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14. In the Mainstream: Africa and Beyond
- Louisiana State University Press
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[ 14 ] In the Mainstream Africa and Beyond Leon Dash of the Washington Post spent most of the early 1970s trekking through Africa with guerrillas who were trying to wrest Angola from Portuguese colonial rule. Dash was not viewed as a foreign correspondent but as a reporter who had seized the chance to have a front-row view of Angola’s march toward independence. He made two private trips and one sanctioned by the colonial government before getting an official post as a foreign correspondent in 1978. That allowed him to crisscross the continent and tell its story. Dash was one of the few black journalists working for the mainstream media after the integration of the nation’s newsrooms. As their ranks increased , they were assigned to cover events all over the world. Simultaneously , foreign reporting in the black press virtually ceased. The Afro-American engaged in some foreign news gathering during the 1970s. Executive editor Moses James Newson covered Bahamian independence in 1973, South Africa in 1974, and Cuba in 1976. The Chicago Daily Defender ran foreign news supplied by United Press International (UPI). Most black foreign correspondents now worked for the mainstream media. They lived in the countries from which they reported and rarely spent much time in one spot. Their on-thescene reporting was based on observation and on interviews with leaders and ordinary people. Their news organizations provided the resources they needed to work and live overseas. The black press, in contrast, lacked the financial means to base reporters abroad and had to rely on stringers or travelers. The first assignment for some black reporters for the mainstream press was Africa. Jack White of Time magazine, Larry Olmstead of the Detroit Free Press, Sheila Rule of the New York Times, Nathaniel Sheppard of the Chicago Tribune, and Jerry Gray of the Associated Press were in Africa in the 1980s. During the following decade, the establishment media assigned more black correspondents to Africa, including Howard French of the New York Times in the mainstream: africa and beyond 193 and Keith Richburg and Lynne Duke of the Washington Post. It is interesting to compare what correspondents for the mainstream media wrote to what their counterparts in the black press reported a few decades earlier. In 1968 Dash took a leave from his job at the Washington Post to volunteer for the Peace Corps and teach at a rural high school in Kenya. He had been editor of the school newspaper while a student at Lincoln University in Philadelphia ; after two years there, he transferred to Howard University. In 1966, while still a student there, he got a job as a copy boy at the Washington Post. By the time he graduated in 1968, he had been promoted to reporter. That was the beginning of a career with the newspaper that would last for thirty years. In Kenya, Dash met foreign correspondents and decided he wanted to be one of those journalists and he wanted to cover Africa.1 When his Peace Corps stint was over, Dash returned to the newspaper. While working at the Post, Dash got a phone call from a Harvard University graduate student who asked if he would go to Angola with a liberation movement . The idea intrigued him—his great-uncle had been born in Angola to a Guyanese missionary—but he was not sure how the Post would react. This opportunity came not long after he had led a group of blacks who filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the newspaper . But the Post gave its blessing, and soon Dash was “tramping around” with guerrillas from the National Movement for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).2 Dash lived with UNITA guerrillas for three months and covered more than eight hundred miles with them as he gathered information about why they were fighting. He spent several days, and more than twenty hours, interviewing UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, who told Dash that most journalists had spent only half an hour with him. Dash’s four-part series on Angola ran in the Post in December 1973. His was the first comprehensive reporting on the conflict in Angola. He examined the reasons for the fighting, and he gave his personal observations on the warfare and his experiences with the fighters. Dash recalled that the mainstream media either were not covering Angola or were covering it from a Washington and Cold War perspective, reporting that Western-backed groups and Soviet Union-backed groups...