making and the equally prevalent tendency to actively silence informed African voices who talk about African affairs in favour of European experts who talk from a eurocentric perspective about African affairs, ultimately to the benefit of their respective nations. This becomes increasingly problematic when the solutions that the so-called European experts want to instigate are in direct contradiction with what African people themselves want and need.

Even as a media organisation, we have found it challenging to say the least, to find African voices in the mainstream media talking about African affairs. And so, the Making of an Impoverished History was written. Initially, it was to be a brief article summarising the media’s approach to Africa but we soon realised that ‘brief’ was perhaps not the way to go about this. We had to contextualise the matter, historically and globally, and so embarked on making this a more comprehensive but accessible report that provides a more joined up picture of the politics behind the G8 Summit, the Live 8 event and its figure head, Bob Geldof, and the British media debate about Africa.

In highlighting these issues, came the inevitability of dealing with the notion of giving charity versus the responsibility of encouraging justice and how the British media have fought against the latter with strategies of defence and denial. This gave rise to headlines including ‘Why I wont be squandering any more money on Africa' and documentaries such as Channel 4’s ‘Living with Aids’ which, along with a barrage of other media outputs reinforced the notion that Africa’s current situation is the fault of African people and therefore people of the West need not feel a sense of responsibility about African issues. Of course, when you look into the instances of corruption, fraud and commercial exploitation that occur on the Continent, a European, American and most recently Asian corporate or indeed governmental influence is not far behind. From the rampant practice of selling cheap and second-hand rifles to just about anyone who will pay the right price, to the contemptuous reluctance of Western banking institutions to relinquish the financial benefits they get from holding the accounts of a small number of corrupt African leaders, corruption and exploitative profit making has proved to be a very Western affair.

The Make Poverty History campaign, the Live 8 concert and the Geldof agenda also pervaded the media reporting. Here, the media found an apparently liberal guise behind which they could conceal their prejudices and racist presumptions. Bob Geldof, far from being the liberal saviour of Africa as many referred to him as, displayed his utter contempt for African opinion in the way he actively ignored it and ensured that his voice, his agenda and his vision of Africa was viewed as the definitive stopping point. At the time, this was hard enough for African people to bare but following the redundant exercise that was the G8 Summit and the way in which its seemingly laudable objectives have subsequently fallen, and some would say been pulled apart, Sir Bob’s announcement that ‘a great justice has been done’ is not only arrogant but disenfranchising and frustrating for the African people who know that his ridiculous assertion could not be further from the truth. Of course, now the media are suffering from Africa fatigue and therein sets the apathy.

In researching this report, it became obvious that for African people, the solutions to Africa’s issues are multifaceted and originate not in the corridors of Westminster or the White House but from African people themselves. The stories that we will rarely if ever hear about in the media are some of the success stories of African development, the workable solutions designed for and by us, examples of good governance and the revolution needed to overturn trading injustice. Some of these are addressed in our report but in truth, because of its specific remit, it is something that will have to be covered in depth at a later date. However, we have always been a solutions orientated organisation and therefore ended the report with ways in which we can continue to aid our own progress and the rebuilding of our great Continent. The British government clearly have responsibilities including the enforcing of anti-corruption legislation and stemming its drain of skilled African people from the Continent. However, we also focused on some of the ways in which the African Union, African governments and African people in Diaspora can develop Africa through self-determinate means.

* This is a summarised version of a report produced by Ligali (pronounced lee-ga-lee), entitled “The Making of an Impoverished History”. Ligali is the African British Equality Authority. African British is the term now used to describe the community previously mislabelled as Afro Caribbean, Black British, UK Black, Coloured and Black. It embraces all British nationals with antecedents originating directly from Africa or indirectly via African diasporic communities, such as those in the Caribbean and South America.
Ligali actively campaigns for social, economic and cultural equality on behalf of the African community. Ligali is a non profit voluntary organisation. Through investigation and monitoring, we aim to challenge, identify and recommend workable solutions to current social issues that refuse to recognise the equal and inalienable rights of African people in the UK. Our main objectives are to turn talk into action and apathy into productivity.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The Rift Valley Institute seeks two new staff members: a full-time Programme Manager and a part-time Information Manager. Both posts are based in London. The deadline for applications is 10 November 2005. The RVI is a UK and Kenya-based research and training organization working in Eastern Africa, particularly Sudan. It was established in 2001. The Institute aims to connect local forms of knowledge to the global information system. Programmes include field-based social research, support for local educational institutions, in-country training courses and an online digital library.