What's the point of this blog?
This blog began when Emily Meehan was stuck in Somaliland without any money left to pay for her hotel, driver, soldier-security guards, or food. But she wanted to go into the desert and walk with nomads, as freelance journalists are wont to do. So she told her friend Greg Galant that she was going to send an email to every single person she had ever met asking them for $20. She asked Greg to open a Paypal account for her so they could pay into it. The Internet connection was not fast enough for her to do that in Hargeysa, or maybe, she was just saying that because she was intimidated by the prospect of opening up a Paypal account. Greg advised her not to do this, but instead start a blog and raise money with the blog via the tool Chipin, which would connect to Paypal. This Emily did. She had already decided to start a blog about how cool Africa is after much conversation with William Deed over a lazy weekend in the Mara Triangle.
After gratefully collecting $1500 from friends, readers, and her devoted literary agent, Susan Rabiner, Emily was able to pay her team and head out to the desert to interview nomads for this NPR story about drought in the Horn of Africa. (The collection was made possible by Dan Wambua Muende and Alessandra Argenti of Nairobi, Kenya, who dutifully helped their roommate by withdrawing money two days in a row from an ATM with Emily’s bank card and then trying five days in a row to wire it to her in Somaliland, where there are no banks, via Dahabshiil, a Hawala money transfer agency.)
The seed of this idea to write about how cool Africa is came out of a conversation between Emily and Neil King in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Neil and Michael Philips were coming up with story ideas for Emily to report while in Somalia. Neil said all anyone ever hears about from Africa is war and scourges. He said there must be some positive stories to tell and Emily should try to find some. He suggested one in Juba, Sudan, which Emily has since forgotten. But this got her thinking, she liked Neil’s suggestion. Neil himself seemed quite liberated for a finance reporter and Wall Street Journal employee.
And here you have the result, “African Heroes: Stories of Brave Badasses.” The original title was “African Heroes: Stories of Brave Badasses on the Last Frontier,” but when putting up the blog, Greg Galant left out the ending for reasons Emily never discovered but nonetheless agreed with. Greg is the one who chose the Tumblr platform.
African Heroes has been linked to by dozens of blogs and reviewed in a June 2009 article in the Diplomatic Courier called “Getting Out the Good News: Blogging Africa’s ‘Other Side.’”
Writes John Bavoso:
While some blogs focus on innovations, others choose to highlight the stories of people who make Africa such a unique region for other reasons. This was the reasoning behind the new blog African Heroes, which, as its tagline “stories of brave badasses” suggests, sheds some spotlight on Africans who are worthy of news coverage for the inspiring deeds they do and lives they lead. Emily Meehan, the blogger behind African Heroes and an American journalist living and writing in East Africa, chose this theme because she felt it would appeal to readers both inside and outside of Africa. “I use the theme of ‘badasses’ or heroes in proper English because I think it’s something Americans love,” Meehan wrote in a recent email correspondence. “It’s something my African heroes and most Americans have in common, they’re all pioneers.”
Meehan is familiar with both worlds – until fairly recently she was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, covering issues relating to twenty-something’s in America. However, working in the mainstream media lost its appeal after a while. “I got very tired of seeing that every media outlet was covering the same stories, very few of which interested me,” Meehan remembers. “So I decided to work on news that was under-reported.” The first step in this process was to find a location which interested her and a place where she could see her journalism making an actual difference in the lives of people. “I have always loved traveling to obscure places. I drew up a list of some obscure places with misunderstood troubles: Chechnya, Georgia, Somalia, Venezuela, Congo. The Horn of Africa was just full of my ideal content.” So, in a move reminiscent of the badasses whom she has come to portray and admire, Meehan packed up her things and moved to East Africa with what most people would consider not much of a plan.
Meehan is currently working on a five-part piece on Somalia as well as other projects for various media outlets on a free-lance basis, but she really enjoys meeting people and writing her hero profiles. Her most recent hero is a man named Dr. Dihoud, a founder of the Somali National Movement (SNM) and the only psychiatrist in Somaliland, the autonomous region of Somalia which has claimed independence but lacks formal recognition from the international community. Included on the blog is an audio clip of the man telling his story in his own words and with his own voice. Dr. Dihoud is a very prestigious and accomplished man – but Meehan did not seek him out, per se. Instead, they met while staying in rooms across the hall from one another in a hotel – which is a testament to the fact that truly great African heroes can be found anywhere, doing anything.
In the end, these blogs may never be as popular or well-read as the traditional news outlets’ – but the positive information that is being put out for public consumption is being produced by people with a true dedication to helping Africa and Africans. And, for the most part, being different is just fine with these bloggers – they’re out to provide a distinct alternative for media consumers. “When I first came to Africa I was coached by a very good journalist named Pedro. I had plans to write about corruption and war in Somalia. He told me not to,” Meehan explains. “Nobody cares, it’s been happening for so long, don’t just write the same story as all the others, he said. I don’t completely agree with Pedro … But if my only news is bad news, how am I helping?”
