African Ethnographies

Sources for News from Africa

What options are available for news from Africa, besides the American papers and networks?

One good starting point is the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC)'s Africa news. The BBC is particularly useful because their stories often include links to past stories and analysis to fill in the context (see e.g. their coverage of the peace deal in Cote d'Ivoire & the links in the right hand column there ).

An alternative starting point to the BBC (and a great site itself) is allafrica.com, "posting over 700 stories daily in English and French and offering a diversity of multi-lingual streaming programming as well as a 400,000-article searchable archive."

The BBC also has a very valuable collection of Country Profiles with maps, chronologies, links to media etc.

Another valuable resource is the Pambazuka newsletter, a weekly compilation of stories related to social justice. Their archive of back issues and subscription info. is at http://www.pambazuka.org/. Each issue has links to dozens of stories, organized by topic, from the media, non-governmental organizations, international donors, African governments and many other sources.

For the final paper in this course, you should go straight to the African press. The BBC makes this easy. From the main Africa page, use the drop-down menu in the lower right to get the country profile for the country you're interested in. Each of the country profiles has a media section with links to local news outlets. Typically, media are in the language of the former colonial rulers so, for example, for Cote d'Ivoire, you'll need to speak French to read the local papers (see e.g. Sud Quotidien -- one of the five daily papers in Senegal currently on-line) .

Some of the major papers in Anglophone parts of Africa include:

Kenya - The Daily Nation and The East African Standard.
Nigeria - The Guardian
Zambia - Zambia Daily Mail and The Post

There are many others--just follow the links from the BBC country profiles.

 

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