Media : Loosening the Leash on Africa’s Press : * Democracy is squelching censorship in the sub-Saharan region. But attacks on bolder publications persist.

To anyone impressed by the startling renaissance of the independent press in this country since multi-party democracy was legalized in December, the police raid Jan. 2 on a certain downtown printing shop had to come as a surprise.

The police struck before dawn, seizing all 30,000 copies of the Jan. 6 issue of Society magazine, due out the next day. Two Indian workers at the plant were subsequently deported as illegal aliens. Tied up in court for the next two months, Society missed eight issues.

What was striking about the raid was that the edition in question was not only more politically innocuous than most of Society’s previous issues but also far milder than what Kenya’s newspapers were publishing as daily fare: allegations of corruption in the government’s highest reaches, speculation about President Daniel Arap Moi’s political weakness--all things that would have been censored out of the press as recently as last November.

“It was the cleanest issue we’ve ever had,” says Pius Nyamora, Society’s publisher. His only guess: The police had been misled by an ambiguous headline into thinking the issue carried photographs of illicit checks written by Moi to his cronies.

For all that, the two sides of independent journalism in Kenya--the increasing freedom of a hitherto tightly controlled press and the arbitrary pressure applied by the authorities--reflect the dual trends emerging across sub-Saharan Africa.

The wave of multi-party democracy washing away a score of the continent’s single-party or military regimes has brought in its wake a flowering of independent journalism.

Within months of the overthrow of Mali’s military dictator, Moussa Traore (a civilian government is to be installed after elections now taking place), there were more than a dozen new dailies or weeklies for sale on the streets of the capital, Bamako. Some were little more than leaflets promoting a narrow point of view--Muslim, Christian, tribal, left or right--but they all were permitted to subject government policy to critiques that earlier had been outlawed.

Similar things have happened in Zambia, where an opposition party ousted the patriarch, President Kenneth D. Kaunda, in open elections and fired the sycophantic editors of the government-owned newspapers; Ghana, where Lt. Jerry J. Rawlings has abolished a 3-year-old newspaper licensing law; Benin, Ivory Coast, Madagascar and elsewhere.

“Now we’re breathing free air,” says Kwendo Opanga, a political columnist for Kenya’s Daily Nation. The security police who used to follow him everywhere and try to engage him in incriminating conversations when he got tipsy in bars haven’t been seen, he says, since Moi legalized the organization of opposition political parties in December.

But at the same time, many governments have stepped up the pressure. In Nigeria, whose fractious and openly partisan press could probably never be comprehensively censored, seven leading newspapers and weeklies have been forcibly closed for periods of days or weeks over the last 18 months, a period of gradual political liberalization. Many of their editors have been jailed from time to time for running controversial reports.

Zambia’s new government has dusted off an old press council law originally proposed by Kaunda. Registration laws, which African journalists tend to regard as vehicles for censorship, have been proposed in Ivory Coast and Nigeria. And there are few countries in which the government has been able to resist for long the temptation to ban one or another turbulent publication.

“Freedom is a tool they don’t easily understand,” says Blamuel Njururi, managing editor of publisher Nyamora’s Society magazine. “Politicians are used to half-truths.”

Not surprisingly, an unfettered press was not among the political bequests left to newly independent African states by their departing colonial administrators, who had ruled in part by keeping public discourse under control.

At the dawn of African independence, the first generation of indigenous leaders expressed misgivings about giving an unruly press the latitude to put forward alternative versions of political truth.

Kwame Nkrumah, independent Ghana’s first leader, presaged his regime’s socialist tendencies by arguing that “within the competitive system of capitalism, the press cannot function in accordance with a strict regard for the facts.” Even Western politicians would perhaps find that sentiment unexceptionable. But Nkrumah added:

“The press should therefore not be in private hands.”

“The press is capable of making or destroying governments, given appropriate conditions,” said Kaunda, early in Zambia’s independence. Eventually, Kaunda proposed a government-dominated Press Council to oversee independent newspapers; he had long since brought the two major daily newspapers and its broadcasting company under state control.

In the autocratic systems created by most independence-era African leaders, they were the arbiters of journalistic fairness and even objective truth. Many journalists went to jail or their operations were shut down, not for pursuing overtly political campaigns but for publishing or broadcasting unauthorized versions of public events.

This was the case, for instance, when Liberian President Samuel K. Doe closed his country’s Roman Catholic radio station--by far the most influential news medium in the rural districts--for reporting in 1988 that one person had been killed during a soccer riot at which the government said no one was injured.

These leaders generally regarded the press as an institution that should function as their own publicity arms.

Over the years, African efforts to exterminate independent journalism created more than a few martyrs. There was Dele Giwa, the editor of Nigeria’s Newswatch magazine, killed in 1986 by a letter bomb whose source has never been publicly identified but is widely thought to be connected with the government of President Ibrahim Babangida.

Many Kenyan journalists, including Gitobu Imanyara, editor of the dissident Nairobi Law Journal, spent time in detention, often in the inhuman basement dungeons of the Kenya Police Special Branch. After being released from such a cell without ever having been charged, one magazine editor learned that his passport had been seized and his family threatened; he left Kenya for good, hidden in the trunk of a car.

Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Malawi’s harshly repressive president for life, in 1989 evidently struck beyond his own borders at Mkwapatira Mhango, a journalist then in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, with a firebomb attack that killed Mhango and five members of his family. (Banda’s preferred style of journalism is exemplified by the state-owned Daily Times, where the approach to coverage of the nonagenarian president can best be described as hysterical adulation.)

This pressure only makes worse what is by its nature an uphill battle for influence by the written press. Newspaper proprietors in Africa face two major impediments to getting the news out: illiteracy and poverty.

“The truth of the matter is that, in Africa, the (written) press is simply not a mass medium,” says Babacar Toure, editor and publisher of Sud Hebdo, a valiant independent weekly in Senegal.

In a region where the average literacy rate is 42% of the adult population (according to figures from the World Bank), many regimes may tolerate as much press freedom as they do because they know newspapers are not much more than an elitist medium. In virtually no country, on the other hand, is there an independent radio or television station.

Also, it is the rare independent publication that is far from the edge of financial extinction. In most of Africa, printing and telecommunications costs are high, advertising markets small.

That gives hostile governments a wedge with which to separate journalists from their public. The high proportion of government ownership of economic enterprises gives regimes tremendous power to punish the recalcitrant and reward the compliant by withdrawing and placing advertising. Printing capacity is at such a premium in many countries that dissident publishers have sometimes even found it difficult to get their journals printed--as in Kenya, Senegal, Ivory Coast and elsewhere--because of government pressure on job printers.

In fact, in many places economic intimidation is today the preferred stratagem.

“The government’s effort is actually to put us out of business,” says Nyamora of Society magazine as he recounts the various ways the Moi regime has fought him. In earlier times, he says, when government-owned industries in Kenya were among his advertisers, any time Society had an opposition figure on its cover the advertisers would call and threaten to refuse payment. The pressure eventually worsened: Society has not had a paid advertisement since its issue of October, 1990.

“Businessmen here are afraid to be identified with the opposition,” Nyamora says.

More serious was the long hiatus between editions provoked by Society’s legal problems. Coming in January--a month when Kenyans face large rent payments and bills for their children’s school fees--the shutdown hit particularly hard at Society’s staff. About $30,000 was lost by the seizure of the Jan. 6 issue.

“January is a very important month, but we haven’t paid our staff for two months,” Nyamora says. “We haven’t paid rent on this office for two months. No one has even complained. Journalists are very dedicated people.”

In any event, Kenya’s mainstream dailies have been enjoying a freedom they have not felt since the early 1980s, when Moi’s more autocratic impulses began to assert themselves.

In truth, Kenya’s press is unusual in sub-Saharan Africa, for its two leading dailies, the Nation and the Standard, are not only independent but well-financed.

In the past, that has not entirely exempted them from government harassment. The Nation was barred from covering Parliament for 10 weeks in 1990, for example, possibly because it had fired the relative of an influential Parliament member. Several editors of the Standard were arrested and detained that same year after their candid reporting of an illicit opposition rally disturbed the government.

More important, both practiced for years the kind of self-censorship that makes a government’s job easy. The Nation canceled a special investigative unit after its stories were routinely killed by compliant editors following instructions from government officials.

“Stories of corruption were not encouraged,” recalled Mutege Njau, the Nation’s current city editor.

Moi’s office seemed to have a direct line to the Nation management, often knowing what stories were scheduled for the paper hours before it went to press. Scarcely a week passed without at least one call from the president’s office at State House ordering a story out of the newspaper.

But democracy seems to have proved a corrective. Njau says not one call has come from State House in the months since multi-party democracy was legalized in Kenya; the press conferences of opposition leaders, which were routinely ignored in the past, are now covered religiously. When anti-government hunger strikers were assaulted March 3 by government troops in Nairobi, the Nation and Standard covered the episode in full detail.

“In the old days, self-censorship was the only way to survive,” says Njau. “Today, there’s nothing like that.”

Literacy in Africa In much of sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than half the people can read. So, they get their news from government-controlled radio and television.

Percentage 15 years and older who can read and write BENIN Men: 32% Women: 16% CAMEROON Men: 66% Women: 43% GHANA Men: 70% Women: 51% IVORY COAST Men: 67% Women: 40% KENYA Men: 80% Women: 58% MADAGASCAR Men: 88% Women: 73% MALI Men: 41% Women: 24% NIGERIA: Men: 62% Women: 40% SUDAN Men: 43% Women: 12% TOGO Men: 56% Women: 31% ZAIRE Men: 84% Women: 61% ZAMBIA Men: 81% Women: 65% NOTE: 1990 estimates SOURCE: CIA World Factbook, 1991

Who’s Free, Who’s Not: A Roundup

Generally, Africa’s democratic awakening has been good for the press. But there is still repression. Some examples:

LOOSENING UP MALI: More than a dozen new weeklies or dailies published after military dictator Moussa Traore overthrown in March, 1991. GHANA: 3-year-old newspaper publishing law abolished. BENIN, MADAGASCAR: Also loosened restrictions. CRACKING DOWN CAMEROON: 27 issues of independent newspapers seized in 1991. Law allows government to review newspaper copy before publication. NIGERIA: Seven leading newspapers and weeklies forcibly closed for days or weeks over last 18 months. Four journalists from Guardian Express detained. Proposed law to register journalists. SUDAN: Membership in dominant party, National Islamic Front, required for employment in media. Detained journalists are often held in secret “ghost houses,” where political prisoners are typically tortured. TOGO: Soldiers destroyed equipment and beat several employees at independent Forum Hebdo in December, 1991.

ZAIRE: Six newspaper offices attacked or raided in October, 1991. Premises of opposition Elima newspaper destroyed by bomb. ZAMBIA: Before October, 1991, elections, government barred its presses from printing independent publications. But election victors fired sycophantic editors of the government papers. MIXED SIGNALS IVORY COAST: Loosened restrictions but has proposed law to register journalists. KENYA: Police raided Society magazine offices, seizing Jan. 6 issue, despite recent growth of press freedom. SOURCES: The Committee to Protect Journalists; Los Angeles Times