Read a full illustrated transcript with ‘two versions’ of a story about the death of Congolese president Laurent Kabila.
Baffour Ankomah, editor of New African magazine, bemoaned the 'Heart of Darkness' rhetoric which constantly recurred in Western reporting and which perpetuated notions from the ages of slavery and colonialism about why things happen in Africa.
The assassination of Laurent Kabila was covered as if 'proving' the irremediable savagery of African people whereas America had seen the assassination of several presidents but no reporter would say that about the US.
Mark Huband, an Africa correspondent for many years and now editor of the Financial Times' World Economy Pages, said all too often stories were led by sensational TV pictures.
Without understanding processes leading to violence, many reporters fall back on racist explanations that it is the result of 'anarchy' or 'tribal warfare'. Whereas in Zimbabwe, for instance, the violence in the land conflict is tied in with the country's struggle for democracy.
In Rwanda the genocide was not a spontaneous upwelling of tribal hatred but a carefully planned political pogrom.
Linda Melvern, author of A People Betrayed (about the Rwandan genocide) said it remained a 'scandal of huge proportions' that MPs in London didn't debate the Rwandan genocide until May 24, 1994 - when the genocide was well underway. By then half a million people had been exterminated, whereas the House of Commons was told that "two hundred thousand people may have died" in fighting.
Sunday Times Diplomatic Correspondent Tom Walker said a lot of coverage of the Zimbabwe land crisis demonised Mugabe at the expense of coming to grips with the real dynamics of conflict between political parties - black-on-black violence, not the violence against white farmers which caught the eye of London media. We seem to need a bogeyman to 'sell' a story, with Mugabe now painted as 'the Milosevic of Africa'.
Colette Braeckman, a DRC specialist correspondent from Le Soir, Belgium , observed that most western media found it much easier to conceptualise the violence in Rwanda as a humanitarian story, not a political story.
This proves how dangerous it is for us to see Africans as insufficiently sophisticated people to plan and carry out systematic, political violence. The true situation 'did not compute'. Similarly, thinking of the Congo as 'the Heart of Darkness', or modelling a conflict as 'good guy versus bad guy' impedes any further analysis.
Richard Dowden, Africa editor of The Economist, complained that trips to Congo are impossible to budget for. You have to do a lot of hanging around in expensive cities, becoming enmeshed in local politics. It is possible, with a great deal of effort, to travel around the country, but you come back with a set of glimpses of a highly complex whole - 'like a mouse looking up at a mountain'.
Congolese journalist Antoine Lakongo emphasised that the DRC crisis is not a 'tribal war' with 'rebel groups' but a scramble for the Congo's resources. Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi are very poor countries, with few resources. How come they're suddenly exporting gold, diamonds and coffee? These are the spoils of war.
Then there's col-tan, a key component of electronic equipment, from space stations to Sony Playstations. The West needs Congo's resources, but the Congolese people need the country that generations of them have grown up in to be free and to live at peace.
The violent struggle for commodities to sell to the West is choking off the Congolese people's ambitions for peace and democracy.
