Among the easier points of political consensus reached by Western members of the newly formed United Nations was the agreement to establish the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in London in November 1945. UNESCO, initially dominated by North American and western European powers, aimed to correct the wartime legacies of propaganda and censorship with an idealistic charter dedicated to ‘full and equal opportunities for education for all, the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and the free exchange of ideas and knowledge’. All member states were ‘agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives’.Footnote 1 Ensuring free traffic in international news ranked high among these post-war internationalist values. ‘If the free flow of information and ideas is to be ensured’, UNESCO's 1953 report on news agencies asserted, ‘the progress which has been achieved in the field of technology, and which has made possible the faster and fuller transmission of news must be utilized to serve an ever greater part of mankind.’Footnote 2
The principle of the ‘free flow of information’, which stood as a sort of informational analogue to the Bretton Woods system of monetary management among the world's major industrial nations, tied together a number of post-war internationalist principles – equality among nation-states, liberty in trade, realization of potential through development – that provided an agreeable language of consensus. Yet these sentiments also veiled a number of thorny disputes, since ownership and control of the global communication infrastructure plainly lay in the West. British, French, and American news agencies dominated the news-gathering and editorial work that produced the international news upon which media across the globe relied. In this context, there were wide differences of opinion regarding the equitable sharing of news between highly unequal partners, between metropole and colony, and between industrialized power and agrarian periphery. Newly independent states sought to make use of their sovereignty to gain favourable terms of informational trade with Western news agencies, yet many also felt that their sovereignty was greatly enhanced by the global daily recognition supplied through the reporting of these same news agencies.
Recent studies on the post-war history of global governance correctly emphasize the diverging interests among nation-states regarding the question of development. But in these studies, ‘development’ is understood in material terms, mainly of commodities and bodies; the main debates, as stressed in current scholarship, concerned import substitution, agricultural improvement, population control, and public health.Footnote 3 News, information, and communication figure less prominently.Footnote 4 In examining the intersection between decolonization, development, and business history, however, and by focusing on the news business, this article foregrounds the informational side of developmental debates. It argues that contests between East and West over news form a neglected part of the Cold War era and that Africa, particularly East Africa, served as a key battleground for global news during this period. Africa became the arena where the leading global news agencies (all of which were based in the West) battled with alternative visions for news ranging from the Soviet model to cooperative visions spearheaded by UNESCO.
The question of development stands at the centre of decolonization. And development lay at the heart of Cold War competition over the developing world, for example in India.Footnote 5 Initially proposed in the 1940s as a remedy to poverty and disorder, development was first appropriated by colonial African politicians as ‘a claim-making construct for post-war social and political movements in Africa’, and later by post-colonial African rulers as a means of cultivating patron–client relationships between weaker post-colonial states and more powerful ‘developed’ countries.Footnote 6 Contemporaries also viewed news and information as necessary elements of development. African leaders sought control over news as a means both to communicate useful information to their citizenry and to receive international recognition as a sovereign member of the international community about whom news reporters would report. But producing timely international news was expensive, requiring both expertise and capital that rested with news businesses. Academic literature on decolonization and business examines the interplay between late-colonial policy-makers and business interests in securing an amenable business climate in decolonizing states, such as for mineral rights, but also stresses that nationalist parties proved more influential than corporations in defining the terms and pace of the decolonization process.Footnote 7 The story below similarly shows that, while news agencies were important actors, they were also far from the all-powerful forces that their critics would claim them to be.
The news business and capitalist modes of news production were important agents of state and identity formation processes in the decolonization period, as they had been in both Europe and its African and Asian empires long before the mid twentieth century.Footnote 8 But if national consciousness was generated through acts of reading vernacular press, the content of that press in post-colonial Africa, in particular its accounts of international events, was mediated through a dual prism of international news-agency production and a government-centred information environment that defined the parameters of acceptable news and political debate. Early post-colonial African leaders played a critical role in this story. As ‘gatekeepers’ of resource flows into and out of their countries, these leaders employed ‘a strategy of using vertical ties and trying to limit horizontal ones’.Footnote 9 This impulse to seek vertical ties to secure patronage from above in order to exercise control over those below was as true for the acquisition of news as it was for more material forms of economic or military assistance.
During the 1960s, this landscape of global patronage was politically defined by the Cold War, which, as Odd Arne Westad stresses, was indeed rather hot in Asia and Africa.Footnote 10 ‘Soft power’ struggles coincided with hard military conflicts. The Cold War loomed large as an extended propaganda battle that frequently framed the narrative of global news. But such struggles over control of international news were fought through news organizations that long predated the Cold War itself. Metropolitan domination sustained through cartel arrangements had characterized the business of international news for many years before the 1940s. The most important of these arrangements was the ‘Ring Combination’, an international news cartel established in 1870 consisting of Reuters (Britain), Havas (France), and Wolff (Berlin), and later joined by the Associated Press (US). The cartel survived formally until 1939, though the AP left in 1933/34 in a dispute with Reuters over news supply to Japan.Footnote 11 Since the mid nineteenth century, this cartel had controlled much of the international news business through a series of agreements that partitioned the globe into areas within which a given organization would enjoy exclusive rights to sell and distribute news. But the end of ‘exclusive zones’ and comparative post-1945 freedoms to trade in news did not mean that UNESCO's envisioned ‘information free flow’ had yet arrived. In its 1953 report, UNESCO identified three major impediments: the emergence of political and ideological spheres of influence manifested in a Cold War ‘East’ and ‘West’; the very high costs of gathering and distribution of news in certain areas; and the rise of several new national news agencies that enjoyed internal monopolies in the distribution of domestic and world news.Footnote 12
This article focuses on the global competition over the control of news in one regional battleground, East Africa, by utilizing Reuter's corporate records, as well as government records from Kenya, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This competition reveals how the struggle for news in the age of decolonization was an important facet of the assertion and recognition of nation-state sovereignty, fuelled by promises of prestige and fears of exclusion. Africa became a testing ground for how agencies such as Reuters had to rethink their strategies of global news and how they reshaped their relationships with local clients in decolonized nations who gained increasing autonomy. Finally, attempting to succeed globally on the business level, those news agencies found themselves entangled in regional processes of decolonization and nation-building at the very heart of a Cold War struggle for influence in post-colonial Africa.
It is an irony of East Africa's decolonization that it opened the political and economic doors for increased Western control of information, particularly by the British news agency, Reuters. This informational dominance of the four major Western news agencies – Reuters, Agence France Press (AFP, the successor to Havas), and the US-based Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) – was realized in many other parts of the decolonizing world. It created a political backlash from international organizations, most notably UNESCO, but also others explored below, which sought to find alternative methods of news distribution to bypass established circuits and patterns.Footnote 13
Reuters’ interests, however, were driven less by political considerations than by capitalist concerns about creating profits and prestige within the news business. The business of news demonstrates a more fundamental disconnect between UNESCO's understanding of communications networks as fundamentally political and news agencies’ more capitalist approach to information. The comparative success of Reuters’ world news service in East Africa in the two decades after independence suggests that sustained global communication networks exhibit a marriage between capitalist dynamics and shrewd diplomacy. To demonstrate this point, this article offers a brief overview of news agencies in empire and the response of anti-colonial activism, then examines the specific case of Reuters in East Africa's decolonization, and concludes with an analysis of the ambitious but failed global ‘third world’ attempts to challenge Western news-agency domination.
International news, empire, and anti-colonialism in the twentieth century
During the nineteenth century, international news agencies initially followed the cable but later followed the flag. Transoceanic cables had provided the technology through which agencies such as Reuters could provide a global rapid-time news service, but sharpening imperial rivalries for territory towards the end of the century led agencies to become more imperial-minded. By 1900, the ‘Ring Combination’ of Reuters, Havas, and Wolff had partitioned global news along imperial lines, most plainly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the provision of international news mapped neatly to the continent's recent partition into British, French, and German colonies. News-agency reporting in these colonies took two major forms – financial reporting of trade and prices, and politico-diplomatic reporting of events. Particularly on imperial peripheries, the reporting of political news required ‘complex narratives, even in the most perfunctory of dispatches. It involved delicate questions of censorship and diplomacy, which required talent and training for correspondents and editors.’Footnote 14 The end product of this latter reporting often resembled the values and priorities of the Foreign and Colonial Offices in London.Footnote 15 Over the twentieth century, a new political map provided global news agencies with new opportunities but also challenges to the extent and form of their global news business, particularly from the perspective of formerly ‘peripheral’ spaces, such as India or Africa.
Alongside these ‘imperial’ news agencies emerged networks of writers who formed a sort of shadow communication world born of anti-colonial activism, most sharply after the First World War.Footnote 16 In India, this took the form of a competition between the Indian National Congress and its propaganda surrogates on the one hand, and the British Raj and its various information department activities on the other, to control the reportage and imagery of nationalist events as they appeared in newspapers and wire services.Footnote 17 Looming large in this competition was the role of Reuters, which had been uniquely profitable in British India, owing to its control of the supply of domestic news.Footnote 18 During India's nationalist decades of the 1920s and 1930s, Reuters’ interest in India had decreased and drifted towards a more independent approach. The Raj feared that Reuters’ reportage had fallen into nationalists’ hands, while nationalists viewed Reuters as ‘virtually a department of the Government’.Footnote 19 The combination of Reuters and ‘British pipes’ (that is, British-owned telegraph services) had been assumed sufficient to provide imperial information control over British India, at least until the outbreak of Gandhian nationalism around 1919. News service impartiality seemed ‘synonymous with [British] interests’.Footnote 20 Yet Reuters and its internal wing in India, the Associated Press of India (API), endured the growing scepticism of the Raj, and more importantly survived the business assault of its sharply nationalist rival, the Free Press of India (FPI; 1924–35), by retaining Indian newspaper subscribers who could use their editorial hand to adjust for perceived Reuters/API bias, but could not abide FPI's irregularity and unreliability.Footnote 21
More durable competition for Reuters in India came first from without, in the form of US news services, the Associated Press and United Press, which together finally broke Reuters’ monopoly in the mid 1930s; and finally from within, in the form of Reuters’ surrender of API to the India government shortly before independence. The Press Trust of India (PTI) marked the institutional fruit of the Indian National Congress's victory of independence. PTI took over API, renegotiated a contract with Reuters in 1948 while being invited to become a company shareholder (only to let the contract expire in 1952), and created what would be a typical ex-colonial ‘national’ news service that served as a gatekeeper between international news agencies and dependent internal newspapers.Footnote 22 Reuters quickly adapted by negotiating directly with the newly extant realities of nationally sovereign entities such as PTI. However, this experience in India of being dislodged by a ‘native’ news agency influenced Reuters’ attitude towards decolonization processes in Africa. Offering assistance to create new national news agencies would become the company's strategic starting point in its attempt to uphold its influence on global news in decolonized spaces.
Colonial Africa experienced a similar dialectic of imperial news control and ‘independent’ media responses. Reuters had enjoyed significant, if never complete, control over international news in East Africa during the colonial decades.Footnote 23 Its two principal customers were Smith MacKenzie and Company, a general merchant that handled financial news, and the East African Standard Ltd, which owned each ‘newspaper of record’ for Kenya (East African Standard), Uganda (Uganda Argus), and Tanganyika (Tanganyika Standard). The majority of the news carried by these newspapers concerned not East Africa but India, Europe, and North America. But overreliance bred contempt, particularly among the newspapers, and frustration with Reuters’ effective monopoly was regularly evident: the Indian-owned Tanganyika Opinion, for example, accused Reuters of blacking out news about Gandhi after he departed from London in late 1931.Footnote 24 Yet this newspaper became outspokenly loyal during the Second World War, carrying little local news or opinions, and serving instead as a vessel for officially approved wire service reportage. Indeed, until the end of the Second World War, Reuters in Africa served as a pro-British mouthpiece.
For its part, Reuters emerged from the Second World War as it had entered it – as a limited liability company owned by the British press, but now with additional minority stakes held by Australian, New Zealand, and (briefly) Indian press associations. Anxious to distance itself from being sullied as a British propaganda instrument, the company went on record in 1948 before the British Royal Commission on the Press to announce its complete opposition to any form of government assistance, in the form of direct subsidies or favourable transmission rates.Footnote 25 Company management in London realized that they faced new competition inside British imperial domains, most strikingly from well-capitalized American rivals led by the AP, but also by the French state-backed successor to Havas, AFP, and a host of Eastern bloc news services led by the Soviet Union's TASS, which had been established in 1925 and had previously worked with American agencies to break the cartel's grip.Footnote 26 After the war, TASS entered new news markets in former African colonial states by offering equipment, technical assistance, and cheap or often free news subscriptions, not only to propagandize but to supplement its ambitious material development projects.Footnote 27 By the 1960s, TASS understood that speed was as important as content in appearing to be a competitive international news service – its director, Gennadiy Shishkin, revamped the editorial process around an open newsroom after a visit to Reuters’ London office.Footnote 28
The stakes for supplying international news thus became as much about geopolitics as they were about market shares. Among state actors, the provisioning of global news was seen as the backbone of informational influence in the post-war world. The Second World War had created a global media environment dominated by overtly propagandistic news, in which basic facts about events were routinely contested. Shortwave radio became the era's favoured medium, and its loudest voice was Nazi Germany, whose external broadcasting service at Zeesen offered news reporting that was ‘a mixture of fact, drama, and psychological manipulation’.Footnote 29 While wartime Germany offered an extreme model, a host of other state broadcasting approaches vied for radio news supremacy during the post-war decades. British colonial Africa became a testing ground for these differing approaches, pitting emotive anti-colonial vernacular broadcasts from Egypt in particular – but later also from the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China – against the more neutral and ‘objective’ radio news of the BBC and colonial government services.Footnote 30 For British policy-makers, the BBC and Reuters provided the twin foundations for maintaining influence over the supply of international news in a rivalrous and often anarchic post-war media environment. Though Reuters and the BBC long had an uneasy relationship – initially over the latter's freedom to contract news from competitors; later over subscription costs that the BBC, as Reuters’ single largest customer, would pay – the British government ensured that the two institutions collectively retained a prominent position in the world by using covert subsidies to help both to compete against their overtly subsidized rivals.Footnote 31
Inside post-war Africa, the challenges for British news organizations remained as much political as they were commercial. Reuters’ Africa South and Central African services served newspapers from Freetown to Nairobi. But this service was also dominated – financially and editorially – by the South African Press Association (SAPA), based in Johannesburg. In the post-war years, SAPA increasingly operated as a censor rather than as an equal partner in its relationship with Reuters. SAPA representatives stationed within Reuters ‘assist[ed] in the selection of news sent’ to southern Africa, while Reuters reporters and stringers, rather than SAPA, gathered the bulk of African news sent back to London.Footnote 32 As South Africa enacted apartheid and became a pariah state among Africa nationalist figures over the 1950s, Reuters developed a new strategy that would repackage the form and content of its international news service to both meet and shape the expectations of African leaders who were gradually coming to power over the decade.
In East Africa, a white settler-owned newspaper firm, the Nairobi-based East African Standard Ltd, remained Reuters’ principal partner, and served a similar role as that of SAPA in South Africa, only on a smaller and regional scale. East African Standard provided round-ups of regional news to Reuters in exchange for a reduced subscription. Reuters had secured a lucrative contract with the East African Standard Group during the Second World War and successfully renewed it into the late 1950s, giving the latter exclusive distribution rights of Reuters’ material in East Africa. In turn, Standard Group correspondents could only syndicate their stories to Reuters, and not to rivals UP, AFP, or UPI.Footnote 33 Good relations with Standard Group had an important defensive element: contractual inclusion within the circle of established local reporters ensured that Reuters would rarely be ‘scooped’ by rival agencies.Footnote 34 But Standard Group newspapers were plainly sympathetic to the colonial governments, and moreover tightly identified with the strident politics of white settlers.
Thus SAPA and Standard Group, previously Reuter's institutional bulwarks in the region, became political liabilities. Commenting on this, Patrick Crosse (see below) acknowledged in 1962 that the SAPA-based Reuters feed that the Standard Group received ‘is unsuitable for Africans in an area as fiercely nationalistic as East Africa, and we shall inevitably have to produce a black man's report to replace the South African service’.Footnote 35 The uncertainty of this future moved Reuters to look for different political and economic partners both to ensure sales of its international news service and to retain access to important news within decolonizing countries.
Securing news hegemony in post-colonial East Africa: Reuters in Kenya and Tanzania
In the 1960s and 1970s, four news agencies – Reuters, AFP, AP, and UPI – dominated the collection and distribution of international news, providing over 90% of what was printed or broadcast around the world.Footnote 36 The core product of each agency was ‘spot news’, the speedy reporting of immediate news, supplemented by lengthier feature reporting. The international operations of all four news agencies were conducted, to varying degrees, on a commercial basis, though, as the historian Jonathan Fenby noted in 1986, ‘they frequently operate in ways not calculated to maximize profits’.Footnote 37 Local clients had their own leverage against the international news agencies – they either shared news or provided tip-offs that agencies relied upon to maintain their international reputations – that militated against profit-maximizing relationships. In general, the agencies’ prime concerns were the lucrative markets of North America, western Europe, and Japan, while the ‘third world’ remained at the periphery of their global news business scheme, because there they made less from news distribution. The value of the final news product, however, relied on comprehensive world news coverage. Thus, integrating the ‘third world’ news organizations such as newspapers, radio stations, and (particularly) government news agencies into each international news agency's larger network enhanced its overall value and prestige.
International news agencies’ business engagement in these ‘less remunerative regions’ was characterized by long periods of collusion, punctuated by short bursts of wasteful competition. In the 1950s, Reuters had found itself slipping behind its better-funded American rivals, and so resorted to a policy of new investment to retain its leading presence in Anglophone Africa, as well as aggressive expansion into Francophone Africa, to sustain its reputation as the leading authority over the continent. By 1972, Africa constituted 7% of Reuters’ total revenue – a small proportion but far larger than that of any of the other three agencies.Footnote 38 Finally, in the post-war world, global news remained technologically path-dependent, with ‘instant’ news flowing cheapest along long-standing telegraph lines to and from hubs in London, Paris, and New York rather than, for instance, across African or Middle Eastern borders. The old empire cable rate of a penny a word ‘still makes it cheaper to send news from former British colonies directly to London … Little news in Africa moves laterally by merely crossing the nearest border.’Footnote 39 Reuters’ headquarters in London regularly chastised bureau reporters in these ‘peripheral’ regions only loosely connected to the old imperial network for exceeding monthly cable budgets, urging shorter items of posted letter for second-order news.Footnote 40
New sovereign nation-states thus had to negotiate complex global news arrangements while simultaneously seeking recognition and legitimacy from them. Struggles over news in East Africa ran parallel to decolonization processes in the 1960s. Owing to its high visibility in the print and radio media of late-colonial British Africa, Reuters enjoyed a prestige in Anglophone Africa that well-financed newcomers from the United States and Eastern bloc could not duplicate. The Reuters name was attached to international news reporting not only in the upmarket newspapers of the regional press but also in the region's radio broadcasting. Paul Sozigwa, who served as the Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere's press secretary, as well as Director of Radio Tanzania in the 1960s, valued Reuters for its high reliability. Reuters was ‘the first place’; Tanzanian news agents ‘trusted Reuters’ (in contrast to Tanzanian politicians) to a degree that they thought that ‘whatever came from Reuters, it must be true [laughter] … you add all the colour, or whatever, or if it is about Tanzania you phone up the minister responsible and ask him … But Reuters, you trust it, I don't think there is a network so correct.’Footnote 41 Although this attitude was not universally shared, in the 1960s there was a wide sense among East African politicians and their press directors that Reuters provided something essential that other services did not. To maintain this reputation and perception of indispensability, Reuters competed vigorously at local and international levels, transforming its colonial service into a plausible ‘African’ service that few independent countries in Africa felt comfortable doing without. This marked a further step in the company's post-war regionalization of its editorial policy, in which sub-editors on regional desks ‘concentrated on selection and treatment, giving Africa a predominantly African news file’.Footnote 42 But this ‘African’ news file was also being shaped and redefined by the newly acquired powers of African nationalist politicians to negotiate contracts.
The declared goal of independent African states such as Kenya and Tanzania was to facilitate political, economic, and social development. For most governments, this meant the redeployment of late-colonial bureaucratic structures and appropriation of largely bilateral aid and loans to facilitate agricultural production, marketing, small-scale industrialization, and infrastructural improvements. In addition to these material development goals, leaders viewed news as a critical component of development and nation-building, and understood the creation of national news agencies as the most effective method to gather, distribute, and control news. Kenya and Tanzania, for instance, independent since 1961 and 1963 respectively, both subscribed to the informational developmentalist priorities famously theorized by Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm. These two American media theorists argued that mass media ‘should be harnessed to the engine of social and economic development … media becomes a tool for exhorting positive social change by encouraging and promoting development initiatives’. State media was to be development cheerleader rather than political watchdog.Footnote 43 Consequently, national news agencies were ‘typically set up in capital cities to distribute news from the international wire services to the various media which might use them’. Their purpose was ‘to cut costs, and sometimes to cut stories deemed inappropriate for the national interest’, including slanting the tone and even content of international wire service materials.Footnote 44
In this context of state-led information provisioning, Reuters wagered that negotiating first with new African leaders to obtain government contracts, rather than with independent media inside newly independent territories, would best secure their position in post-colonial Africa. The mistake of India, where Reuters had stood aloof from nationalist leaders for too long, was not to be repeated. The company's strategic premise was that ‘in order to finance the creation of a special regional service for the countries of Eastern Africa, we had to sell the service to Governments rather than to local newspapers and Radio stations’.Footnote 45 Their successful campaign to secure contracts with newly independent African states ranks among the most impressive sales triumphs conducted during Africa's decolonization. The two key figures in this campaign were Patrick Crosse, a British former war correspondent and widely admired manager, and Shahe ‘Gubby’ Guebenlian, an Armenian Cypriot of titanic energy who had joined Reuters as a reporter during the Cyprus emergency, and quickly ascended the managerial ranks to become head of the company's Middle East and Africa section in 1968.Footnote 46 Both aspired to climb to the top of the corporate ladder, though both were to be disappointed – Crosse was passed over for managing director in 1963 and soon after left the company; Guebenlian rose no further than head of the Middle East and Africa region, where he remained in the 1970s as the company decisively shifted away from general news to financial news services.
Part of the initial impetus for this scramble to distribute news in Africa, however, came not from Reuters’ Fleet Street headquarters in London but from nearby Whitehall, the heart of the British government. Since the First World War, when the Foreign Office played a key role in restructuring Reuters’ ownership to include a powerful government vote, the company had had to balance the security and revenues of state support with the need to be seen as an independent and objective news agency. In 1959, Crosse responded to a new call from the Foreign Office, which stated ‘We want more news – more Reuter news – into Africa’. Reuters replied to this government request by securing ‘a large increase in British Government and Central Office of Information subscriptions for delivery of news services to their African outlets’, which provided an indirect rather than direct government subsidy.Footnote 47 So anxious were British and American information officers to ensure that Reuters won out against communist competition that the Foreign Office had to remind its information officers ‘of the need to be extremely discreet in the way that you help Reuters, particularly so that their reputation for independence is in no way compromised’.Footnote 48 This episode brings to light how strongly Reuters was still invested as an imperial news company, on the one hand, and how effectively it managed to conceal this fact from African statesmen, on the other. In 1960, Crosse conducted a survey across sub-Saharan Africa which concluded that
extra costs of news-gathering could be recouped to some extent from the provision of an international news service specially tailored to local requirements … allowing for a major expansion of Reuters’ news-gathering staff and willingness to cooperate with and foster the development of national news agencies in a way which AP, for example, might have found inimical to its tradition of direct distribution.Footnote 49
Over five years (1960–65), Crosse and Guebenlian secured contracts with thirty-five African states, failing only to do so with Rwanda, Burundi, and Gambia among the newly independent states. Reuters policy was to work solely with governments ‘as the only sure points; and to assist the desire of most African states to establish their own national news agencies’.Footnote 50
Western news salesmen, as with other forms of expertise and capital concentrated in wealthy metropoles, had to be sensitive to the sovereign sensibilities of the new nationalist gatekeepers. According to Crosse, it was ‘mortifying for Africans that news of other African countries must reach them via white intermediaries’. Possessing an astute awareness for these local political sensitivities, however, he used them to Reuters’ advantage. He recognized that ‘the very political inspiration behind the new agency [i.e. Reuters’ new African service] may be its strength, producing a service different in spirit from the others, but one which the others will wish to buy’.Footnote 51According to Guebenlian, Crosse had done the ‘original shopping around and concluded that African statesmen wanted a tailored service to Africa, 28,000–30,000 words a day, but with their own priorities’.Footnote 52
For Reuters, supporting the development visions and political vanities of state leaders while appealing to the cultural integrity of African nations proved the surest path to securing post-colonial business. Crosse and Guebenlian were quicker than their American and French rivals to repackage news to meet African leaders’ expectations and self-conceptions. Guebenlian eagerly traded on his own Armenian identity. Vividly, he recalls an interaction with Kenya's interior minister Oginga Odinga thanking him ‘for telling [him] [he was] not English’. In the sequence of events, ‘Oginga then turned to his wife and said “look, our time has come”’. Reuters’ managers also strictly kowtowed to rules of African diplomacy in order to sell their news. Guebenlian stressed in his personal recollections of the time that African ministers did not answer letters or telegrams – ‘you had to show up face to face’. In his meeting with Hastings Banda, President of Malawi, Guebenlian further emphasized the importance of integrating Reuters’ international news service to meet nationalist aims when he appealed to his sovereign sensibilities:
‘Mr. Prime Minister, I think you are angry with us. For so many years you have been fighting as a patriot for your country. What did we do? We had to cover your country from South Africa. Once the news goes through various channels, it changes itself. But you didn't have a direct telegraphic circuit with London, so everything had to go through South Africa. Therefore, you had the right to be angry with us. But with this new opening of Cable & Wireless, the messages will go directly to London, and the time has come to have these circuits go directly to London, and receive Reuters direct from London.’ Banda said, ‘My boy, where have you been all this time.’ He said he'd like to take the Reuters service, without knowing the price.Footnote 53
Providing direct feeds to State House became a standard part of Reuters’ contracts with African governments. This special service satisfied leaders’ curiosity and sense of importance on the world stage – heads of state were regularly provided with personal teletypes to receive Reuter's unfiltered news service direct – while securing Reuters’ reputation as an indispensable world news source with the most important decision-makers. The service also facilitated mutual recognition among sovereign African leaders. A company report explained that ‘It is through the REUTER report that African countries have news of one another’, stressing that leading Africans understood that the news they received ‘is substantially the same as that available, also from REUTERS, to the leaders of every country in Africa’. Yet this network effect of interconnected recognition was also fragile – ‘were we forced to withdraw from even a small number of countries’, the report warned, ‘our whole structure in Africa would be gravely threatened’.Footnote 54
Another anchor point in Reuters’ business strategy was to integrate newly formed African national news agencies, which gathered and edited news within a given country, into Reuters’ international service. Crosse and Guebenlian made clear that they had no interest in serving as a domestic news agency, which neatly matched the desire for due recognition among the new generation of African rulers. Reuters produced six regional African services, and ensured that at least 50% of all material distributed to each service was either from the continent or directly concerned it.Footnote 55 These regional African packages were more economical in scale. By the 1970s, Reuters services to Africa by radio ran between 25,000 and 30,000 words a day, or roughly one-third of the size of subscriptions to developed countries.Footnote 56 But Reuters’ domination of international wires expressly did not mean editorial control. The journalist and historian Jonathan Fenby observed in 1980 that
The Western agencies do indeed determine most of what the national news agencies in poor nations receive but what happens to the news after that is beyond their control … National agencies can cut copy, rewrite it, or ignore it completely … They can replace the neutral terms used by the major agencies with descriptions that suit their own political outlook, substituting ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighter’ for the agencies’ ‘guerrilla’ according to their point of view.Footnote 57
Most international news agencies engaged African nation-states not merely as customers but as business partners. Reuters secured expensive contracts with poor African governments in part by convincing them that they might recoup most of their subscription costs from the internal sales of their news service. Governments were to act, in effect, as Reuters agents, but agents who carried the risks of high-cost, long-term contracts. In everyday routine, this meant that these governments purchased international news from Reuters by subscription and then distributed news to the newspapers and radio stations within the country. In 1963, Uganda and Tanganyika were the first in East Africa to sign such contracts, both for the large sum of £12,000 per year plus equipment costs, with subscription rates gradually rising over the length of the contract.Footnote 58 Reuters’ strength of reputation, tailored African service, and promise of internal subscribers were all required in Tanganyika (which in 1964 became Tanzania following union with Zanzibar) to beat off far cheaper offers from the American UPI (£2,400 p.a.) and the French AFP (£7,000 p.a., including equipment). The American AP made no offer, refusing to enter into government-based subscriptions.Footnote 59 Tanganyika's contract was signed based on an optimistic accounting of £9,000 in subscriptions from radio, newspapers, and embassies, the last of which proved unfounded.Footnote 60
As it had in other African countries such as Ghana, Reuters hoped to solidify its national subscriptions by helping to design Tanganyika's national news agency, tasked with providing a national news service to local newspapers and radio, which, the company explained, would play ‘prime roles of nation-building and creating the country's image abroad’.Footnote 61 Yet early plans about a national news agency were frozen by competing agreements: the country's ambitious foreign minister, Oscar Kambona, had signed a separate agreement with the Czechoslovak Četeka service, and the Ministry of Information had signed with Reuters to form what would some fifteen years later become Shihata, or the Tanzanian News Service. Četeka and TASS, both seeking to exert ideological influence in East Africa, followed Reuters’ strategy of dealing directly with governments rather than news organizations, and moreover ‘embellish[ed] [this approach] with ideas of their own as to how foreign news should be doctored before being distributed’.Footnote 62 As elsewhere in Africa, TASS secured their position by offering free equipment and subscriptions, and secured a coveted spot for its teleprinter newsfeed in Tanzania's state radio newsroom by late 1964.Footnote 63 The Tanganyika government at last realized a profit as a news agent by accepting free subscriptions of international news from TASS and Četeka and passing them along to the Standard, its major national newspaper, for £1,000 per annum.Footnote 64
Finally, Reuter's success in East Africa relied not only on striking lucrative contracts but also on maintaining a global reputation for accuracy through effective local reporting. In doing such effective reporting, the work and routine of agency reporters often resembled that of intelligence agents. Reuters correspondents worked diligently to develop independent networks of informants in addition to close relations with local newspapers. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital and largest city, the Reuters reporter Graham Lovell explained that he had ‘managed to establish a fairly effective collection of contacts at such places as the airport, the police departments, embassies and within government. But most of these have to be approached rather than they doing the approaching; and in all cases it is a non-remunerative arrangement because of their positions.’Footnote 65 The hidden abode of ‘remunerative arrangements’ was wrapped within payments to stringers, for Reuters reporters could not afford to be seen paying officials cash for information themselves. While many early reporters for TASS and the Chinese news agency Xinhua in East Africa were openly and unapologetically engaged in conventional espionage work, Reuters was keen to be seen to avoid such activities, to protect the agency's reputation for objectivity. Paradoxically, the ‘Africanization’ of Reuters’ full-time reporting staff in the region fell victim to local fears of espionage. Arthur Maimane, a highly skilled South African journalist who had worked on Drum before fleeing the country, lasted only four months as Reuters’ first and only African staff correspondent in Dar es Salaam, which was rapidly becoming a haven for nationalist exiles and liberation movements. He was expelled in August 1963 following ‘a spy scare that now seems to be sweeping the entire country’, on the grounds that African staff correspondents ‘are suspected of knowing too much’. When a Ghanaian replacement was suggested, Tanganyikan officials rejected the suggestion, and instead requested a European staffer be appointed.Footnote 66
The trajectory of Kenya's relationship with international news agencies was more sharply influenced by Cold War rivalries. Unlike Tanganyika, Kenya committed early to creating its own national news agency, forming it during the months before independence in December 1963. This work, carried out in secret by the minister of information, Achieng Oneko, a close ally of the leftist politician Oginga Odinga, was premised on accepting assistance from TASS and Četeka, who both delivered free teleprinters to the news agency, along with free subscriptions to their news services. The arrangement was revealed just days before independence to prevent counter-lobbying from BBC and Reuters.Footnote 67 The revelation of Communist bloc aid to something as fundamental as news provision set off alarms in Whitehall: ‘To open the door to communist infiltration into the business of disseminating news is a sinister development’, the colonial secretary, Duncan Sandys, observed, for it would be universally interpreted ‘as a reflection on Kenya's political re-orientation’.Footnote 68 The manoeuvre had escaped the attention of the (increasingly pro-British) prime minister, Jomo Kenyatta, and moved Britain to call on the United States to work in concert in order to ‘keep in discreet touch with [Kenya] Information Ministry with view to preserving as much Western influence as can be secured in rapidly changing circumstances’.Footnote 69 Objections from Cable and Wireless and the East African Posts and Telegraph, who constituted the region's communication providers, against being required to connect Soviet equipment to their networks were met with veiled threats of deportation.Footnote 70 Even more jarring was the government's simultaneous decision to cease relaying BBC news bulletins over state radio. Radio news would instead be gathered through the multi-sourced and ‘non-aligned’ Kenya News Agency (KNA).Footnote 71
The hazards of Reuters’ government-first sales policy had become plain, but there was no going back. Suddenly inserted between Reuters and the deeply distrusted East African Standard, the KNA declared itself the only official distributor of Reuters and any other news service.Footnote 72 It was a bold assertion of gatekeeper authority, designed to strengthen state control over global news at the expense of ‘imperial legacy’ organizations. Reuters’ strategy of contracting its news service directly through governments gave rise to charges from reporters in both East Africa and Britain that the company had supported state press censorship. Expatriate journalists such as the Standard reporter Eric Marsden felt that they ‘had been sold down the river by Reuters’.Footnote 73 Struggling to acquire reliable international news, the Standard pleaded for a return to the direct feed of Reuters’ South African (SAPA) service that it had enjoyed before independence. Reuters refused, explaining that to ‘feed this copy into a newspaper office in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, when African sub-editors are now beginning to be trained, would of course have led to very serious trouble’ – that is, any accusations of importing South African editorial control over Kenyan news.Footnote 74
The root of the news struggle in Kenya, however, was not primarily between white and black but rather between rival political factions within the Kenyan government playing out along the East–West frontline of the Cold War. From independence in late 1963 until the leftist Oginga Odinga's formal break with the more conservative President Kenyatta in 1966, Kenya's Ministry of Information was dominated by Odinga's ally Achieng Oneko, who, unlike Kenyatta, warmly welcomed Soviet and Chinese support.Footnote 75 The East African Standard was distraught to find that the KNA's new international news service supplied half the wordage of its Reuters predecessor, and much of it was filler on the comings and goings of African ministers. To ‘balance’ its news, KNA accepted a free subscription from TASS and distributed a daily service comprised of 50% Reuters and 50% TASS material.Footnote 76 KNA stood as a sort of ‘black box’ to repackage wire service copy around state ideological priorities, which in practice usually meant adding or changing descriptors of regional political figures, such as inserting ‘arch-traitor’ before the Congolese secessionist Moise Tshombe and ‘racist’ before the Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith. By removing all reference to Reuters in their reports, KNA circumvented the legal breeching of a clause that was specially added to all East African government contracts that prohibited government services from materially altering Reuter reports that went out under the Reuter name.Footnote 77
Larger continental patterns of international news-agency consumption and politicization prevailed in Kenya. In early 1964, TASS occupied between 15% and 30% of the KNA product, while the remainder was overwhelmingly Reuters, often deliberately anonymized, and the rest some local KNA items.Footnote 78 Reuters was content to have locked in a typically lucrative subscription service – £13,000 per year from 1964, rising £500 p.a. over five years – and looked on as the percentage of TASS items gradually declined over the following years, falling nearly to zero by mid 1966.Footnote 79 The Ministry of Information's permanent secretary, J. N. Oluoch, complained that he was being pressured to insert more Četeka service in the KNA, but he was mainly interested in the free equipment that the Russians had sent before independence to build up the agency's provincial reporting network.Footnote 80 His political rivals within the ministry who were hostile to Reuters’ effective dominance decried the fact that ‘Some of our staff have been nursed so well by the imperialists that it is not possible for them to see all the changes.’Footnote 81 Oluoch's successor, the staunch Kenyatta ally P. J. Gachathi, welcomed Reuters and more broadly challenged the ‘non-aligned’ political arrangement of the KNA from the inside, arguing that ‘there has been no clear directive as to what should be the function of Government-controlled Information media in Kenya’. This led staffers to either excessive caution or risky guessing in reporting the controversial statements made by government officials.Footnote 82 Factional competition over news did not last long. Kenyatta eventually wrestled control over the ministry back from Oneko by appointing a committee to investigate the Ministry of Information in 1965 that led to Oneko's resignation; the latter soon joined Odinga's opposition party, and later followed him to jail for political activities.Footnote 83
The Cold War often made itself felt across post-colonial Africa more through the news it generated than the news it controlled. African news sensitivities were sharpest around the principal crisis of Africa's decolonization, the collapse of the government in Congo, and the subsequent Cold War-fuelled civil wars, from 1960 to 1966. Reuters touched off a continent-wide controversy by describing Tshombe government's invading forces in the formerly colonial Belgian Stanleyville in 1964 in Eurocentric rhetoric as ‘rebels’ rather than ‘nationalists’ or freedom fighters. The KNA withheld all Reuters dispatches following the events in Stanleyville on the grounds that such reporting would damage the delicate diplomacy of President Kenyatta's attempted mediations in Congo.Footnote 84 Guebenlian investigated the matter and found that the choice of ‘rebel’ was used by local British expatriate editors who politically viewed the ‘rebels’ as working for the communist world.Footnote 85 The KNA purposely withheld all Reuters reporting on the subject, effectively ending the East African Standard's coverage, while its chief rival, the Nation, had fortunately retained a direct AP subscription that enabled it to be the only Kenya newspaper to publish on the story.
Within such a fraught climate, international news-agency copy was easily politicized. Reuters and other Western agencies were loudly and repeatedly upbraided for referring to armies that opposed Tshombe's government as ‘rebels’, reflecting the deep antipathy of previous Western support for Tshombe's efforts to detach Katanga from Congo, and their generally violent interventions in that country's tragic decolonization. Indeed, it became formal policy for Kenyan state media to describe the rebels challenging Tshombe's government ‘as ‘Nationalist forces’ in English news bulletins, and as ‘Wajeshi ya Wananchi’ (‘Army of the People’) in Swahili.Footnote 86 Yet TASS reporters proved to be similarly clumsy political operators: when a TASS item claimed that a leading Kenyan politician, Njoroge Mungai, stated his regret at having received his medical education in the United States, Mungai and other government officials furiously contested the account and denounced the distortion as ‘an affront to the African personality’, forcing an apology from the Soviet ambassador.Footnote 87 Such political alienation from dependence on news copy that seemed plainly ‘imperialist’ grew in tandem with frustration at slow economic growth and increasing technological dependence on institutions of the industrialized North, inspiring African countries to seek alternative informational arrangements from Reuters and TASS to gather and distribute international news.
Hegemony challenged: East Africa, NANAP, and NWICO in the 1970s
Reuters could accurately boast of its dominance over East Africa's print and radio media by the mid 1960s. Its Tanzania staffer reported: ‘I estimate that up to 80 percent of the Nationalist and the Standard is Reuter’, and estimated that Radio Tanzania ran seventeen Reuters items per day, compared to three from AFP.Footnote 88 Yet such dependence on news from an ex-imperial source bred resentment. The Tanzanian Nationalist attacked Western news agencies for their subtle spread of ‘pernicious propaganda’ in order to make Africans ‘the intellectual slaves of the Capitalist press’.Footnote 89 Reuters’ high subscription costs – widely known to be over twice the rate of any competitor – sharply irked African editors who wanted greater budgetary discretion. Radio relied even more heavily on the agency. By the 1970s, Radio Tanzania's external services were, according to the head of Reuters’ Dar es Salaam bureau, ‘almost exclusively Reuter, frequently the story read out as written by London headquarters, although credits only slightly less rare – a “told reuter” within the text of a story is likely to be left in, but otherwise all is anonymous’.Footnote 90 Usage of AFP or AP material had grown negligible – indeed, this Reuters’ employee recommended slipping in more ‘told reuter’ phrases within stories to take credit for radio broadcast stories, as this ‘seems to get past the eagle eye of the man whose job it is to strike Reuters name off the stories’.Footnote 91 Such anonymizing and editorializing of Reuters copy had become second nature, confirmed by Radio Tanzania's reluctance to accept Reuters’ audio service, which as an un-malleable product would be resistant to ‘the need for angling stories to make their views clear’.Footnote 92
The confluence of developing nations’ anxieties surrounding Western economic and cultural domination moved a critical mass of non-aligned state actors to develop schemes to ‘rebalance’ the content and flow of international news.Footnote 93 The mechanisms of this global North–South informational imbalance had been popularized in the 1960s by analysts such as Wilbur Schramm, who optimistically stressed the high positive correlation between levels of mass media communication and levels of economic development: expand mass media in less developed countries, Schramm suggested, and economic development would follow.Footnote 94 But UNESCO's founding principles concerning the free flow of information, analogous to the trading conceits of Bretton Woods, were now actively challenged in the post-Bretton Woods era by a new majority of ‘Global South’ members within UNESCO. This group also championed a New International Economic Order (NIEO) through UNCTAD that challenged the hegemonic role played by Western economic and financial institutions by using UN forums to wield state-based economic rights.Footnote 95 Most worrying for these ‘third world’ actors was the recent emergence of satellite communications technology and the gloomy prospect of greater Western monopolistic control.Footnote 96
At the root of this new international communications vision was an assertion of informational sovereignty – that nations had a right to speak directly to other nations rather than be mediated through global news agencies based in the West, and, by extension, the right to determine what was said about them, and the responsibility for internal news-gathering, raising Western objections about government censorship.Footnote 97 Western news agencies in particular were seen by critics as gatekeepers and agenda-setters rather than objective news organizations.Footnote 98 This harmonized well with the then-ascendant dependency theory, which located the roots of ‘third world’ poverty within long-standing international inequities in terms of trade and divisions of labour. Through a host of declarations at UNESCO and numerous international conferences, Non-Aligned Movement states announced their intent to create a ‘New International Information Order’, later rephrased as the ‘New World Information and Communication Order’ (NWICO). Led by UNESCO's polarizing secretary-general, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow (1974–86), supporters of NWICO sought to correct the Western-dominated ‘one-way flow’ of news with a ‘two-way flow of news through cooperative measures, and in particular by protecting regional news agencies’, and used the machinery and funds of UNESCO to begin enactment of these principles.Footnote 99
The most ambitious project in this vein was the launch of the Non-Aligned Press Agencies Pool (NANAP; 1975–95), which was the culmination of several international conference discussions during the 1960s and early 1970s to provided news to non-aligned member states free of ‘imperialist’ content. NANAP, a news exchange rather than a news service, was effectively operated from Belgrade by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. Beginning with only twelve members, it had expanded to eighty-three by 1981.Footnote 100 In Africa, this same critique helped to launch the UNESCO-subsidized Pan-African News Agency (PANA) at an meeting of the Organization of African Unity in 1979. PANA only became operational in 1983, and remains today a reliable if modest agency for African news.Footnote 101 But pooling enormous amounts of national agency reports raised pressing questions of editorial choice that no figures at NANAP or PANA felt confident to confront, fearing possible dissatisfaction from contributing countries’ leaders. Each member agency was left to produce its own national report. Fenby notes that ‘State sovereignty reigned supreme, reducing news exchange to a mechanistic, one-way process without much regard for the recipients.’Footnote 102 NANAP, in particular, could hardly be viewed as anything other than a mouthpiece presenting official government views on a given story, removing journalistic credibility as an approach for debate over international news.
Such criticisms annoyed the big four Western news agencies, who themselves felt financially fragile and did ‘not feel like monopolists’; they ‘neither maximize[d] profits nor manipulate[d] markets, and [were] powerless to prevent subscribers from signing up with competitors’.Footnote 103 Furthermore, neither of the two American-based agencies, AP and UPI, had made much of an impact in Africa, owing to their lack of sales knowledge and overly ‘American’ style and content, which served American audiences well but was poorly suited to African needs. Both beat a partial retreat from the continent over the 1970s and 1980s, upon concluding that operation costs would always outpace customer revenues.Footnote 104
Within Reuters, NWICO generally and NANAP in particular were viewed with some concern. Yet Guebenlian, by this time the head of Reuters’ Middle East and Africa desk, confidently allayed company fears that increasingly vocal non-aligned conferences might replace the current international news system with a genuinely NWICO one. In July 1976, following a major NWICO conference in New Delhi, Guebenlian offered his view of the motivations and limits of African actors: PANA, first mooted in 1963, was ‘the Africans’ principal desire’ – much more so than NANAP. Howeer, PANA had yet to exist beyond a series of resolutions, bedevilled by divisions between ‘black’ sub-Saharan African countries and those of North Africa, selection of a primary language, weak inter-African communications, editorial selection of news, and general lack of funds. Reuters should not be complacent and should listen to these complaints of ‘one-way flow’, he counselled, but he also highlighted the core strengths on which Reuters could still rely to secure future contracts. In African countries where state news agencies ‘processed’ raw copy from Reuters and other agencies, newspapers still sought and obtained direct feeds; heads of state and ministers were ‘even more anxious to have access to the full story’.Footnote 105 The failure of these new independent institutions to be trusted to deliver the ‘full story’ not only underlines the advantages of capital and expertise that Western news agencies wielded but also echoes the paradox of sovereignty itself: that its main significance lie in its recognition by former colonial powers. The ‘full story’, it seemed, would only come with recognition from Western reporters and editors of a given event's objective truth.
It was the rapid and regular provision of this ‘full story’, to presidents, newspapers, and radio stations on a capitalist basis, that secured Reuters’ place across East Africa as it entered the even more troubled 1980s. Such success demonstrates the greater disconnect between how UNESCO, now dominated by ‘Global South’ members, understood communications networks as fundamentally political, and news agencies’ more capitalist approach to information. Guebenlian explained that ‘Our philosophy in the past has been to counter public attacks on the role of the international agencies with quiet diplomacy and cultivation of the people who rant in public but in private cease politicking and accept realities.’Footnote 106 Reuters continued to busy itself providing free development assistance ‘to as many as thirty-four agencies on a bilateral, confidential basis’.Footnote 107 The international news business remained primarily a capitalist enterprise sustained through diplomacy.
Debates over NWICO proved paradoxically distant from the new direction that Reuters itself had come to embrace by the 1970s. Frustrated at the poor prospects to enlarge a barely profitable world news service, the managing director, Gerald Long (1963–81), opted to reorient Reuters towards computerized financial information. He struck it rich with Reuter Monitor, an instant currency-price service that seized advantage of rising demand for foreign exchange news following abandonment of Bretton Woods in 1971.Footnote 108 Success utterly transformed the company: in 1963 Reuters had an annual turnover of £3.1 million and net profits of £26,789; by 1981 its turnover was £138.8 million with profits of £16.3 million, most of it attributable to financial information services.Footnote 109 Both general international news and Africa had come to be seen by management as areas of unpromising growth. African governments struggled to pay subscriptions, while Reuters organized special debt collection campaigns to bring delinquent accounts to order.Footnote 110 In 1981 the company removed its bureau correspondent from Dar es Salaam, as Tanzania was deemed to generate too little international news. Yet both Tanzania and Kenya retained their long-standing subscriptions, increasingly falling behind on payments but unwilling to relinquish access to the pulse of the world's daily occurrences.
Conclusion
Reuters’ success in Africa was based not simply on its many technical and professional advantages but also on its willingness to take editorial decisions of prioritizing and presenting news with which newspapers, radio stations, and national news agencies could work. And this Reuters did, while not failing to flatter African leaders that their own sovereignty was bolstered, rather than corrupted, by allowing this free flow of international news at premium prices. The high costs and low returns on international news have historically pushed organizations to make cooperative arrangements to protect the supply of news from wasteful and potentially ruinous competition.Footnote 111 This dynamic was reflected in the constitutional make-up of the era's leading news agencies: AP was a cooperative; over half of AFP's budget came from French government subsidies; and Reuters operated more like a trust than a profit-hungry corporation, at least until the 1970s.
Following the rather bitter experience in India, where Reuters had been marginalized by having paid too little attention to nationalist leaders and their sensibilities, the decolonization of Africa offered the company a second chance. Decolonization had more generally offered international news agencies a unique opportunity to reincorporate African countries into communication networks whose ownership, expertise, and capital remained concentrated in the West. For decolonized states, international news, as provided by agencies such as Reuters, supplied a stage on which new African leaders were anxious to perform, participate, and be recognized by one another and the larger world. The political meaningfulness of this stage lay in its prestigious reputation for accuracy and objectivity, and particularly for its timely recognition of global developments. This could not be adequately replaced with untimely protocol accounts of the comings and goings of non-aligned leaders that would constitute the core content of NANAP and PANA news copy. African leaders and a sufficient number of their news-consuming citizenry proved willing to pay to remain on this meaningful stage.
Struggles over the provision of international news also illustrate how Cold War rivalries shaped and animated the tensions of decolonization. TASS, Xinhua, and other communist news services competed against their Western rivals across most of sub-Saharan Africa, but had undermined their own credibility by offering their services for nothing or next to nothing. As the cases of Kenya and Tanzania show, ‘Eastern’ news service offers were accepted ostensibly to create a more ‘non-aligned’ international news content for national news organizations. In practice, however, the specific decisions to accept such offers were made by factionalist politicians who sought to make use of them to gain the external favour of Cold War patrons, and thus greater leverage for internal contests among political elites
Crucially, these decisions were also made with little consideration for what were revealed to be the key constituencies for international news-agency copy: the need for global and intra-African news awareness (as well as for mutual recognition) among African leaders, followed by the needs of newspaper and radio editors and their audiences. In practice, Reuters’ more capitalist vision of news as a commercial product proved more responsive to these demands. The success of this vision would in turn help to generate its own potential rival in UNESCO's explicitly political conception of news, which ultimately proved to lack the capital capacity to provide breaking ‘spot’ international news, upon which respectable national news organizations relied. Capitalist communications companies had won the battle over news in East Africa by the mid 1970s.
James R. Brennan researches the histories of twentieth-century Tanzania and Kenya, examining themes of urban history, decolonization, media history, and the Indian Ocean World. He is author of the book Taifa: making nation and race in urban Tanzania (2012), as well as of numerous journal articles and book chapters.