I started buying Kiswahili newspapers as soon as I got to site, in order to practice, and they always annoy me. A typical newspaper runs three types of stories; an investigation has traced corruption to the highest levels of government but is powerless to do anything about it, or another section of Africa is collapsing (The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the flavor of the month, with Zimbabwe also making regular appearances) or the paper decides to run some ridiculous article on America and the western world. Remember when pictures circulated of Obama wearing the dress of an African Muslim? Tanzanians do, because one newspaper (Mwananchi or Citizen) devoted an entire two-page spread to an issue that was almost completely disregarded in America.
What do we have today? The front page…
The accused of the EPA Want Their Millions: They have agreed to return some fees.
Another Albino is killed in Kigoma: Albinos body parts are used by witchdoctors for sorcery.
The Union is touched again by Zanzibar: Tanzania is made up of two separate countries, the mainland Tanganyika and the Zanzibar peninsula. The union was something of a shotgun marriage, and each side is unhappy with the other one.
The foreign affairs section, happily buried in the middle of the paper, today includes sections on Zimbabwe (demonstrations in Harare), Nigeria (the minister for combating corruption received death threats) and Mogadishu (starvation looms).
I’ve read a lot of books since getting here; the one which looms largest is Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, which begins “All news out of Africa is bad.” Pick up any newspaper and here and it seems as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse are running rampant throughout the continent.
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