The News: A User's Manual

The Details

The Ugandan government auditor has reported that millions of dollars have been transferred from Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi’s office into private accounts. Mr Mbabazi has acknowledged that money has been stolen from his office, but denies any involvement. The Ugandan President’s adviser, John Nagenda, said the government was determined to ensure that those responsible for the alleged corruption were brought to justice. All Ugandans were ‘absolutely fed up’ with corruption, he said. Mr Mbabazi has denied wrongdoing, but acknowledges there has been ‘massive theft’ from his office.

BBC

1.

DURING A VISIT to the BBC Uganda desk, while enjoying some banana cake that a colleague from BBC Nigeria had brought in and generously shared, I tried to hint as gently as I could at my inability to develop much of an interest in the news that the desk’s staff were so assiduously collecting from their country and attempting to disseminate to an apathetic world – news which, on that particular day, included an account of the brazen theft of $12 million in aid money from the office of the Ugandan prime minister.

2.

AS FAR AS Ugandan political news went, this was clearly a matter of considerable significance, but on the BBC’s website, the report had the misfortune of competing with, first, an item about a married footballer who had been photographed in the arms of the wife of one of Britain’s most famous television chefs, and second, a piece about a French actress who had been injured, under peculiar circumstances, on the yacht of an American Internet billionaire as it lay moored off the coast of Monte Carlo. Predictably, the Uganda story stood little chance.

The BBC Uganda staffers were more gracious than they could by rights have been in the face of my and my society’s lack of interest. Finally one of the team, a young Ugandan who had spent several years as a teenager in a refugee camp in the north of the country, suggested that the best thing might be for me actually to go to Uganda and see the place for myself, in the hope of perhaps igniting an interest that had eluded me thus far.

3.

AND SO I went; not because I wanted to, but precisely because I really didn’t – and yet I wanted to understand why. I went to develop my ideas as to why so many foreign countries lack any appeal whatsoever to a dispiritingly large share of a home audience and what role the news might play in supporting or creating this lassitude and disengagement.

My first surprise was that I had to go on a journey to get to Uganda. Technology helps to mask this somewhat obvious detail. For most of human history, the obstacles presented by overseas travel and communication were so formidable that the geographical – and also by implication the psychological and cultural – distances between countries were constantly and automatically emphasized. To cross an ocean, or even to send a simple message, was an extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive feat which left everyone in sure command of a moral that has a tendency to get lost nowadays when, at the tap of a screen, we can – at no cost to us – travel at the speed of light through the undersea Internet cable SEA-ME-WE4 from Marseilles to Djibouti and then, via the East African undersea fibre-optic cable EASSy, from Mombasa to Kampala, from where we declare a feeling of boredom and impatience: a moral that the experiences of mankind are infinitely more complex and interesting than we could ever imagine when we gaze out from our own static narrow vantage point and that it is hence a basic courtesy we should pay to the planet and its many lands to remain at all times open, curious and modest before their manifold mysteries.

This moral would have stuck naturally in the mind when the only way to get to Uganda was to travel for two months by sea around the perilous Cape of Good Hope bound for Dar es Salaam, then inland for another few months through bush and desert, with every likelihood that one would never return. In 1859, John Hanning Speke, the first European ever to enter Uganda and the man who gave Lake Inyansha its new name, Lake Victoria, made it back to Britain and gave a lecture on his travels to an almost hysterical 800-strong crowd in the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington. For these people, there was no doubt that ‘foreign news’ was exciting in the extreme. Speke told them that near Lake Manyara, in Tanzania, he had been attacked by fierce local hunters and ended up with a javelin impaled through both his cheeks. A few days after, a beetle had crawled into his ear, had started gnawing at his eardrum and had eventually had to be scraped out with a knife. The moment when he finally ascended the lush tropical hills on which the city of Kampala now stands was evocatively described in the bestselling travel book he published in 1863, The Discovery of the Source of the Nile:

We crossed over a low spur of hill and stretching as far as the eye could reach was a rich, well-wooded, landscape. I was immensely struck with the neatness and good arrangement of the place, as well as its excessive beauty and richness. No part of Bengal or Zanzibar could excel it in either respect; and my men, with one voice, exclaimed, ‘Ah, what people these are!’ … I felt inclined to stop here a month, everything was so pleasant … The whole land was a picture of quiescent beauty, with the boundless [Lake Victoria] in the background … At night a hyena came into my hut, and carried off one of my goats that was tied to a log between two of my sleeping men …

There was little danger that the original audience for this sort of material was going to be distracted by the nineteenth-century equivalent of an anecdote about a philandering footballer.

Even now, the journey down to Uganda is hardly a jaunt: the eight-hour flight in a Boeing 767, spanning some 6,500 kilometres between London and Entebbe, serves as an appropriately powerful reminder of the scale of our planet. Six hours in and you start flying over the endless ochre desert near Ounianga Kébir in Chad. Europe is far away now. An hour later, the boredom interminable, you riffle once again through the in-flight magazine while the plane enters the airspace over North Sudan. On the airline’s route map, the names themselves are charged and oddly poetic – Emi Koussi, Am Djeress, Umm Buru, Muhajiriya – so many unforeseen, unknown locations that are home to people whose assumptions and ways of life would be deeply challenging if the plane were to choose to fail at this point. Now comes a snack assembled late last night in Hounslow (a choice of a cheese or egg and cress sandwich) to be eaten in the minutes between Khogali and Tambura, a journey between two towns that would take five days on foot. Eventually, over the Democratic Republic of Congo, the seat-belt signs come on, there is a thanks from the captain, a reminder about immigration and malaria, and then a descent over Hoima and Luwero to Entebbe, with, as a backdrop, Lake Victoria sunk in tarry darkness punctuated by the flickering lamps of hundreds of tiny fishing boats.

We are wary of anything ‘exotic’ now. This way of praising what is foreign seems dangerously provincial, patronizing and possibly racist. Foreign news has actively distanced itself from travel writing and all the accompanying paraphernalia of exoticism. Cautious neither to overpraise nor to denigrate other cultures, it has settled as a compromise on a permanently neutral tone, never expressing any wonder at the ways or practices of the far-flung corners of the world it reports from. It never seems amazed to find itself where it is; it simply accepts without astonishment or explicit comment that it is filing a story from a spot where brides offer their grooms a goat on their marriage day, where there may be luwombo with sim-sim paste for supper and where it can be 30 degrees centigrade in the shade at midday, none of which is apparently interesting when the news could be focusing on the prime minister’s likely role in an incident of financial maladministration.

Nevertheless, upon landing in Uganda, one can’t help but be struck by what still deserves to be recognized as exotic: by the colourful adverts for Bidco’s Golden Fry Superior Vegetable Oil hand-painted on the sides of houses, by the names of one’s new acquaintances (Patience, Ignatius and Kenneth), by the smells of roasting meat and campfire smoke, by the marabous, the weaver birds and the turacos that wheel in the light-blue morning sky and perch on the tops of the telecom masts, by the fig trees that grow in the middle of traffic islands, and everywhere by the constant repetition, at moments of delay (of which there are many), of the old Ugandan proverb ‘Mpola mpola, otuuka waala’ (a version of ‘Make haste slowly’).

The news is keen never to sound remotely like him. John Hanning Speke (1827–64).

(picture credit 7.1)

4.

IN TRAVEL LITERATURE, we enter foreign nations with the help of narrators with whom we can identify and who respond to other countries with some of the assumptions and fears we ourselves might harbour. They, too, might miss home and get frightened of fevers and bugs. They, too, might admit to weakness, excitement and despair. They, too, might flinch a little from their normal journalistic impassivity upon seeing, along the main road leading into Kampala, a large and unconvincing sign bearing the promise that ‘Together we can kill Marburg Disease’ (a highly contagious haemorrhagic fever virus which proves fatal to over 80 per cent of its victims within two days and is endemic throughout large sections of Uganda).

Nowadays, though, any kind of personal narrator would be deemed an intrusion on the objectivity of reporting. Foreign news hence avoids speaking to us with any kind of voice or personality. Yet if any harm could conceivably come to a viewer from seeing another country through the distorting lens of a correspondent who expressed candid reactions to it, it is as nothing next to what can be the stifling boredom produced by ostensibly neutral and accurate reporters who, by their implicit denial of even having a response to anything foreign, fatally undermine our desire to add to our knowledge of the world.

5.

IN THE RUSH to acquaint us with the so-called ‘main events’, the news forgets that our sense of engagement with a country depends on our being shown those smaller visual or sensory elements which alone can excite our deeper interest in a people and a place. If we are going to feel any real concern about Ugandan news we will first need to know something about the mango trees in Kampala, whose sweet smells drift across the crowded boulevards after the almost hourly tropical showers. It helps to look around a typical Kampala office, to see how the country’s schools work, to learn about relationship rituals and to browse the local newspaper, New Vision, and take in reports of the latest crimes:

Former Medical Union president Dr. Apollo Nyangasi has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of killing his wife Christine following wrangles over property. Delivering her judgment on Wednesday, High Court Judge, Jane Kiggundu said Nyangasi’s actions were uncivilized. Nyangasi committed the offence on July 24, 2010, at their marital home in Kireka Kira division in Wakiso district. The couple had been married for 17 years and has two children. The state attorney had asked the court to pass the death sentence against Nyangasi on grounds that he killed his wife in a brutal manner.

The very tone of this account points up some of the distance we have travelled. The judge deemed it merely ‘uncivilized’ for a man to kill his wife, and the state attorney argued for capital punishment not as a fitting penalty for murder per se but because, instead of dispatching her using some kinder method, Apollo had killed Christine ‘in a brutal manner’. The ‘wrangles’ over property sound confoundingly sedate as well (‘We were having wrangles so I hammered her to death …’). Without quite meaning to, the article conveys an unusual world in which violence is always close to the surface as a behavioural option, as a response to frustration and inconvenience, and where mayhem is such a constant and overwhelming threat that the local news media, unlike their sensationalizing counterparts in more law-abiding countries, can address it only in the most squeamish euphemisms.

6.

I ACCOMPANY THE BBC’s correspondent to a press conference with the embattled prime minister, who for several weeks now has faced accusations from foreign governments, as well as from many of his own people, of being a thief. From such occasions, the news machine demands one thing above all: a quote of around fifty words, subsequently to be complemented by another fifty words from an opposition spokesman.

But even this journalistic set piece provides the bystander with an opportunity to learn about Uganda in non-standard ways – for example, by studying the very large photograph, remarkably still on prominent display, of the prime minister embracing Colonel Muammar Gaddafi at the African Union gathering in Kampala in 2010 (the last such event the colonel attended); or by noting, around the conference table, the gigantic black leather swivelling chairs, 1970s in style, a porn-film director’s idea of a seat fit for an important CEO, on which the prime minister and his aides are enthroned.

Stuart Franklin, The Prime Minister of Uganda, 2012.

(picture credit 7.2)

Stuart Franklin, Lobby of the Serena Hotel, Kampala, 2004.

(picture credit 7.3)

There is something to be learned about Uganda, too, from our host’s unswerving refusal to give any kind of answer conforming to the norms of contemporary journalism. On being asked if the allegations against him have prompted him to think of resigning, he offers a slow, wounded smile and a theatrically circumlocutory reply which seems oddly to combine the English diction of a Southern Baptist preacher with the sombre tone of an executioner (indeed, he ran the security services for many years). ‘My friends,’ he begins, ‘dear friends, all of you here are my friends; we in Uganda reach out to the world with a hand of friendship. So to all of you gathered here today, enough of distrust and sadness, enough of blame. The certainty is that no bad thing will befall us again in the future that we are building for Ugandans, all Ugandans, the very poor as well as those who have come by prosperity, today and tomorrow and every day that the Lord grants us.’ Certainly not the sort of statement that can be tidily shoehorned into the next bulletin.

If news stories have their accepted norms, so, too, do the photographs that are used to illustrate them. Convention demands head shots at desks, officials-disembarking-from-a-plane shots, men-at-podium shots – nothing too idiosyncratic and certainly nothing too ‘artistic’. And yet there is something to be gained if the photographer who has come out to Kampala with the author breaks the rules in order to capture both the shocked look in the prime minister’s eyes in the split second after he is asked a blunt question by a reporter and the female assistant whom he has instructed to record us while we record him, perhaps as an implicit reminder that he holds the keys to the torture cells situated, according to Amnesty International, in the basement of the building we are in.

Stuart Franklin, Brass Instruments, Independence Celebrations, Hoima, Uganda, 2012.

(picture credit 7.4)

Good photographs compress extended themes into single images: they can speak of the whole nation’s endemic corruption simply by showing us a few men waiting idly in the lobby of a luxury hotel, or of its extreme poverty by focusing on a musician’s battered tuba at a parade celebrating (though that might not be quite the word for it) the fiftieth anniversary of Ugandan independence.

7.

IN HIS POEM ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ (1955), the American poet William Carlos Williams famously wrote:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

The bit about ‘dying’ is, naturally, an overstatement. What Williams fears is that without regular contact with poetry, we may lose our vitality, cease to understand ourselves, neglect our powers of empathy or become unimaginative, brittle and sterile. Literature, for Williams as for George Eliot before him, is the medium that can reawaken us to the world. The news may have an intense surface seriousness – which sensible people naturally imagine gives it a greater claim over our attention than verse could ever hope to command – but the artist recognizes its dangerously anaesthetizing effects.

Pupil of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1565.

(picture credit 7.5)

Yet this equation – poetry as life, news as death – is no permanent law; it isn’t the category of ‘news’ itself that is at fault, for in its essence the word doesn’t signify anything more specific than that which is happening in the world at a given moment. It isn’t news per se that is the problem, only the ‘life’-inhibiting version of it that too often abounds. However, if Tolstoy, Flaubert or Sophocles were in the newsroom, the medium might well give us rather more of what we need in order to keep our souls from ‘dying’, for what were War and Peace, Madame Bovary and Antigone in their original state but just the things that William Carlos Williams so unfairly attacked – namely, news events?

8.

SOME SIXTEEN YEARS before the publication of ‘Asphodel’, W. H. Auden had taken his readers to Brussels in his own poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, placing them in front of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting long thought to be by Bruegel but now attributed to one of his pupils.

The painting shows us a superficially bucolic scene: ships are taking sail, a shepherd is tending to his flock, distant cities look prosperous and ordered. But in the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas, a tragedy is unfolding all but unheeded (the headlines, had there been any, would have been about something else that day): reckless Icarus, having allowed the sun to melt the wax of his homemade wings, has just tumbled into the sea, to his death. A resolute ploughman at the centre of the picture references a popular proverb, ‘No plough stops for the dying man.’

The detail.

(picture credit 7.6)

Not many people have noticed Icarus – but the painter and now the poet have. This, Auden wants to tell us, is what artists do: they notice stuff; the small and unobtrusive stuff that other people – ploughmen and shepherds, you and me, and journalists in a hurry – miss and yet that is essential to halting our usual indifference and callousness.

9.

WE NEED A kind of foreign news that hangs more tenaciously on the details, a news that ignites our interest in events by remaining open to some of the lessons of art, a news that lets the poets, the travel writers and the novelists impart aspects of their crafts to journalists – and perhaps occasionally even lets them have a desk of their own somewhere in the quieter corners of the newsroom – so that we won’t so regularly be able to walk blithely past the planet’s less obtrusive beauty and tragedy.