The 16-Year-Old Foreign Correspondent
There must be some fallout from Africa’s low professional training requirements for jobs from journalist to president. I suppose Idi Amin would be a good example of someone who mucked up his job of leading Uganda due partly to his underqualification. But so far in my travels I have seen more evidence that the lack of technocracy on this continent is a good thing. In fact, this entire blog highlights the triumphs of people who learned how to do their jobs under obligation from real life, dynamic circumstances rather than static classroom simulations. Certainly most of them would have rather gone to an American university to learn their trades, it just wasn’t possible. Not to mention the fact that American universities don’t actually teach any trades, unlike Africa’s pragmatic two-year colleges.
Mariam Mohamud Barre is a young Somali journalist I met the other day at a press conference. She’s the Somali language service reporter for Voice of America, a radio network paid for by the U.S. government that had the original charter of delivering patriotic news to members of the U.S. armed services stationed abroad. Now it’s radio for anyone living abroad and broadcasts in an astounding amount of countries and languages.
The other reporters I was with treated Miriam like a veteran correspondent. She told me she had covered the 2002-2004 Somali government reconciliation conference here in Kenya and I assumed she was about 27 or 30-years-old. She has some serious poise. So I asked her how old she is. She’s 21.
“Wait. You’re 21? So that means you were…15 when you covered the reconciliation conference here in Kenya?!”
“I interviewed warlords!” she chirped with laughter.
“The journalists in Somalia are very young,” said another young Somali reporter. “You will find many who are 21. It is the young person’s profession.”
Miriam started her career by writing articles for a Somali news gossip Web site for a province of the country, the equivalent of a Web site about Orange County, California, or Buffalo, N.Y. Then she and her family had to flee to Kenya because of ongoing war in Somalia. When Miriam mentions this her eyes cloud over and she chokes up. They settled in Kenya and Miriam was hired by one of the main Somali radio stations to cover the reconciliation conference as a correspondent.
I thought with wonder about this for quite a while. It makes sense. Young people are more prone to gossip and often better at it than adults. They are less afraid of authority, especially in Somalia, where teenage attitudes very much resemble those of gum chewing, cigarette-smoking daredevils in American public high schools. And what is reporting anyway? Delivering news to the people. African news is not fraught with the kind of rarified snobbery that our media is afflicted with. It’s practical. And it’s much more popular than news in America.
Everyone in Kenya watches the news at 9pm. Bars hush as people gather round the TV. In Somaliland during the BBC afternoon newscast work halts for 30 minutes. Of course, the incentive to get the news is bigger for most Africans than it is for Americans. Hearing the news in Somalia, for example, can mean the difference between knowing that 14,000 Ethiopian troops have entered your province and are headed for your town or being caught in your underwear by a team of assassins.
Getting back to Miriam, she moved on from Kenya correspondent to become Somalia’s parliament correspondent, living in a dangerous zone constantly under siege from Islamist and opposition fighters. Then she was hired by Voice of America in Nairobi. At 21 she is the Somali equivalent of Anne Garrels.
So really, how much of our lives do we waste in the U.S. kissing people’s asses and attending graduate schools?