We can’t expect the average news story to be written up with Shakespearean skill, but we might insist that it pay a degree of Shakespearean attention to universals, especially where the particulars are likely to seem off-puttingly foreign. There are ways of presenting a story that assist us in transferring knowledge across cultural and circumstantial gaps and in viewing the myriad experiences of our fellow human beings as resources on which we can continuously draw for inspiration, caution, guidance and insight.
8.
WE HAVEN’T LOST all our appetite for elsewhere. We are creatures who, in previous ages, stood in queues to hear tales about so-called exotic lands. The problem is that the reporting methodologies developed by the modern news media – which privilege factually accurate, technologically speedy, impersonal, crisis-focused coverage to the near exclusion of any other kind – have by error led to a sort of globalized provincialism, whereby we at once know a good deal and don’t care about very much; whereby a little knowledge of the wrong kind has managed to narrow rather than expand the compass of our curiosity.
Yet our fascination and our empathy are merely slumbering. To become powerful once more, foreign news needs only to submit itself to some of the processes of art.
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.