Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard University. Wahutu is an expert in the sociology of media, with an emphasis on genocide, mass violence, and ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa. He has written about global media patterns in covering genocide in Africa, ethnicity, land, and politics in Kenya, and on the Kenyan media's experimentation with social media platforms. Wahutu's research has appeared in African Journalism Studies, African Affairs, Journalism Studies, International Journal of Press/Politics, Global Media and Communication, Media and Communication, Media, Culture, and Society, and Sociological Forum.
Wahutu applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa, and reported the following:
Page 99 informs the reader of the tensions between journalists and their sources, highlighting that the sources journalists rely on have an inordinate effect on journalists' cognitive scripts. With this in mind, the page flags the fact that in the coverage of Darfur, African journalists relied more on knowledge entrepreneurs (sources) from Minority World Countries than those from Africa. African voices, the page states, are marginalized by African journalists even as African journalists themselves are marginalized by their organizations. The end of this page captures this tension as an "epistemic struggle" between different knowledge entrepreneurs.Learn more about In the Shadow of the Global North at the Cambridge University Press.
Overall, readers would get the book's essence from this page. Page 99 comes right at the start of Chapter Five and Part II of the book. This chapter, titled 'Africans at the Margins,' focuses on the extent to which African knowledge entrepreneurs are marginal to narratives constructed within Africa. Thus, reading this page, the reader would learn that while African journalists marginalized by their organizations in how Darfur was covered, they are also engaged in silencing African knowledge entrepreneurs in their choices of whom to co-construct this narrative with. With this in mind, page 99 does an excellent job of introducing the reader to the tensions and contests in how African journalism fields cover Africa.
For readers dipping their toes into the study of African journalism, this page captures the importance of thinking about the role of knowledge entrepreneurs as part of any journalism analysis. It also points out the importance of listening to journalists not only explain their work but also listening for those moments of disjuncture. Those moments where what they say/think they do does not align with what they produce. As I stated on this page, despite “claims of diversity [..] by and large, non-Sudanese African sources were consistently missing from the stories filed by African journalists.”
That said, readers interested in learning how journalism on the continent covers the continent, with its tensions, successes, frustrations, and pride in equal measure, will have to dive into the book. It is only by doing this that they can appreciate the politics of identity at play, the role and place of colonization as a context through which to understand the seemingly contradictory patterns and norms of journalism, the tensions between being an African and being a good journalist, but most importantly not just the continent's pursuit of trying to define the quintessential 'African Journalist' that takes to heart both the 'African' and the 'Journalist' parts of this identity. Surprisingly, when thinking about the book now, I realize it has become clear that it is about African professionals trying to find their place within and outside the continent while trying to reconcile their habitus (as Africans) with their doxa (professional journalists). An attempt that began in the early years after independence and that has become ever so important in the age of global knowledge flows in the midst of an intensive digitalization of their profession.
--Marshal Zeringue
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