Toward a Native Press

The grey, two-story stone villa near the center of Nairobi once served as the headquarters for British troops operating against Mau Mau terrorists. Today the same building bustles with Africans; a few of them are even ex-Mau Mau. Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi -- the list of their homelands reads like a roster of emergent nations. They have little in common except their color, their knowledge of English, and their burning desire to learn the techniques of journalism.

The Nairobi Press Institute, which started its sixth six-month course in June, is Africa's first full-fledged journalism school for native Africans. Founded in 1963 along with a sister school in Lagos, it is financed by the Ford Foundation, and directed by the International Press Institute, an organization that tries to maintain freedom of the press around the world. Its ambitious aim is to turn out enough black journalists to replace the expatriate white newsmen who have been leaving Africa in a steady stream. Newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations, ministries of information, all have been clamoring for Africans to fill vacancies, and competent Africans are everywhere in short supply. "In the past," says Nairobi School Director Tom Hopkinson, 60, a quiet, determined newsman who has edited both British and African magazines, "journalism has not attracted many Africans. Those who did take up the work had few opportunities of rising above the humblest level. With the coming of widespread independence in the '60s, the press of Africa risked either a very sharp decline in standards or else a total eclipse."

With a Twig. To help prevent an eclipse, the two schools each run a rigorous six-month training course for some 20 Africans who have had at least two years' experience in some form of journalism. The students put in a tough eight-hour day studying history, law and economics as well as the principles of their profession. They learn how to handle wire-service copy, how to lay out news and feature pages; they take frequent trips to cover courts, politics, sports, theater. Toward the end of the course, they fill in on local papers or at the Voice of Kenya radio station.

The training is so thorough that an I.P.I, diploma is highly regarded all over Africa. It is almost always a passport to a better-paying job. Upon graduating, Reynald Olivier was promoted to editor of a daily newspaper on the island of Mauritius. Ojwando Abuor, a former herdsman who taught himself to write by scratching characters on his arm with a twig, became a top information officer in Kenya. John Kayamba was appointed managing editor of government publications in Zambia at $4,500 a year--which puts him well up toward the top of Africa's financial aristocracy.

Uhuru for Women. Pleased and proud that their students were doing so well, the I.P.I, faculties were nonetheless concerned that graduates were going back to jobs in the same old taboo-ridden social system. What is needed in modern Africa, says Director-designate Frank Barton, 41, who has spent 16 years in African journalism, "is to eradicate not only poverty and disease but also suffocating superstition and prejudice. What stood out in Kenya was the need to do something to improve the role of women."

After taking careful soundings and winning the support of President Jomo Kenyatta, the I.P.I, decided to recruit some women students--an unprecedented act in a land where woman's place has always been restricted to the kitchen or to service as a beast of burden in the field. "It seemed to us that the men of Africa had won their uhuru," says Barton, "but that for millions of women freedom was still meaningless."

At first, the women students spoke in barely audible whispers. They were almost frantic with embarrassment if they had to deal with stories involving some sordid aspect of sex. At coffee breaks they hung back, while the men served themselves first, leaving the women to take whatever might be left. Gradually the women gained confidence and a surprising mastery of their subject. Alumna Charity Mumbi, who would otherwise have joined her 42 brothers and sisters as a hewer of wood, is now a Kenyan information officer. Charity Waciuma has just published a children's book about her own childhood experiences during the Mau Mau terror.

Within the next decade, Hopkinson and Barton expect their graduates not only to fill all the vacancies in African journalism but also to contribute to hundreds of new weekly papers all over the continent--in French, in English, in the dialect of a district. "I doubt if it's possible," says Hopkinson, "for a developing country to reach full development, to take its place with authority in the modern world, if it lacks free and courageous newspapers and journals."

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