A Twist on Violence and the Media

Yesterday’s Daily Graphic carries an article about a plea made by one Kwesi Amoafo-Yeboah, identified as an “independent presidential aspirant”, directed at the main political parties here and urging their followers to avert the violence he foresees in the electoral campaign. In doing so, Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah joins, well, pretty much everyone. Since my arrival in June, not a single issue of The Graphic has passed beneath my eye without containing a similar plea from some junior regional minister, some paramount chief of an obscure traditional area, some reverend, some CEO, some actor or some musician. On Mondays, there are frequently several such pleas, since the newspaper doesn’t publish on Sunday and the exhortations tend to stack up. Added to these, on a more-or-less weekly basis, are reports of Walks for a Peaceful Election, Prayer Meetings for a Peaceful Election and Concerts for a Peaceful Election. Every two weeks or so, The Graphic runs an editorial of its own, usually not only calling for peaceful elections, but also calling on Ghana’s citizens to call for peaceful elections. The pleas are repeated on the radio stations, TV broadcasts and, as I saw last week, at comedy shows. An observer could not be blamed, based on the tone of the local media, for confusing Ghana with Somalia.

This has all been patently absurd, of course; it has been completely divorced from both past and present reality. The best explanation for all of the alarmism is probably that people are spooked by the violence that followed the elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe this year. Most of the pleas cite these examples, never mentioning that in those countries, violence-plagued elections are very much the historical norm. Ghana simply does not have this kind of history, however. While its fifty years of post-independence history do contain some cases of political and ethnic conflict, the conflicts have been tied overwhelmingly to local chieftaincy disputes rather than electoral politics. Since democracy was reintroduced in the mid-1990’s, Ghana’s elections have been free, fair and peaceful. As the newspaper exhortations never fail to mention, to date Ghana has been a model for African democracy.

How long it remains so is an open question, and one that hinges largely on the behavior of the media. Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah’s plea is unique in that it follows in the wake of a bona fide case of electoral violence (which is probably why he was joined, in other articles, by the editorial board of The Graphic and something called the Bawumia Fun Club). This weekend, a scuffle at a political rally in the Northern Region resulted in a reprisal attack that killed 6 people and the torching of a fair bit of a town called Gushiegu. In addition to auguring poorly for the next three months, the attack seemed to confirm the fears that so many had aired in the media. However, did their utterances really represent foresight, or were they just self-fulfilling prophecies?

In his book, When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani analyzes the psychology of the Rwandan genocide: what, he asks, turned thousands upon thousands of Hutu farmers, shopkeepers and clergy into genocidaires? One of the necessary ingredients, he found, was fear. The Hutu-dominated government sowed fear deep into the Hutu population; the Hutus were told stories of the Tutsi militia that lay just over the border, ready to commit all manner of atrocities to the Hutus once they had the chance. When the Tutsi guerillas advanced, and when the Hutu President’s plane was shot down, it seemed to confirm all of the worst fears that had been cultivated in the population. It was at that point that the genocide began. Throughout the Rwandan genocide, vernacular radio stoked the flames of violence by repeating claims about Tutsi plots; during the electoral violence in Kenya, Kalenjin and Kikuyu vernacular radio stations spurred attacks by reporting (false) stories about the atrocities committed by other ethnic groups. In Rwanda and Kenya, violence became acceptable as revenge, as pre-emptive protection, as the norm for behavior.

I think something similar is happening, albeit on a much smaller scale, in Ghana. All of the pleas for a peaceful election carry the subtext that the situation is desperate, that danger is afoot, that someone is plotting trouble. Though intended to instill restraint and cooperation, the real effect of these remarks is to create fear and distrust. Supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) accuse each other of plotting to incite violence (and now, in the wake of the clash at Gushiegu, the two parties are trading blame for the violence there). Every newspaper article about the need for peace and every radio commentator warning about the prospect of electoral violence just makes the likelihood of that violence greater.

The media needs to act more responsibly, by reminding the population of the peace that has prevailed throughout most of the country, even during past elections. It needs to place the remarks of the doomsayers into context and rebuild trust and confidence. Unfortunately, this would mark a significant departure for the vast majority of Ghanaian journalists, who seem to fanatically adhere to the philosophy espoused by Stephen Colbert (at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner a few years ago) that the media’s job is simply to accurately transcribe what is told to them. For their part, the luminaries who make these pleas for peace could better spend their time taking concrete steps to eliminate some of the structural factors that encourage electoral violence. The registration process is an ungodly mess and the firewalls designed to separate traditional authority, the bureaucracy and elected offices are woefully inadequate. Fixing these problems would help ensure peaceful elections. I fear, however, that simply airing pleas for a peaceful election will prove self-defeating.

Live from Accra...it's Saturday Night!

There’s an old truism out there that you’re not really fluent in a language until you can joke and be joked to in it. There’s some logic to that; to get a joke, you must have a quickness with, and a command of, the language’s vocabulary that would elude a novice. I think it’s a principle that can be extended further, though: you’re not really fluent in any subject until you can joke about it. In my view, the AP American History exam could be replaced by a wonderful joke I heard about Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, with the score from 1 to 5 determined by the quickness and vehemence with which the test taker laughs after hearing the punch line. It would certainly save time and trouble and, as a side benefit, would probably open the eyes of a lot of kids who have received that abstinence-only sex ed.

I bring this up because Saturday night I tested myself and went to a comedy show featuring Ghana’s leading political satirist. It was held in the National Theatre in Accra, which I guess is Ghana’s Chinese-built answer to the Kennedy Center. Its exterior, which looks like nothing so much as a gigantic ship in dry dock, is admittedly impressive in a “we shut down the country’s public schools and hospitals for 12 years to pay for this” sort of way. Inside, though, it looks like the architects used the losing design for a small liberal arts college’s auditorium. There was only a little time to linger over the bizarre modernist balconies or the terrible acoustics, however, with all of the people-watching there was to do. Because every Ghanaian newspaper article is essentially a transcript of what a politician or a politician’s flunky has said, accompanied by a blurry. underexposed photo, I was well acquainted with the words and the rough outline of the faces of the VIPs that were scattered around the hall- the kind of pundits and insiders who, if they were American, would go see the Capitol Steps at the Kennedy Center. Truly rarefied air.

Unfortunately, we all had to wait for the political comedy. The event turned out to be a kind of variety show, with reggae duos, R&B groups, and dancers. At one point, the MC said that the show was a celebration of “indigenous, African creativity”, which sent my mind racing with thoughts of Wole Soyinka, Ali Farka Toure and Cesaria Evora. I was on the wrong track, however, as the act he was introducing turned out to be a man who played the flute with his nose. Finally, though, after a pitch from a bank rep and another for Amarula liquer, the comedian KSM took the stage.

He was funny- even I thought so. He made a few jokes about religion, Indians (channeling Joe Biden, perhaps), and returned expats, but the vast majority of the segments were about the campaign leading up to December’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Granted, the jokes were of the Maureen Dowd and Saturday Night Live variety (he made fun of one presidential aspirant for being short, one for being old and sick and the third for being irrelevant); still, I was pleasantly surprised that I got them. Yet as funny as the show was, there was something unsettling about the performance. The show was called “Castle or Suicide”, referring to Osu Castle, the seat of government. Throughout, there was an undertone of fear that the intensity and competition of the campaign were in danger of spinning out of control. This was made explicit at the end of the night when KSM passionately implored the audience- a portion of which, no doubt, actually has influence over how the election is to be conducted- to ensure a peaceful campaign through December. And as the writers for Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and SNL no doubt know as well as I do, that is just not a good, parting laugh line.