Afronline: Africa speaks to the West

Thursday June 11 an innovative project saw the light of day in a crowded room in Italy’s capital Rome.

The conference taking the form of a round table was called “Media and Africa. Talking of Africa, letting Africa talk”, and was organised for the launch of afronline.org, the new website claiming to be “the voice of Africa”.

The aim of the English language website, as well as the “Afro project” is to give a new form of information about Africa to a preconditioned international crowd.

“I was frustrated about this unilateral top-bottom way of communicating Africa here in Italy, which saw us having a guilt-ridden relationship with it, where we alternated between reporting catastrophes  and sending money to try and help,” says Riccardo Bonacina, the journalistic brain behind Afro.

“This communicating problem isn’t unique to Italy of course, but I think it is safe to say that it is true of all Western countries.”

Visiting the website www.afronline.org for the first time, an emotionally grabbing quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski hits the viewer:

“Africa is silently dying because nobody is listening to its voice”

The website presents itself as the answer to this statement, as a reaction it seems, to what Kapuscinski was presumably denouncing: a lack of understanding from the West of Africa’s actual voice, and the detrimental effects of this chain of consequential events.

As such, the portal is a form of news gathering, which presents stories reported by anyone of its 9 official partners.  The news however is not the usual emergency related kind, which we in the West have come to expect from the African continent. 

“It’s not that we do not want to talk about AIDS or Darfur, it’s just that we also want to tell all the other stories, like the new political developments, notable African personalities and the effects of the global financial crisis,” explains Chiara Caprio, content administrator for Afronline.

“What’s more, we don’t only want to be telling these stories, we want these stories to be told by the protagonists of the stories themselves; Afronline is seeking to be the voice of and from Africa.”

Particular attention will be given to African civil society, and social debates in and around it.  Afro has also linked up to Italian news wire service AGI, with the aim of making available the same quality African news directly to Italian journalists and news diffusers.

“There are many stories untold on our continent” states Paula Fray, regional director of Ips Africa, one of Afro’s founding partners. “Our main challenge is to seek out the stories of those who remain marginalised and to keep their stories on the development agenda despite increased pressures from the global financial crisis”.

Was the launch a success?

“It was an immense success,” Bonacina says, “I must say that it was a huge relief to hear from a number of authoritative figures, such as Le Monde’s Jean-Philippe Rémy and Kenyan daily The Nation’s Eric Shimoli that they strongly agreed with me about this need for a different kind of news diffusion.”

Sounds like a good start.  Let’s see how it goes.

www.afronline.org