New News Out of Africa
Uncovering Africa's Renaissance
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
For twenty years an acclaimed correspondent on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and the winner of two Emmys and two Peabody Awards (the latter two for her coverage of Africa), Charlayne Hunter-Gault was until recently the Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN. In New News Out of Africa, this eminent reporter offers a fresh and surprisingly optimistic assessment of modern Africa, revealing that there is more to the continent than the bad news of disease, disaster, and despair.
Blending personal memoir with sterling reportage and astute analysis, Hunter Gault presents an Africa we rarely see. She looks first at South Africa, contrasting the country she first encountered as a young reporter--when she personally witnessed the brutality of apartheid--with the black-led, multiracial society of today, a nation undergoing one of the most radical social and economic experiments in modern times. She acknowledges the great imbalance in income in modern South Africa (where upwards of 30 to 40 percent of blacks are unemployed) and describes the ravaging effect of AIDS on the nation, but she also underscores the nation's commitment to affirmative action, describes how South African universities have opened their doors to black students, and debunks many of the myths about the violence of South African society. Likewise, Hunter-Gault looks at the continent-wide efforts to promote "an African Renaissance," illuminating the political and economic conditions in Rwanda, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Angola, and Sierra Leone. Finally, the book describes the challenges of reporting on the much-maligned continent and the efforts of African journalists to tell their own story.
A compelling book on a topic of vital importance, New News Out of Africa promises to re-define what is news about this vast and complex continent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Widespread AIDS, constant internal strife and corrupt, shaky economies form the largely media-driven image of Africa that many Americans possess, argues veteran correspondent Hunter-Gault in this skillful blend of memoir, reportage and political analysis. The author is determined to deliver some "new news" or good news out of Africa, and to challenge facile assumptions that it is a dark, hopeless continent ravaged by the "four D's": death, disaster, disease and despair. Based on lectures Hunter-Gault gave at Harvard University in 2003, while a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, the book is divided into three distinct though intrinsically interrelated sections: an analysis of South Africa under apartheid and positive postapartheid developments; the painful yet powerful continent-wide transition from colonialism to democratic reform; and how foreign and African journalists can more accurately report an emerging "African Renaissance," particularly in Rwanda, Kenya, Mozambique, Angola, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Hunter-Gault (In My Place), who lives in Johannesburg, where she is special Africa correspondent for NPR, has written an incisive, informative work that provides a balanced perspective on the continent's recent past, transformative present and potentially rich future.