This book is motivated by two factors. The first is rooted in my first year as an undergraduate student in the United States. In 2007, my home country, Kenya, had a highly contested election that led to post-electoral violence. While the violence was primarily limited to a few parts of the country, watching and reading coverage from Western media outlets, one would have been forgiven for thinking that the whole country had convulsed into an inexplicable, bloody, and vengeful conflict. There was little to no mention of the intricate political, economic, and historical injustices that had led Kenya to this point. In the eyes of the Global North’s press, Kenya was proving to be a typical African country, beset by ethnic hatred and the potential to be “another Rwanda.” For many, images of political protests, burning tires in the middle of roads, and machete-wielding men represented all that was wrong with African politics. These images linked the country to past and ongoing atrocities in other African countries. The crisis had a primeval inevitability, with a constant stream of people running away from the violence of “burning houses […] and even people hacked to death” (Ogola, Reference Ogola2008). Images were accompanied with little to no contextualization, subliminally suggesting that the whole country was doggedly marching into the abyss.

The second motive is grounded in an intellectual interest born of and nurtured by frustration. Frustrations best capture in December 2017, at the start of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, I attended a symposium in Canada with several scholars working on media and atrocity in Africa. During my presentation, a well-regarded scholar asked a question of which I had heard numerous variations during my graduate career. Prefacing his question with the tried and tested “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” he asked why I would focus on African newspapers and not those from the Global North, since no one reads African newspapers. Leaving aside the annoyance that African audiences were being labeled as “no one,” what took me aback was the fact that for this scholar, the fact that we were both at this symposium and we were fellows at Harvard University was not enough to convince them that African journalism was worth studying. My work, the voices I was giving space to, and the intellectual exercise I was engaged in were all for naught, since “no one” read African newspapers.

This book represents an effort at allowing people who look like me, and live where I have lived, to tell their stories. It is about giving African journalists a platform to discuss how they construct knowledge about Africa. It is about pushing back against the tendency to talk about and for Africa without speaking to and with Africans. This is not to suggest that I seek to tell an “African story,” since, with fifty-four countries, what counts as an “African story” is in itself contested (see Jacobs, Reference Jacobs2015). Moreover, the data presented in Chapters 3–5 offer a strong rebuttal to the notion of an “African story.”

Both motivations are anchored on the fact that scholars and laypeople often assume that they know the nuances of how Africa is represented in the media. As a result, a set of beliefs about media representations of Africa have become truisms both within and outside academia: (1) journalists from the Global North often represent Africa through stereotypical frames and often ethnicize African conflicts; (2) journalists from the Global North lionize international rescue/intervention; and (3) Global North journalists typically represent Africa with paternalistic, negative, neoliberal narratives. Yet, despite a long and deep fascination with Africa, there is a dearth of scholarship on how African journalists represent the continent and its peoples. This void is extant in studies on how conflicts in Africa are represented in the media.

Journalism scholarship has been epistemologically ethnocentric with regard to how Africa and Africans are represented, almost as though African journalists do not engage in knowledge production. The continent’s media organizations are treated as transient compared to their counterparts in the Global North, resulting in a scholarship with an “imperialistic unconscious” through its “European metrocentrism and analytic bifurcation” (Go, Reference Go2013b, p. 49). They can only be understood as flawed and incomplete copies of those in colonial metropoles. This has meant that scholarship on African journalism has had the tendency not just to “reproduce and mirror the wider culture of northern dominance” but to approach Africa’s press more to make comments “about something else, some other place, some other people,” with the continent being the “mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious” (Go, Reference Go2013b, p. 49; Tageldin, Reference Tageldin2014 p. 302–3). As Nyabola (Reference Nyabola2018, p. xix) and Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2001, p. 3) eloquently put it, Africa is often the background to someone else’s story rather than a unit of analysis in its own right.

With all of this in mind, In the Shadow tells the story of how African journalists contend with being journalists that are African, covering an international event unfolding next door. It examines the social conditioning of African journalists’ knowledge while paying attention to existential factors like professional pressures, norms, and the nation-specific constraints placed on journalists and the news organizations they work in. As a result, In the Shadow is invariably interested in news narratives and the social context within which journalists construct these narratives. As will become apparent, these narratives are neither naïvely constructed nor innocently relied upon. They embody multiple discursive struggles over what it means to be an African journalist, what it means to be an African news organization, and what it means to be an African in light of a politics of identity and belonging. This third struggle is key to understanding journalism narratives in Africa when we consider that within the African political scene there still exists what Nyamnjoh (Reference Nyamnjoh2005, p. 17) calls “an obsession with belonging,” which becomes evident in this book as well.

In the Shadow achieves the aforementioned by focusing on how African journalists constructed knowledge about the atrocities in Darfur between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2008. The choice of Darfur as a site for studying African journalism fields and how they cover international events unfolding on the continent is based on two key attributes. First, Darfur was the first conflict that garnered intense attention from the Global North after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi as well as unfolding in a post-9/11 world. Second, Darfur provides a site through which to analyze journalists from several African countries covering a singular event to understand the narratives and norms they rely on to make sense of an event for diverse national audiences. Also, because of its history of Arabization by Khartoum, continental tensions about what it means to be African and what it means to be an “African journalist” clearly come to the fore. As such, Darfur is a perfect site to investigate the tension between journalistic norms and roles (doxa) on the one hand and an embracing of an African postcolonial identity (habitu) on the other.

Strands of Journalism Scholarship

Scholarship on the representation of Africa, particularly by the Global North, has developed along three primary trajectories. The first argues that Western organizations rely on colonial tropes that focus on ethnicizing every conflict in Africa while also relying on stereotypical representations of Africans (Ebo, Reference Ebo and Hawk1992; Kogen, Reference Kogen2015). This reportage on Africa is reductive, and its engagement with the continent begins from the premise that the continent is incomplete and needs to be “saved” (Bunce, Franks, & Paterson, Reference Bunce, Franks and Paterson2016; Mamdani, Reference Mamdani2010). This trajectory holds that this type of representation hovers between, on the one hand, homogenized knowledge leading to a normalization (and eventual disregarding) of conflict in Africa and, on the other hand, trying to convince the audience that this is newsworthy and new. Thus, phrases such as “another Rwanda” appear regularly whenever a conflict is covered in Africa (see Brown, Reference Brown2013). The implication is that African journalists are likely to better contextualize Africa. In the Shadow engages and pushes back on this strand by showing that African journalists also ethnicize conflict on the continent but argues that this is part of a long historical debate over who belongs and who does not (Chapters 6 and 7).

The second strand’s approach has led to analyses moving away from questions focusing on the rigid bias versus objectivity paradigm to studies of how newsroom routines play a role in shaping news content (Tuchman, Reference Tuchman1978). This shift has also informed our understanding of the news as an organizational product – that is constructed, rather than a “true” transcription or representation of events. Taking cues from the literature on knowledge production, this strand argues that representations, like the knowledge anchoring them, depend highly on the social context journalists, news organizations, and audiences are in. This trajectory has led to a careful analysis of how atrocities – such as Darfur – are framed by media organizations from the Global North and how wire agencies inform how news organizations from the Global North cover Africa (Bunce, Reference Bunce2010, Reference Bunce2011; Savelsberg & Nyseth Nzitarira, Reference Savelsberg and Nyseth Nzitarira2015). For example, Savelsberg and Nyseth Nzitarira (Reference Savelsberg and Nyseth Nzitarira2015) find that a nation’s collective memory of traumatic events, such as Ireland’s famine and poverty, or Germany’s memory of the Holocaust, will manifest in how the media frame atrocity. Traces of this strand can be found in In the Shadow’s discussion of frames in Chapter 5, in which Rwanda’s memory of its own Genocide and the memory of colonization across Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa influenced how Darfur was framed. It builds on this strand by arguing for the importance of nonjournalistic actors – like the colonial and post-colonial states – in affecting how journalists operate (Chapters 2 and 3). The strength of social context is accentuated in Chapters 2 and 3, which discuss the political and educational contexts as an avenue to understand the struggles over what it means to be an African journalist working in an African news organization.

In the Shadow’s focus on discursive struggles builds on a third and very nascent strand of scholarship that has shown promise. This trajectory argues that scholars have inadvertently found themselves perpetuating a myth regarding how Africa is represented, due to focusing primarily on newspapers, magazines, and a small number of countries (Scott, Reference Scott2017). This narrow focus has meant that scholars have made sweeping statements about “media representations” when they mean “press representations.” This is further compounded by the narrow range of topics related to crises, likely determining research design (Nothias, Reference Nothias2016). In this strand, we find work by Guy Berger (Reference Berger2010), Daniel Hammett (Reference Hammett2011), and Jacqueline Maingard (Reference Maingard1997), who focus on how major international competitions hosted in South Africa were represented in the press. By focusing on the representation of South Africa in contexts not imbued with violence, these and other scholars avoid the concerns Nothias (Reference Nothias2016) raises over predispositions towards specific research designs. This trajectory, in conjunction with the second strand, urges scholars to take a more nuanced approach to studying Africa’s representations by the media and to include more diversity in questions and topics analyzed. Using Darfur as a case study, it shows how an analysis of conflict representation can yield insights that allow for new avenues for scholarly engagement and broaden our understanding of journalism(s) in the Global South. Furthermore, In the Shadow also shows that conflicts are ripe for capturing discursive struggles over identity and professional norms and expectations and how these lead to tensions over what it means to be a journalist.

Although these three trajectories offer a rich and vibrant debate about how Africa and Africans are represented, none actively engages with how African journalism represents Africa and Africans. All three treat largely Africa as merely existing in the shadows, a prop in the discourse about journalism fields from the Global North. A decade and a half after Hallin and Mancini (Reference Hallin and Mancini2004) argued for a case study approach to understanding media interactions with other social actors – and articulating which actors and institutions play a crucial role in shaping the narrative –very little has been done on media in Africa. In the Shadow takes up this challenge by focusing on the roles of the political field (Chapter 2), academic field (Chapter 3), journalistic cultures (Chapter 4), and sources (Chapter 5) in shaping narratives. With this in mind, I make two claims in this book: (1) discourse about the silencing of African voices by Western journalists has itself silenced African voices by not including them in analyses; (2) as a result of this silencing, we know very little about journalists in Africa and the types of narratives they employ to represent Africa and Africans.

At heart, In the Shadow is about the construction of knowledge about Africa by journalism fields in Africa. It is anchored in Max Weber’s (Reference Weber1976) call to study the press, the contextual nature of knowledge, and the narrative limits and opportunities this contextual nature presents (P. Berger & Luckmann, Reference Berger and Luckmann1966). It does this by paying attention to the structures and strictures of the journalism profession as understood through Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (1984, 1991, 1999, 2013). This situates In the Shadow at the intersection of two strands of knowledge production scholarship: one preoccupied with the influence of global scripts on local knowledge production (Haller & Hadler, Reference Haller and Hadler2008) and the other with the impact of nation-specific contextual and institutional realities (Savelsberg & Nyseth Nzitarira, Reference Savelsberg and Nyseth Nzitarira2015). It is at this intersection that I empirically illustrate and explain how: (1) News organizations in Africa are critical players in the silencing of African voices; (2) African journalists are themselves part of the marginalization of African voices; (3) narratives employed by African journalists do not differ that significantly from those employed by journalists from the Global North; and (4) African journalists use the ethnic conflict frame with relative frequency when narrating a conflict. In the Shadow achieves this by analyzing the social space in which journalists exist as Africans and the structure of the professional space within which they pursue “their different trajectories” (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1996c, p. 27). Ergo, it purposefully centers African narratives and experiences while pushing the Global North to the margins.

Theorizing African Journalism

When thinking about the trajectory of the journalism profession on the continent, it is impossible to overstate the effects colonization had on the formation of the profession and how it developed in the postcolony. For example, it would be imprudent to talk about media freedoms in post-colonial Africa without taking into account the role of colonial control in shaping how actors within and outside the profession understand these freedoms. Moreover, colonial era moves to control Indigenous presses highlighted the importance of retaining power over the field within the new political class. It is not a stretch to argue that political elites inherited fields that colonialists had designed and deployed as tools of oppression (Acemoglu & Robinson, Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2010, Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2012). Many were all too willing to put the profession, just like economic and political institutions, to the service of a ruling minority (Mamdani, Reference Mamdani1996; Nyabola, Reference Nyabola2018). As Martinique political philosopher Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon1968) had warned, politicians succumbed to the seduction of colonialist thought and, as a result, journalism found itself the subject of enduring coloniality (Quijano, Reference Quijano2000).

I rely on field theory to capture these disparate forces seeking to influence how journalists operate to varying levels of success (Benson, Reference Benson1999; Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1993; Usher, Reference Usher2017). As an explanatory mechanism, it is not a “static model with a priori determined confines,” allowing me to simultaneously use it in a transnational, national, and subnational manner (Buchholz, Reference Buchholz, Go and Krause2016, p. 34). I construct a profession whose boundaries and characteristics “transgress, principally, those of the nation-state” (Buchholz, Reference Buchholz, Go and Krause2016, p. 34), leveraging this quality to design transnational, national, and subnational units of analysis that work in concert to produce and shape the narrative on Africa. It allows me to articulate experiences that go a long way in explaining individual and institutional decisions that may seem irrational to those outside the profession (Chapters 4 and 5).

Discussing Bourdieu’s conceptualization of a “field,” Julian Go and Monika Krause (2016, p. 8) remind us that a field is “a social space of relations or social configuration defined by struggle over […] valued resources.” In In the Shadow, the critical resource being contested is the right to construct the continent’s narrative. This idea of struggling over “valued resources” has a lot of purchase for anyone thinking about how to argue for a transnational African field (as I will do) while also being sensitive to the idea that within this overarching field, there are smaller subfields also struggling over resources. Additionally, field theory allows In the Shadow to expand its focus “beyond the newsroom and towards a larger news ecology” (Usher, Reference Usher2017, p. 1119), which allows for the contextualization of the realities journalists have to deal with – such as an ever-present state in how Rwanda covered Darfur (Chapters 5 and 6) – without resorting to assumptions about state censorship and authoritarianism that tend to surround discussions of relationships between journalism and political fields on the continent. This expansion of focus to include interactions with nonjournalistic actors places In the Shadow within Hallin and Mancini’s (Reference Hallin and Mancini2004) milieu.

For In the Shadow, the task of field theory is to examine the role of institutional logics while simultaneously highlighting and being mindful of the complex interplay between social structures and cultural forms within a society.Footnote ¹ Members of the field share certain dispositions and have specific beliefs that they take for granted about how the field operates and the particularities that structure the field. Specifically, I lean more towards Rodney Benson’s model of “journalistic field position, logic and structure” (2013, p. 17) than I do the version discussed by Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1993). Bourdieu discussed fields as sites of struggles for and between two forms of power: an external heteronomous pole and an autonomous pole internal to the field. For Bourdieu, the heteronomous poles contain both economic and political power, whereas the autonomous poles are more cultural. On the other hand, Benson argues that focusing on merely economic and cultural forms of power is “inadequate to explain the complex dynamics of the ongoing journalistic mediation of public discourse” (2013, p. 13). Instead, Benson’s model provides a way to analyze the “complex interplay of market, civic, class, and organizational ecological dynamics” (2013, p. 25). By taking this approach, I seek to complicate understandings of how and why “news is produced as it is” (Benson, Reference Benson2013, p, 25). This should provide a fuller understanding of the influences at work in shaping narratives produced by journalists situated in African contextual realities.

A Transnational African Journalism Field

While In the Shadow takes up the challenge of “fielding transnationalism” (Go & Krause, Reference Go, Krause, Go and Krause2016), this is not about ‘bringing’ field theory into Africa. Instead, it illustrates how field theory can be transformed by a deeper engagement with Africa while also being nestled within the discourse of de-Westernizing international political communication and journalism studies research (Willems, Reference Willems2014a, Reference Willems2014b). While, at first glance, relying on field theory may seem at odds with my pursuit of de-Westernizing these areas of scholarship, this surprise captures the extent to which Africa’s contribution to institutionalized knowledge in the Global North continues to be erased. The seeds of field theory and the central concept of habitus can be found in Bourdieu’s early work on the Kabyle in Algeria (Go, Reference Go2013a). Its use here is thus less about transposing a Western theory in my attempt to de-Westernize but rather a return to a region where the theory’s fundamentals germinated.

Of course, it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge that Bourdieu was a White Frenchman working in a French colony as he thought about and wrote about life there. However, recognizing Bourdieu’s positionality is not to suggest that he was unaware of colonialism’s toxic impact. Indeed, Bourdieu wrote of colonialism as a “relationship of domination” that structured a kind of “caste system” (1958, pp. 120, 132, 134). As Go reminds us, for Bourdieu, “racism was built into the system of colonialism as a legitimizing mechanism” (2013a, p. 55). Pushing back on modernization scholars who insisted that modernization was a process that occurred by choice, Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1958, p. 120) argued that these scholars ignored the fact that the power to choose had been denied to those dominated by those dominating them. Subsequently, Bourdieu’s work was central in pointing to the colonial state’s penchant for, and monopoly on, violence, suggesting an affinity with Fanon’s (Reference Fanon1968) work in Algeria (Go, Reference Go2013a, pp. 56, 68). Thus, while, yes, Bourdieu is a White Frenchman writing about a French colony, his early work on Algeria aligns with Raewyn Connell’s southern theories by focusing on the “power, violence and pain of colonialism” (2007, pp. 165–191).

Yet there is also the fact that in contemporary understandings of field theory, the place and role of Algeria have been obfuscated. The elision of Algeria’s pivotal role in the development of field theory echoes Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1999) warning on the “cunning of imperialist reason” within academia. It is also a reminder that field theory, like many concepts circulating in the Global North, epitomizes Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s admonition that within academia, Africa specifically, and the Global South generally, exists as a site “for hunting and gathering of raw data” (2021, p. 6). In contrast, the Global North remains framed as a crucial site where “what is considered valid and scientific knowledge cascades and circulates to the rest of the world” (2020, p. 6). Consequently, its use in In the Shadow as a tool to de-Westernize journalism studies and political communication is a conscious decision to remind the reader that the continent has been a critical player in knowledge production and circulation and thus part of the “global.”

In the following chapters, I eschew the “discursive prominence” (Raetzsch, Ngomba, Olivera, From, & Bødker, Reference Raetzsch2021, p. 9) of Global North journalism(s) in my use of field theory and move the theory away from an obsession with “problems experienced in the West” (Hanitzsch, Reference Hanitzsch, Hanitzsch, Hanusch, Ramaprasad and de Beer2019, p. 216; Willems, Reference Willems2014a). In writing exclusively about a transnational African journalism field and how it narrates Africa, In the Shadow moves away from the Eurocentrism that pervades political communication and journalism studies that insist on conflating “transnational” or “international” with the Global North. It takes for granted that African countries are “transnational” and “international” in relation to each other and introduces a transnational journalism field that is African in much the same way Noha Mellor (Reference Mellor, Mellor, Ayish, Dajani and Rinnawi2011) and Marwan Kraidy (Reference Kraidy, Hallin and Mancini2011) have argued for an “Arab media field” and a rise of pan-Arab media as a “transnational system” respectively. While this transnational field is continuously being integrated with the global media field, especially in the age of digital media, it is heavily influenced by disparate, and often similar, nation-specific contextual realities.

Field theory’s relational quality allows for boundary-stretching and contraction, which enables In the Shadow to focus on national fields simultaneously with their subfields (contraction) while always keeping the transnational field present and active (stretching). This stretching and contraction of journalism’s boundaries is crucial, since “national and transnational fields interact in complex ways” (Go & Krause, Reference Go, Krause, Go and Krause2016, p. 12). Concurrently, within this transnational field exist multiple subfields located within several countries on the continent. These are subfields in relation to the transnational field but are often the environing field in their respective countries (Steinmetz, Reference Steinmetz2016, p. 109). For example, the South African journalism field is a subfield of the transnational African journalism field while also being an environing field with its own subfields (Chapter 4). The critical point to remember, though, is that actors within subfields are also participating members of the environing field, since subfields share “certain features with [their] environing field while differing in other ways” (Steinmetz, Reference Steinmetz2016, p. 109).

Any discussion of a transnational African journalism field should be grounded on the knowledge of histories and geographies that have worked to repress modes of knowing and producing knowledge about journalism fields in Africa. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 show the ubiquity of a colonial legacy that continues to shape the realities of everyday life on the continent. Consequently, any articulation of a transnational African journalism field must be mindful that such a field would be inflected by pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial realities. These realities make it prudent to engage the interdisciplinary field of postcolonial theory in concert with field theory.Footnote ⁴

Postcolonial theory attempts to theorize the problematics and context brought to the fore by the processes of colonization and decolonization (Shome & Hegde, Reference Shome and Hegde2002). It confronts us with the recognition that institutionalized knowledge is often subject to colonialism, geopolitics, and historical forces. In the Shadow asks us to think about localized colonial histories and how they mitigate journalism practice in Africa (Mabweazara, Reference Mabweazara and Mabweazara2018, p. 34). Its use here clarifies the historical structures of knowledge production firmly rooted in coloniality’s various histories and geographies (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni2021, p. 5). Using both postcolonial and field theory allows In the Shadow to capture the interaction between actors within journalism fields and subfields, where although power differentials exist and are acknowledged, a mutual constitution and interdependence of actions also exists. This allows for an excavation of how colonial experiences continue to shape the journalism field’s coverage in the postcolony. With this in mind, In the Shadow treats this legacy as a macroenvironment within which the journalism, politics, and education fields are “embedded in networks of fields” (Fligstein & McAdam, Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012, p. 203) that have coloniality as their environing field.

Studying African Journalistic Fields

We know little about how field logics and subtleties affect news construction about Africa in African countries. For example, how does relying on the field’s logic lead to African journalists marginalizing African sources and mimicking frames from the Global North? To what extent does Africa’s colonial and post-colonial history influence the field’s relationship with actors from the political field or the Global North? How does identity affect how journalists view protagonists in a conflict unfolding in an African country? To answer these questions, while making the connections between imperialistic policies of the Global North and how these continue to shape journalism fields today explicit, In the Shadow is at the locus of three overarching academic fields: African studies, journalism studies, and sociology.

Drawing on academic and nonacademic literature, original content analysis, and journalist interviews, I explore the process of narrative construction, capturing and explaining instances of convergence and divergence of journalistic narratives on Darfur. Together with three research assistants, I conducted a content analysis of 784 newspaper stories from The New Times (Rwanda), The Sowetan, The Mail & Guardian (South Africa), The Daily Nation, The East African, and The Standard (Kenya) published between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2008.Footnote ⁵ This time frame allows me to move beyond the coverage of news-breaking events such as the application for (and issuance) of arrest warrants by the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Ahmed Haroun, Ali Kushayb, and President al-Bashir, or moments of increased levels of violence or visits by international government officials to refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. It captures periods where there was a lull in the intensity of attention by governments, institutions, and actors from the Global North.

We know that news organizations are critical actors in determining the overtone window for their audiences (Benson, Reference Benson2013; McCombs, Reference McCombs2004). Decisions over what events to highlight and which ones to ignore and downplay are vital in shaping and reflecting our reality. With this in mind, the decision to focus on newspapers as a subject of analysis is anchored on the fact that newspapers contemporaneously archive history and are also “indicators of collective knowledge repertoires and processes” (Savelsberg, Reference Savelsberg2015, p. 22). Each news story was coded using byline attribution (e.g., Zachary Ochieng’ Meera Selva, Reuters), which allows for nuances such as whom African journalists quote as sources (Chapter 5) and how they frame events (Chapters 6 and 7) compared with journalists from the Global North who had articles published in African newspapers (Chapter 4).

Scholars have shown that news stories are often the result of complex collective actors within and outside journalism fields (Wright, Scott, & Bunce, Reference Wright, Scott and Bunce2020). Therefore, a news story can be understood as a representation of scripts, beliefs, values, and normativity, which form a society’s collective representation (Asad, Reference Asad2007; Tuchman, Reference Tuchman1978). To achieve this collective representation, journalists rely on frames, which influence how audiences discuss and interpret events (Iyengar, Reference Iyengar1994; Shulman & Sweitzer, Reference Shulman and Sweitzer2018). My analysis focuses on manifest frames since they exert the “first and uncontested level of influence” (Benson, Reference Benson2013, p. 5). Moreover, unlike latent frames, focusing on manifest frames ensured that my research assistants and I were not forced to try and interpret second-order meanings of frames and thus narrowed our focus to a frame’s initial effect. To ensure that the coding of frames was consistent, I carefully trained them in how to code the frames and conducted rigorous multiple tests to ensure that the findings were not simply the result of our idiosyncratic interpretations.

The content analysis is supplemented by interviews with journalists from Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Nigeria between 2012 and 2015. The journalists interviewed had covered Darfur (and other mass atrocities) for several years and frequently traveled to the region or the various peace negotiations held across Africa and the Middle East. The interviews focused on how and why they became journalists, how they understood the atrocities, their organizations’ division of labor, whom they viewed as bearing responsibility for the atrocity, and what course of action they thought best to solve the crisis. These interviews provide contextual nuance to the findings from the content analysis and capture any disjuncture between the published news stories, which result from bureaucratic/group processes, and journalists’ perceptions of the atrocities.

The interviews center on journalists’ voices and are motivated by the fact that we rarely hear from African journalists in discussions of media representation of Africa and Africans. Journalism research tends to treat African journalists as props on a stage whose role is to supplement Global North journalists rather than to be active actors. As more African journalism scholars have come through the ranks, we have started to hear more African journalists, but this is still infinitesimal compared with journalists from the Global North. As a result, they are vital for capturing how journalists discuss and perceive the atrocities in Darfur, its victims, and their role in constructing knowledge about African suffering. They uncover the role and influences of the “rules of the game” on how journalists cover atrocity. Finally, role of historical trajectories that place journalists in the nexus of being African and a professional field that sees itself as narrating African experiences are laid out.

This choice to interview journalists is conscious of concerns by scholars who view interviews through a strictly constructionist approach (Collins, Reference Collins1990; Miller & Glassner, Reference Miller, Glassner and Silverman2004).Footnote ⁶ Some have argued that interviews are, at best, context-specific and constructed to fit the demands of the interactive milieu of the interview. Miller and Glassner (Reference Miller, Glassner and Silverman2004) state that though interviewees are likely to respond to “familiar narrative constructs” (such as what it means to be “Black African”), it is incumbent on the interviewer not only to recognize this as a possibility but also to realize that prior cultural understandings inform the interviewee’s response. In the context of In the Shadow, the influence of cultural perceptions is crucial since it points to nation-specific traits and traces of collective memories (Chapters 6 and 7). Hence, some of the more critical facets of interviews are those familiar constructs seen by constructivists as impediments.Footnote ⁷ For example, when journalists explicitly referred to the victims as “Black African,” this opened up avenues to discuss how they understood identity in the context of their country’s collective memory. In South Africa, Black-identifying journalists wore their sympathies with victims referred to as “Black Africans” on their sleeves primarily because of their country’s apartheid history (Chapter 6).

I am also keenly aware of the critiques by scholars who suggest that researchers cannot make legitimate claims if they do not have the subjective knowledge central to understanding the life experiences of the groups they study (Collins, Reference Collins1990). While I cannot claim to understand the experiences of journalists, let alone South African or Nigerian journalists, this does not imply that the interviews were bereft of helpful information on their social and professional worlds. Interviews allow In the Shadow to illustrate how journalists, as social actors, imagine the meaning of their activities (Chapters 4 and 5), which cannot be achieved without at least talking to them (Lamont & Swidler, Reference Lamont and Swidler2014, p. 159).

What Are African Journalism Fields Doing?

In the Shadow leverages the dynamic nature of field theory to zoom in (individual level analysis) and out (transnational/national/regional level analysis) while paying attention to the organizational (meso) level. It articulates how individual journalists talk about their work and communicate their organization’s helpfulness and unhelpfulness as they carry out what they view as their duty, to tell the story of Africa to Africans. The result of this highlights the fact that African journalism fields are sites of discursive struggles over what it means to be African journalists, what it means to be African, and what role the field and its actors have in shaping narratives about the continent to Africans. In these discursive struggles, I point to a metajournalistic discourse. This discourse is critical in understanding not only how journalists define their relationship with the continent and their audiences but also how they discursively constitute their roles within the global narrative construction of their home continent (Hanitzsch & Vos, Reference Hanitzsch and Vos2017). This focus on metajournalistic discourse also draws critical attention to how nonjournalists from the political and educational fields seek to discursively constitute journalistic roles, always looking for ways to influence these roles through legislation (Chapter 1) and curricula (Chapter 2).

In the struggle over what it means to be African, I not only rely on journalists’ articulation of what they think of as “real Africa” but connect this to debates over African identity by thinkers such as cultural theorist and Senegal’s first President Leopold Senghor (Reference Senghor1966, Reference Senghor1971), and Fanon (Reference Fanon1968).Footnote ¹⁰ In the following chapters, I capture the necessity of a reimagination in understanding representations of Africa by showing how Africa represents itself. This reimagination begins with the placing of narratives by African journalists within the locus of knowledge production; at this locus, scholarship should consider what people define and know as their everyday reality (P. Berger & Luckmann, Reference Berger and Luckmann1966). This definition of the everyday is what establishes the very fabric upon which society creates meanings. In the Shadow treats journalists as well-socialized members of society, which requires us to take seriously that African journalists, and, by extension, African news organizations construct knowledge that is circumscribed by the reality within which they are embedded.

This socialization is captured in the stories journalists produce, which are imbued with culture and history that provide structure to their narratives. That being said, narratives are never unilateral signs, and audiences can decode them in ways that are incongruent with the journalist’s original intent (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1992, p. 195; Hall, Reference Hall, During, Hobson, Lowe and Willis1993). To mitigate against this risk, journalists inscribe within their narratives a preferred reading through the use of already existing frames and taken-for-granted knowledge. Taking a sociology-of-knowledge approach means that the use of the “ethnic conflict” frame in Chapter 7 to describe Darfur by African journalists is not particularly surprising. Even then, Chapter 7 seven shows that the presence of this frame is a marker of who can be imagined as either a “worthy victim” or “truly African” (Wahutu, Reference Wahutu2018b). While capturing the protagonists’ identities may be the manifest/conscious function of the story (i.e., who are perpetrators and victims), the contemporaneous construction of who belongs and who does not is the latent/unconscious function. Subsequently, framing such a story relies on and reifies already present knowledge and understandings of identity society.

Finally, part of this discursive struggle is also born out of the fact that journalists have a sociality that develops from their relationships and practices that they unconsciously reproduce in their particular contexts over time. They are not “born” journalists but instead learn how to embody this identity through education and continual repetitiveness to the point where it becomes almost second nature to them. But what happens when what they learn is at odds with their particular contexts (Chapter 3)? Put another way, what happens when the definition of a “good journalist” or “good journalism” seems at odds with how they identify as a nonjournalist (Chapters 4 and 5)? It is not as simple as saying that they will “innovate,” since innovation is often inscribed within the contours of coloniality that permeate most facets of African society (Chapter 2). Innovation is almost impossible in spaces where society values foreign things not because they are better but because they are foreign (Nyang, Reference Nyang, Serageldin and Taboroff1994). As the Kenyan journalist put it, this preference for foreignness has “something to do with colonization” and is the result of colonization’s everydayness.

Darfur: A Snapshot of a Case Study

Following its independence in 1956 from Britain, Sudan became embroiled in two civil wars between the North and the South throughout the twentieth century (Bartlett, Reference Bartlett2008). The first began in 1955, eight months before independence on January 1, 1956, and pitted the North and the South (Deng, Reference Deng2006). This conflict halted in 1972 and resumed in 1983 when the North abrogated the peace agreement that ended the initial conflict. Both civil wars were rooted in a politics of identity and belonging, in which, as Francis Deng informs us, “the normative framework provided that a person who was Muslim, Arabic speaking, culturally Arabized and could claim Arab decent” would be elevated to positions of power and prestige. At the same time, all those considered non-Muslim, Black, and African were deemed inferior and legitimate targets of enslavement (2006, pp. 155–156).

Four years into the second civil war, violence in Darfur erupted and would last two years; while this conflict was initially an internal Darfuri affair, the government in Khartoum would get involved following the 1989 coup that brought al-Bashir into power. While this conflict was initially about the effects of desertification on communities, it would become a conflict anchored on two “uncompromising ideologies – one Arab supremacist and the other Fur nativist” (Mamdani, Reference Mamdani2010, p. 245, United Nations, 2006). Essentially, the more desertification affected entire groups, the more likely it was that nomadic and sedentary communities would view this ecological crisis through the “land and governance systems created during the colonial period” (Mamdani, Reference Mamdani2010, p. 237). As this conflict continued in the 1990s and destruction escalated, conventional restraint on conflicts between farmers and herders began to erode slowly. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s decision to flood Darfur with weapons as he sought to destabilize the local government and promote his pan-Arab ideology turned the region into a tinder box (Bartlett, Reference Bartlett2008; Mamdani, Reference Mamdani2010). This escalation means that violence in the region started taking a “near total character” with the objective no longer of boundary definition but of questioning the “very existence of the other” (Mamdani, Reference Mamdani2010, p. 246).

Chapter Summaries

In the Shadow consists of two parts. Titled “Making Journalists,” Part I provides the context within which African journalism fields emerged and explores how the role of education and coloniality ensures that the field’s logic endures. Chapters 1–3 make up this first part, providing a theoretical and historical framework for understanding the transnational African journalism field and its framing of Africa. Part II, titled “Narrating an Atrocity,” transitions from these early days of the field’s development to illustrating how these early influences shape how the field – and its subfields – facilitates the continent’s “self-writing.” These chapters capture how this is happening within a global field that is insistent in its presence and hegemonic approach, using the atrocities in Darfur (between 2003 and 2008) as a site through which to articulate the role of specific actors and institutions in shaping African narratives about Africa.

What to Expect

Allow me to point toward some critical interventions In the Shadow makes. It shows that the term African media is a misnomer of sorts, even more so when talking about newspapers and their coverage of events on the continent (Chapters 4 and 5). African news organizations rely primarily on wire agencies and foreign news organizations to cover the continent’s international events. Subsequently, African journalism fields are mainly composed of two subfields operating within them with minimal overlap. The first, which I call the national subfield, comprises journalists with an African postcolonial identity rooted in specific geographic African locations (Gikandi, Reference Gikandi, Wawrzinek and Makokha2010, p. 9; Wahutu, Reference Wahutu2018b). The structure, logic, and position of this subfield are shaped by the national context and history of the country it is located in. The second is what I term the cosmopolitan subfield. It comprises foreign journalists working for organizations headquartered in the Global North and writing primarily for the Global North. The critical brokers in the cosmopolitan subfield are Reuters (founded by Julius Reuter in 1851),Footnote ¹⁴ Agence France-Presse (founded by Charles Havas in 1832), and the Associated Press (founded in 1846).Footnote ¹⁵ Other actors in this subfield include Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa), the BBC, individual authors from the Global North, and in some cases a mix of these in specific stories (see Table 4.1). Although discursively aware of the cosmopolitan subfield and mutually constructing narratives about events in the region, journalists in the national subfield hardly, if ever, interact with journalists in the cosmopolitan subfield.

African audiences primarily receive knowledge about events in Africa from non-African actors. These carrier groups include not just the cosmopolitan subfields (Chapter 4) operating within the continent but also non-African knowledge entrepreneurs (Chapter 5). While it is easy to point to the data presented here and say that African sources have played a role in shaping the narrative on Darfur due to the perceived dominance of Sudanese sources, this is not a holistic interpretation of the data. The significant presence of sources from the Sudanese state cannot be read in isolation, because the cosmopolitan subfield also has an overwhelming presence in the narrative construction process. By combining the presence of cosmopolitan subfields and sources from the Global North, it is evident that non-African voices shaped Africans’ knowledge about Darfur. In the Shadow challenges assumptions about how African journalists represent African atrocities by pointing to the dissonance between critiques of Western media and the actual representation of Africa by African journalists.

However, I want to stress that the marginalization of African voices is not simply a result of the dominance of Global North journalism fields but a joint enterprise between the African journalism field and its Global North counterpart and one distinctly rooted in the journalistic rules of the game. The result of all of this is that the transnational African journalism field is a site of multiple discursive struggles about what the role of the field in post-colonial Africa should be (metajournalistic discourse), what it means to be African (habitus), what it means to be an African journalist (alignment of habitus and doxa), and who should narrate the experiences of Africans to Africans and the rest of the world (cosmopolitan versus national subfields).