A Conversation with j. Siguru Wahutu
In this episode of the Media at Risk podcast, visiting scholar j. Siguru Wahutu joins doctoral candidate Adetobi Moses for a conversation that explores the field of journalism in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, what it means for media workers to report with courage and truth during political and health crises. The conversation also tackles the affordances (and barriers) of using the context and lived reality of Africans to inspire different media futures, innovations and ethics around privacy and technology.
Music credit: Cave 2 by HoliznaCC0
j. Siguru Wahutu is an expert on the sociology of media with an emphasis on genocide, mass violence and ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa. He has written extensively on global media patterns in covering genocide and the Kenyan media’s experimentation with social media platforms. Wahutu is also the author of In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa. He joins the Center as a visiting scholar from Yale, where he is an Assistant Professor in the University’s Sociology department and Council on African Studies. Wahutu is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies, both at Harvard University.
Adetobi Moses is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Center for Media at Risk steering committee. Her research explores the entanglements between media, coloniality and disease narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of sub-Saharan Africa.
Transcript:
Adetobi Moses: Welcome to Media at Risk, a podcast from the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Adetobi Moses, and I’m a PhD candidate and a fellow at the Center for Media at Risk. My work, broadly speaking, explores the entanglements between media, coloniality and disease narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana. Today, I am so pleased to have Doctor James Siguru Wahutu joining us today for what I hope will be a fruitful and generative conversation. An expert on the sociology of media with an emphasis on genocide, mass violence and ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa, James Siguru Wahutu has written extensively on global media patterns in covering genocide and the Kenyan media’s experimentation with social media platforms. He’s also the author of In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism and Post-colonial Africa. He joins the Center as a visiting scholar from Yale, where he’s an assistant professor in the University’s Sociology Department and Council of African Studies. Doctor Wahutu is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a fellow at the Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies, both at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us today, Doctor Wahutu.
Dr. Wahutu: Thank you so much for having me.
Adetobi Moses: So, we’ll start with an easy question. What, in your own words, do African journalists and media workers operating in the nuanced environments they’re in have to teach the world, especially the Global North, about covering humanitarian crises, navigating misinformation campaigns and reporting with truth even in the face of threats and political strongmen?
Dr. Wahutu: Typically, when scholars in minority world countries think of journalists and journalism in majority world countries, in spaces such as Africa, they tend to think of those practitioners and the practice of journalism as lacking – as these weird gaps that need to be filled. I’ve often argued that they’re not lacking. Part of the challenge that these journalists often face is they’re forced to stick within routines and norms that were designed externally. But even within those routine and norms, when it comes to how they cover the continent, they’re still able to innovate in a way that makes sense for the continent but may not make sense in the minority world.
For example, African journalists know how to cover events, realities and the state even when the state is hostile to them. That’s pretty important because what we’re seeing in a lot of minority world countries is that the state is very specifically becoming hostile towards the journalism field and the journalism profession. When I hear journalists and minority world countries talk about how dreadful it is to be a journalist at the moment and how difficult the job is, sometimes I have to go: journalism was designed to be difficult. If you look at African journalists, their performance of their profession has been within an environment that made it difficult for them to perform it. Yet I can think of several African journalists who still do the work of holding the state to account, even when they know that their state may send literal boots to their homes and arrest them. For them, the ideal is that journalism is something worth fighting for and something worth protecting. So, I often find myself telling African journalists: you’re in the position to teach that journalist – in the UK, in the US, in Germany, in France – how to cover the state and questions pertaining to the state even when the state is uniquely antagonistic towards you. There is a level of bravery that is required. There is a level of skepticism in the way you interact with the state and in the way you interact with state actors. There is a level of innovation when resources are lacking, when the space to do your job is so constricted. Even in those moments, African journalists know how to do their job.
I think that is a thing that they can teach people in the minority world. We know from scholarship, from the US, that objectivity was a ritual enacted and designed by the profession to protect the profession from criticism. How do we protect ourselves from criticism? We protect ourselves from criticism not by giving opinion, but by collecting opinions from both sides of the divide and presenting it. That’s a problem because if the other side has learned to manipulate that, you’re always losing that battle. African journalists know that sometimes certain things are just so bad we will not even give it airspace. If we give it airspace, it will be a sentence, and we’ll move on rather than pretending it carries equal weight. That’s a thing that journalists in the minority world could learn. A journalist in the US could learn from a journalist in Nigeria about those moments when the state is doing certain things that make no sense. They could learn from a journalist in Ghana. They could learn from journalists in Kenya. Ironically, we tried to hold a symposium that did this, that said: ‘What would happen if we bring journalists from the minority world and journalists from Africa together in conversation?’ This was while I was at NYU. This was the Fall of 2019. We were working on this, sent out some invites and a lot of American journalists were upset. Their argument was that there’s nothing much we can learn from those guys.
Adetobi Moses: Especially when the conversation is always about the resources that are lacking in the majority world.
Dr. Wahutu: This was 2019, right before COVID. We saw what happened between 2019, 2021 and 2022. And I remember I would watch these things and I’d go: these are the things you could have learned from that symposium when we wanted to bring African journalists because they know how to do this. When you’re covering a protest and tear gas canisters hit you and you go: ‘it was an accident’. No, it was not. When we watch these things happen on camera – and because the profession in the US doesn’t know how to deal with the hostile state – [the profession] treats those things as anomalies. When this is happening across multiple states, this is not an anomaly. If this was happening in Uganda, everybody would wake up and go: the state is oppressing journalists. How do you cover that? These are things that journalists from Africa could teach journalists in the minority world. But for some reason that space is never provided.
Adetobi Moses: So far, the history of journalism has already been implicated in your responses. To put the spotlight back on Africa: In your own work, how much onus do you place on history, such as the colonial roots of why media makers and journalists navigate media spaces the way that they do? What would it mean to indigenize African media spaces and practices?
Dr. Wahutu: Let’s start with the history bit. In my work there’s a great emphasis on history because I think it’s important for people to understand how journalism comes to be on the continent. In my book, one of the things I talk about is this seminal moment in the profession’s history, where Kwame Nkrumah is giving a speech at a conference with African journalists and he’s talking about what it means to be an African journalist. What he does really well in that particular speech, is he goes on and mentions the indigenous newspapers that had been started by indigenous populations on the continent. He gives this speech and talks about how these people, at great risk, were insistent on informing citizens [about] what was happening. This is right under the noses of the Colonial Office. Modern African journalism, as we think about it today, arises at a moment where a lot of Africans are fed up with the inequities of colonization and the disrespect. They rise at this moment where they’re pushing back against the colonial state. They are very interventionist. In Kenya, one of the indigenous newspapers that I quote in the book said something along the lines of ‘when the elites are out here drinking and cavorting with the colonialists, the man on the street is thinking about politics.’ That had always been the tenor of indigenous newspapers. A lot of countries would then end up having a state of emergency instituted by the British Colonial Office. The British Colonial Office then gives itself the right and the prerogative to provide media licenses.
In one fell swoop, they kill off indigenous newspapers. Immediately that’s what they do. What we then end up having are these newspapers that are not interventionist in the traditional sense but are also not necessarily anything that is cutting edge. So, in Kenya, what ends up happening is the two newspapers that survive the state of emergency are actually still the two main newspapers today. They had been started by settlers. One was designed to give information to the settlers, and the other was designed to give the owner space to advertise. We end up having this weird model where newspapers are relying on advertisements to gain money and revenue. This is important because of that Kwame Nkrumah speech. Kwame Nkrumah says [in the speech]: in Africa today, it would be crazy to think about a press that exists in the capitalist sense, where it relies on revenues. The moment you do that, the newspaper will do this thing where facts are pushed to the side. They’ll seek sensationalism because they need to make sure that people are buying the newspapers [and] spending money. After the state of emergency in a place like Kenya, we see this happening. You look at newspapers today and revenues are top of mind. But that warning by Kwame Nkrumah is a warning that – going back to the initial question – if newspapers in the minority world had paid attention, they would realize that the business model was flawed. They would realize that you cannot favor revenue over society.
Adetobi Moses: Over information too.
Dr. Wahutu: Exactly.
Adetobi Moses: Especially since revenue is always top of mind. It almost silos you into always going for the middle of the road take on everything even when, to your earlier point, there’s a clear difference between facts and a provocateur.
Dr. Wahutu: To the second part of the question: ‘Can we indigenize newspapers or indigenize media?’ Yes, we can. I think of indigeneity and indigenizing less as retreating from the global space, and more as favoring approaches that make sense in the continent and peripheralizing approaches that make sense in the minority world. Can we do this thing where we favor the lived reality of Africans, versus favoring narratives that may look good to external actors? During Covid, they had stories that were published in indigenous languages. That’s a way to indigenize the profession. It is going back to what it used to be but also saying we will put the concerns of Africans top of mind. Let’s not come in and say what African journalism needs. Let’s look at what they’re doing. What are they doing right? We hear a lot about what they’re doing wrong, but what are they actually doing right and how can we make sure that those foundations are strengthened?
Adetobi Moses: I really like the idea of ‘indigenizing African journalism’ as a return to roots rather than as a retreat. I think that’s a really striking way of putting that. Now, I want to talk a little bit about legacy media. Legacy media, as you know, is still so critical on the continent. Is that a blessing or a curse?
Dr. Wahutu: I think legacy media is still highly important on the continent but also highly advantageous. In a lot of rural communities, it is still the radio. People want to talk about how Africa is connected. Look at all of these cell phones! But let’s actually look at the data and what that actually means. [For] folks that talk about social media platforms and all of these things, I normally go, yes, you can talk about [digital media] if you’re high on the socioeconomic ladder and if you live in the city. If you live in Nairobi, of course. If you don’t live in Nairobi and you live in the villages outside of Kisumu, that doesn’t really do you much. In those spaces, radio is still important. When you focus on digital media, my first worry often is we don’t own those. We don’t own them. They’re owned by folks in the US. If those folks in the US get bored, we lose them. What does that do to us? Those particular platforms are not necessarily suitable for indigenous languages. There’s a large swath of people on the continent that are completely missed.
Adetobi Moses: I’ve been thinking a lot about how agency, science and history were all implicated in conversations about the pandemic and Africa. There is, of course, the very real history of how colonial medical advancements came at a steep cost. Then there’s the more recent history of, say, Pfizer’s fated drug trial in Northern Nigeria in the 1990s. Given the weight of these historical threads, it might make sense why the president of Tanzania, for example, declares during the COVID-19 pandemic that he’s investing resources in finding an African herbal remedy to COVID-19. If we take Africa and all of its contradictions as our departure point, what lessons did COVID-19 impart on the media landscape?
Dr. Wahutu: One of the greatest lessons of COVID to the journalism profession and the media landscape on the continent was it allowed journalists to see in real time the hypocrisy. There was an insistence during COVID that the continent could only get vaccines that were donated, regardless of whether there was money to buy vaccines. There was an insistence that we could only get the donated stuff. At the same time, there was an insistence that somehow Africans not dying in numbers that were expected of them was a weird sort of anomaly that could only be explained by people in the minority world. As I’m sure you’ve heard, one of the hypotheses is that Africans were not dying because they’re already poor, or some other random stuff like that. Suddenly poverty, the thing we’ve been trying to eradicate, was good because it meant that Africans were not dying.
I think maybe for a very brief moment, the profession was forced to ask some very tough questions about its own assumptions about how the world worked. I think the Tanzanian president then was Magufuli. When Magufuli is saying these things, on the one hand, there was the tendency to mock. But on the other hand, there was also a conversation about ‘oh, wait a minute. What happens when we’ve been left to die? What other remedies would we have?’ There was also, unfortunately, as tends to happen in moments of crisis, a tighter coupling between the journalism profession and the state. So, when the state would employ colonial approaches towards dealing with public health crises, there was often very little questioning by the media about why we were relying on these things that made no sense. I think what COVID did for that brief period was allow the profession to wrestle with some of these questions and its role in disseminating public health information. But once COVID ended, we sort of reverted back to the mean. I don’t think those lessons survived. And those things were important. It’s this weird moment where we captured a moment and we dealt with it as a moment, and we moved on and we went back to our regular bad habits.
Adetobi Moses: What is your vision of African media in these unprecedented times? It’s been a few years now since COVID has officially ended, but we’re still contending with not just the material and the corporal risk that media workers face, but also all of the compounding risks associated with digital tribalism, AI and the shared ecological cost of this technology. We’ve mostly been talking about legacy media – but to your point – as these news organizations are starting to take their digital presence a little bit more seriously, what does it look like for African media makers and journalists to contend with the global repercussions of this new technology and even just existing online in 2026?
Dr. Wahutu: My biggest hope is that media makers on the continent continue to innovate in a way that is meaningful to the continent. I’m hoping that we move away from the place of mimicry – even mimicry of innovations – to a place of a contextually relevant approach to innovation. There is the space and there is the opportunity to innovate in a way that is resilient and cognizant of the continent’s reality that isn’t necessarily reliant on minority world logics. Can we please talk about the fact that AI is basically supported by an infrastructure that runs the risk of making places, such as Mombasa where I grew up in Kenya, disappear faster into the ocean? I think what innovation and experimentation look like on the continent has to be divorced from what innovation and experimentation look like in the minority world. I would like to see more innovation. I’d like to see more experimentation. But these things hopefully are circumscribed within the context of the lived reality of Africans.
Adetobi Moses: I would love it if you could share some insight into your new upcoming book project and your exploration of the conflicting imaginaries inherent in African tech spaces.
Dr. Wahutu: One of the things I’m curious about in that book is having a different conversation about the coloniality of Silicon Valley. For colonization to happen, you need agents of colonization. You don’t wake up one morning and poof, [you’re] colonized, right? People showed up. Companies showed up. Actors showed up. In that book, I’m saying what would happen if we treated companies that come from this Silicon Valley milieu as agents of colonization in the same way scholars, media scholars, sociologists, historians, economists treated the early colonial trading company? We exist in this place where these countries are coming in, almost as these trading companies, erecting fences around our digital lives and owning that. Part of what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t be fine with it because that’s an American company.
Adetobi Moses: The laws and the rules around how they operate are also being made in an American context. It’s not like they can necessarily be projected onto other countries and in different contexts.
Dr. Wahutu: Exactly right. And part of what I’m saying is, if we treat these companies as colonial trading companies, as the tip of that spear, a spear that is intent on spreading America’s imperialism into every nook and cranny –
Adetobi Moses: – Under the guise of globalization and being connected to the world –
Dr. Wahutu: – And under the guise of bridging the digital divide. If you’re spreading that into every nook and cranny of Africa’s digital life, then it is our job to make sure that you do not run amok. How then do we protect against what I think of as digital theft, what I think of as digital primitive accumulation by these companies? In the book, the argument I’m hoping to make is that to argue that there’s digital colonization is not enough. We have to show and name the agents of this colonization, name how they’re doing the colonizing and then think about ways to protect against this digital theft. Going back to the question of innovation about media. We have to innovate legally in a manner that protects us. And that’s the two-or-three-pronged argument I’m trying to make in the book. Even in those societies that are inherently communal, they have an idea of privacy and dignity.
As a way to wrap this up: One of the things we know about facial recognition software is that it sucks when it comes to people with darker skin. Do you know one place in the world where you have a majority of people with different tones of dark skin? Africa. If I can train my facial recognition software on Africans, I get this data set of different shades of black skin in a manner that hopefully five, ten years from now, my system can easily differentiate and can be that much more precise than if I’m just training it on the US. If you want to know what these types of companies will do with facial recognition software and how they’re sharpening it, look at that place there because that’s where that action is happening. And that’s why we need very specific, stringent laws and regulations that, while they may be unique to the continent, are actually going to do that much more good to the rest of the world. And that makes it that much more imperative for me in my mind.
Adetobi Moses: I’d like to thank Doctor James Siguru Wahutu for his time and this wonderful conversation. Please be sure to check out his book, In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa. I’d also like to thank the Center for Media at Risk staff for making this conversation possible, and I’d especially like to thank the Center for Media at Risk director, Barbie Zelizer. You can learn more about the center for Media at Risk at ascmediarisk.org. That’s ascmediarisk.org. This has been Adetobi Moses. Thank you so much for joining us.
