Times Reporter Wins Award for Series on Black Africa

Charles T. Powers, the Los Angeles Times’ Nairobi bureau chief for the last four years, has received the 1984 Sigma Delta Chi award for foreign correspondence for a series of articles on black Africa.

Powers, 41, a Times reporter since 1972, was honored by the organization of journalists for analytical articles published on four days last December, built on the theme “Is black Africa making it?”

The stories, the citation said in part, “delve deeply into the competing social, political and economic systems within the often impenetrable Third World to review, in brilliant specific case studies, what has succeeded in Africa and what has not. Beyond that, Mr. Powers writes movingly of the people involved in what he sees as the ‘crisis of spirit’ raging throughout Africa today.”

Although he is based in Kenya’s capital, Powers’ assignment takes him through roughly 40 black-governed countries of Africa, stretching south from the semidesert nations just below the Sahara to the borders of white-ruled or white-influenced southern Africa.

Among other recipients of the awards, announced today at Sigma Delta Chi headquarters in Chicago, are Dolly Katz of the Detroit Free Press for general reporting; Jonathan Freedman of the San Diego Tribune for editorial writing; Larry Eichel of the Philadelphia Inquirer for Washington correspondence, and Mike Lane of Baltimore’s Evening Sun for editorial cartooning.