Decolonise How? | How to change reporting

Patrick Gathara

Welcome to Decolonise How? A podcast that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises.

 

Jess Crombie

Really, what we're talking about is about acknowledging power and making efforts to undermine existing power structures.

 

Gathara

My name is Patrick Gathara and I’m an editor at The New Humanitarian. We’ve spent years diagnosing what’s wrong with humanitarian storytelling.

 

Crombie

The bigger stuff around narrative, and the recognition of the impact that narrative has in the world, that is not being tackled as it should be.

 

Gathara

We’ve named extractive narratives. We’ve critiqued the politics of pity. We’ve exposed how suffering is simplified, decontextualised, and even sometimes commodified.

 

But there’s a harder question: What does it actually take to change how crises are spoken about in newsrooms and humanitarian organisations? How can we build systems and processes that centre impacted communities?

 

Chika Oduah

We need the boldness and the self-awareness. We have to fuel the space. We have to really saturate the space with our desires, our needs. You know, too often, we're just, we keep silent. 

 

Gathara

Joining me today are two people who approach this challenge from deeply different but connected angles.

 

Jess Crombie is a leading voice in ethical humanitarian storytelling. Her research, The People in the Pictures, was the first major study to actually go back and ask people featured in humanitarian communications what they thought about how their stories were told. She has developed the contributor-centred storytelling methodology, and has worked with the Bond Ethical Storytelling Working Group to push for sector-wide change.

 

Chika Oduah is a journalist, editor, and founder of Zikora Media and Arts, building alternative media infrastructure in Africa and challenging dominant frameworks for how African stories are told.

 

Together, we want to explore not just what needs to change – but how change might actually happen. Chika, you've worked as a journalist. You've covered crisis. In 2014, you were the first international journalist to actually spend a lot of time covering the incident in Chibok, Nigeria, where around 300 girls were abducted by Boko Haram. Could you talk us through that story, and the challenges you faced reporting it for international media? Did you find they were focused on the story you wanted to tell, or did they want you to tell a different one?

 

Oduah 

That's a good question. The 2014 Chibok kidnapping was unprecedented in Nigeria. Of course, Boko Haram had been kidnapping students previously, but that Chibok kidnapping was the biggest. So, a mass abduction that Nigeria - that the world - had never seen before. At that time, I was contacted by a major British publication, and at the time, I realised that all of the reporting about the Chibok kidnapping had been done by reporters who had not visited Chibok. The stories were coming from Abuja, from Lagos, from Nairobi, from London, from New York, Washington, D.C., Paris. No one had gone to Chibok at that time. So, I told the editor, let me go to Chibok. Let me go on the ground and see what's happening to actually see the faces of the parents. It's very much part of my principles as a journalist to go meet people. I don't like the idea of asking people to come out to meet me. I'm very much against this, so I try as much as possible to meet them in their houses. I am supposed to be the one inconvenienced, not the person I'm talking to. The editor was aware that no other journalist had gone to Chibok at that time, and asked me: is it safe? Of course, it's not safe. I mean... 

 

Gathara  

People have just been kidnapped…

 

Oduah 

It's not safe. Yeah, people had just been kidnapped, and they're still in the area. But I appreciated her concern very much, and she told me to check in with her every three hours, and I did that. This editor allowed me to write the story that I wanted to tell. I wanted to bring a human face to this kidnapping. I really wanted to focus on how the town was mourning this huge loss of 276 girls. I wanted to introduce Chibok to the world. Because even in Nigeria, Chibok is a remote…no one has heard of Chibok, so I wanted to tell Nigerians, this happened. This is what they look like. This is their history. So, I did put in some historical context into the story to talk about what Chibok is like. You know, the ethnic makeup of Chibok. I really like to put those anthropological elements in my story, and this editor allowed me to do that. And I do think that there's a difference between the way the Europeans report, well, let me say the Brits have this colonial history, there is a familiarity that the Brits have of many parts of the world, so Africa, Asia, South America, the Caribbeans, there is a bit of a familiarity, but the advantage is that they do welcome nuance. They want to learn something new sometimes, whereas America's relationship with the wider world, it's a newer relationship. They're not quite familiar, and they just need the basics. They're like, okay, don't complicate it too much. We're just now learning that there's a country called Angola, so just give us the basics and we will learn. It's just like spoonfeeding the information. Don't put too much complexity or nuance. They're just learning about the world. That’s really the difference. So, I appreciated her British sentiments to say, yeah, go ahead, go in depth with this. It might not have been the same if I was reporting for an American publication.

 

Gathara  

Would you say there was a difference between how that story was covered by Nigerian press and by international press? Of course, I understand that there are differences when we say international press, whether it's British, it's American, it's Japanese, they all kind of take different angles. But in general, would you say that there is a difference between how local media covers humanitarian crises and how international media does?

 

Oduah  

There's a lot of nuance in that. Sure, Nigerians report on it from more of a local angle. But even with the way Nigerians cover things, sometimes there is context lacking, because the stories are being reported from people so far away. Most of the journalists in Nigeria are based in Lagos and for Lagosians, northern Nigeria is another planet, so even they don't always have the context. But yes, there very much is a difference. You do find that the Europeans, they really want to focus on: the terrorists, the terrorists, the terrorists, the terrorists. Who are they? Who are they? Who are they? Whereas the Nigerians are mostly focused on: well, where is the government? The local government. They failed. Why did they let this happen? So, the blame is really on the local government. 

 

Gathara  

Jess Crombie, in your People in the Pictures research, you went back to people who had been featured in humanitarian communications, and asked them about their experience. Could you speak a little bit about what that was, and what did people say about how it felt to have their stories told by others?

 

Crombie  

So yeah, we went back to just over 200 people who had featured in Save the Children's communications and fundraising materials, specifically. They were people who lived in Niger, in the UK, in Jordan, who were refugees from Syria, and in Bangladesh. There were a lot of conversations at Save the Children at that time about whether or not it was okay to show people in certain ways, and I felt like a big missing part of that argument was actually the people in those stories themselves. So, we asked them about three different areas. Firstly, was their motivation. Why did they choose to share their story with Save the Children? Secondly, was the process. How did they find that? And thirdly, was the way they were portrayed in the final materials, and they were a mixture of children, women and men. Largely, people shared their stories because they were either wanting to have some kind of control over how that story was told, and they felt that by sharing their story, maybe they would be able to input into that narrative, or because they were desperate, and they felt that by sharing their story, they might be able to be more helped in some way. And, you know, that's not a comfortable finding, but that's a really important thing to be able to prove, because it's not often acknowledged, I think. Secondly, around process, people were generally quite happy with how it was. People were nice to them. They were friendly. It wasn't a problem. But, even though everyone had signed a consent form, nobody remembered that they had signed a consent form, and that wasn't because they didn't understand what a consent form was. It's because nobody had spent the time really explaining to them what consent is. It's not because Save the Children are rubbish at doing that, because actually I think they're quite good at doing it now. It's because, across the sector, we don't spend the kind of time that's needed to really explain to someone what is they getting involved with. And then around portrayal, people essentially said: I don't want you to not show times when I was suffering, when things were bad, that's why this story is being told. But A, I don't want that to be the only thing that's told about me as it currently is. And B, I want to be making the decisions about how that story gets told. It was a really interesting piece of research. I mean, to be honest, they weren't things I didn't know, but it was great to be able to prove them. 

 

Gathara  

Was there anything that you particularly found surprising, and especially around when communicators imagine they're being ethical, and perhaps it doesn't appear that way to the people who they're actually speaking about?

 

Crombie  

Yeah. There were two elements to the surprisingness, right. So, there were things that I had been involved in, had thought we were doing quite well around the process, that we really weren't doing very well around at all. So, the consent process that I talked about, I was the director of that department, so I had been in charge of enacting that, and I thought we had done it quite well in that we spent an hour really explaining the form. But it turns out, because we didn't show examples, and we didn't really bring it to life, and we didn't talk about the kind of implications of sharing your story, it didn't stick. But on the other side, I really thought that people would look at things like direct response television ads - you know, those one-and-a-half minute long TV ads, which are rightly criticised often - I thought people would look at that and be like: I absolutely hate this. I don't want this there. But actually no one said that. What they said was: yes, that is a true reflection of that thing that happened. But why is that the only thing you're saying about this situation? So, that was surprising, and useful.

 

Gathara

Jess, let's talk a bit about, you've developed the contributor-centred storytelling methodology. For listeners who haven't heard of it, what is it, and what does it actually change in practice?

 

Crombie  

Yeah, so People in the Pictures is nearly ten years old now. I then went away and thought, what do we have to do about this practically? And obviously, as a person who's worked in the humanitarian sector for a couple of decades, I'm really cognizant of the practical challenges, both structural, cultural, logistical, that exist. And so, in a nutshell, what the methodology is, is recognising that there are three sets of people involved in storytelling processes, and that they all have technical expertise that they're bringing to it, and then allowing each group to have equal amounts of say in how the story is told and what story is told. And those three groups are people who have technical expertise around audio-visual or storytelling: journalists, writers, photographers, filmmakers; people who have technical expertise around the audiences and the channels: that might be fundraisers or communicators; and people who have technical expertise around the situation that is happening there: so that's people who are living in that situation and experiencing it every day. But really, what it asks people to do is to come at the storytelling process from a different perspective, and to recognise that just because you are a professional communicator in some way, you don't have more ability or right to share what's going on there than anyone else. And actually what you need is to bring together these three bits - I have this triangle that I use when I'm explaining this to people - these three bits, and then what you get are stories which have more integrity, are truer to the situation that's going on there, and often more powerful. It's a practical way of enacting change within an imperfect system, I think is probably the best way of describing it. I was in Lebanon last November, and obviously they are still in an ongoing conflict with Israel. And so, I was working with people who've been displaced from south of Lebanon into the capital, and were living as IDPs - as they get called by the media and by the sector, but - as people who are displaced from their homes, and so living in less than the perfect scenarios. People have to say they want to be a part of this, so there's ten women volunteered to be a part of it. They were part of a community group, and we spent five days together working on developing stories. Most of that time was spent really talking through: what do we want to say to the outside world, or what channels is this going to be communicated on? Who are the audiences going to be? What are the implications going to be for you and for your broader community, and for Lebanon government policy. And therefore, what do you want to say? What do you not want to say? How can we say that in a way that is going to safeguard you, but also tell a really engaging story? You're knowledge sharing, right, in a way that often doesn't happen. So, you know, if you brought in a professional creative partner, like a filmmaker, for example, or a journalist, you'd say all that information. But when you're working with people who have lived experience, very commonly, that information is not shared, and therefore people have slightly less power because they have slightly less knowledge. The women decided they wanted to make three short films, and when it went into the edit, the women were then facilitated to input in throughout the editing process on all of the content that was made. And then there's an ongoing dialogue about who it's going to? Are you still sure that you're happy with this? Because you're working with people who, their lived experience is shifting and changing because they are in an unstable situation. And so they might say: you know what, actually, six months ago, that was fine, but now I don't want that bit of that story in there. Or can you, you know, actually hide the identity of that person who's in the film, because this situation's changed, or actually, I just don't want that being shown anymore, and so you can take it away, but what you end up with is really great stories, I have to say, because people are so invested in them. And you get all - like you were talking, Chika, about context - that is super rich in this content, because everyone's able to talk about what's actually happening, but what you also end up with are people who are properly involved in decision-making, in the process.

 

Gathara  

Chika, I was wondering what you made of this methodology, and especially this idea of essentially communities curating the stories that are told about them in crisis, that kind of flips the narrative, or flips normally how journalism works, isn't it? You go in, tell a story that you find interesting, not necessarily what those people want told about them?

 

Oduah  

Exactly. I think that it turns on the head this colonial legacy that journalism is still rooted in, and the way we practice journalism. The way it's practised mainstream, where it is people from the Western world dictate the way the stories are supposed to be told, dictate the representations of people from the Global South. It's very much a colonial legacy, and even the way people from the Global South respond when being interviewed. There is a power dynamic. And I know that a lot of journalists from the Global North or higher income economies like to pretend it doesn't exist, but it does exist. It's very much there. There's always a power dynamic when someone who is coming from a place that you deem to be much more privileged is asking you questions, and you're compelled to respond, you know, I really feel like we need to flatten the power dynamics, and the way to do that is, increasingly, to get people who come from those places to be the one doing these interviews. We've got to get more journalists coming from the Global South, and I say that with a lot of experience having interacted with people who still have this view of colonial masters. I live here in Senegal, and it's still very strong. When a French person is asking a Senegalese person a question, even if that Senegalese person is of a certain age - is an elder - the way they respond as if they're a little boy in a classroom, you know, with a submissive body language. It's there, it's there, and it affects everything we do as journalists. And I really feel like we need to flip this on its head. And the way to do that is to have these sometimes uncomfortable conversations, I say uncomfortable, because for certain parties, they are uncomfortable. As long as the majority of journalists reporting in the Global South are from higher income economies, there's going to be a problem.

 

Crombie  

Chika, I feel like I spend my life having uncomfortable conversations, and one of the things that I'm really aware of is that one of the reasons that a lot of the people in the humanitarian sector in the UK, and the US, and Europe, who I work with are comfortable with working with me is partly because I'm a white woman from Britain, right? And so, they can admit these uncomfortable things they're thinking about to me in a way that they might not want to to someone else. But also, when I am involved in that storytelling process - and I should say that the way that I work is by doing, like initial training with organisations and then giving them the process and saying, like: run this without me. It shouldn't be that someone like me is flying in from somewhere to do this. That's kind of the antithesis of this whole piece of work, but you have to explicitly name those power dynamics. So, part of this process is to say, in the room: right, we're a team, what power dynamics are going on here? You know, who is freely able to leave this country? Who has a home they can go back to? Who has multiple languages? So, you're naming all those power dynamics, not to try and make some people feel bad, which I think is the fear, right? If we name it, then that will make people feel bad. No, they already see it. They're living it. They recognise it right now, by naming it, you say that you see it too, and you're able to have a more open dialogue. So, I love the way you describe those uncomfortable conversations. 

 

Oduah  

That's very interesting. I think you're absolutely right that there are some people, let me say, from Africa, who would feel more comfortable speaking to you rather than someone from their country. Nigeria is a highly divided country. It's not a unified country at all. Ethnic politics is very strong. So me, coming from the southern part of Nigeria, reporting in the north, there still will be some suspicions. This lady is from the south. She's from the Igbo ethnic group. Can we talk to her? They may feel more comfortable with someone like you. However, I feel it's less problematic to have someone, like a Kenyan journalist asking these questions…

 

Crombie  

Yeah, I agree. I agree entirely.

 

Oduah 

Yeah, even if it's not Nigerian, it's still an African journalist where there's less of that baggage, that colonial baggage, it's not there.

 

Crombie

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. 

 

Gathara  

Here's an interesting thing I'm finding. It seems to me, Jess, that you built this methodology, essentially, to be used by humanitarian organisations in their communications. Chika is talking about being a journalist, which a lot of times we have sort of imagined that these are two different fields, doing two different things. Do you think that there is applicability across this sector, so that people who are dealing in communicating about humanitarian crises, be they journalists, be they academics or humanitarian agencies, that there's something they can pick from this methodology that would then inform how they do their work?

 

Crombie  

I mean, honestly, what Chika is describing in her process is completely aligned with this methodology, right? Because really, what we're talking about is about acknowledging power, and making efforts to undermine existing power structures. When I have worked with journalists and media organisations with this methodology, the biggest blocker is around a kind of culture of understanding what journalism is. And so, what I come up against a lot is people saying: oh, but if you work in this way, it won't be accurate. And it's really interesting, right? Because, like you're saying Chika, the idea of what accuracy is comes from a colonial idea that some people have more ability to spot the truth than other people, or that somehow, if you have an objective - and you can't see me using air quotes on the podcast, but I'm using them hard - you know, the idea that objective truth actually exists when we know it doesn't. So, the idea of accuracy and integrity have become intertwined. And I think you can have integrity in your storytelling, and you can be accurate in your storytelling, but you can also be doing that by listening, as well as telling. That's what this process is asking you to do as a journalist, and not listen so you can edit, but listen, so you can be influenced. It asks journalists to undermine something which they hold very dear. And that's a difficult thing to do. 

 

Oduah  

Can I jump in, Patrick, because journalism goes against many tenets in African cultures. First of all, in many African societies, you don't question authority. There are channels to do that, you maybe have a council of elders. But journalism, you have an individual coming up to a president, a mayor, a governor, asking questions of accountability, it goes against many of our cultures. And this is why even sometimes African journalists struggle to really practice journalism in the way that Westerners want it to be practised - things like questioning. It's very tricky for many Africans to do this. You have to tread lightly and walk on ice, because if you do question, you'll be accused of being Western. You know, you're not being a proper African woman. Where are your manners? How can you come to the President and ask these questions? I'm in the process of coming up with a curriculum where we Africanise journalism. We do it within the context that we understand. It's still respectful, because you have to be respectful in both manners. You know, I have a job to do, but I don't want to be throwing away or stepping upon the principles of the culture I grew up in. Questions are very sensitive in many African cultures, and we don't want to seem as if we're completely walking away from the way we grew up. And I think we have to think about this. We haven't done that yet.

 

Gathara

One of the things I find interesting Chika in what you're doing, especially with your work with Zikora Media, is this sort of cultural approach to it, and I like to think about the ethics that underlie that, so that we've been sort of conditioned to think of journalism as this universal thing that, you know, truth-telling, objectivity, this idea of telling the story from nowhere. You know, you're sort of an inert player and just an observer, do you think that we need when you say ‘Africanise journalism,’ are you talking about changing the ethical basis on which journalism is run, and what does that actually look like, especially if you could refer to what Zikora does. It's described itself as a media company and cultural institution with a mission to show the world what it means to be unapologetically African. So, what does that mean in the context of this discussion about ethics and culture?

 

Oduah 

Yes, Africanising journalism means to write our own code of ethics. This means we have to sit down and think, as media practitioners, what does it look like. We want to organise symposiums where we sit and talk about these things. We need to theorise this. It has not been done before. For example, can African journalists get involved with the change that they want to see in their communities? We've been taught not to do that. You just write about it and let the systems take effect. But what if the systems are not working? What if, you know, the judges are getting paid bribes? So, we need to figure out what exactly does it mean. Because the journalist is a totally new concept in many African societies. In this part of West Africa: Senegal, Gambia, Mali, they have something called the griot. And the griot is the cultural historian. The griot is the bard. The griot knows the history of all the communities, and when asked to recite history, the griot can do that off head. Is that journalism? Kind of. It's still not, you know, questioning leaders, but it is giving a historical record. So, the way we practice journalism, it's totally foreign, which is not a bad thing. We have to make sure that people understand that this is for the public good, and that's why I say we need to sit down and come up with a code of ethics, how we practice journalism as Africans.

 

Patrick Gathara 

I have an almost congenital reaction to the idea of Western journalism being the default journalism. I think there are many different journalistic traditions around. People in Africa used to have ways of passing on the news and understanding what's happening in their localities, in their regions, and what the politics of that were, without necessarily resorting to the sort of models of journalism that come out of places like the U.S. in the 1920s you know, and this effort to try and turn news into a product, into something that could be sold. That's why they come up with all these things of objectivity and whatever so it could sell it to a wider audience. But, Chika, you’re not working within existing mainstream institutions, you've set up your own thing, you know, and sort of pushing change through that. I guess my question would be, is that what will be impactful, or are you trying to influence as well how mainstream organisations report? And if you are, how are you doing that?

 

Oduah

I did walk away from the mainstream outlets after just being fed up, you know, with them and I never thought I would have my own media platform. It just became necessary, and I saw that I need to be part of being a solution - if I could use the word a solution - I do feel like Africans, we need to own the media. It comes down to who owns the media. It's always about ownership. And then, of course, when we talk about ownership, we're talking about economics, and unfortunately, we don't always have the benefits of that. We're still relying on the grants that trickle down from a particular part of the world. But I do feel that as Africans, as storytellers, or Global South, we do need a self-awareness one, and two, boldness. The boldness is still lacking. Why? Because of that position of submission that many of us still walk around with. Our body language is still quite submissive. When we look at fixers, producers, and the way they submit to these people, it's really - and I can speak this way because I was raised in the U.S., so I have this fierceness that many people are like: you must be American, because you guys are so militant. And I wish I could inject some of this militancy into people on the continent. We need it. There's no reason why you should be calling the correspondent a master. I've seen that. You know, I've been to newsrooms where the reporters who are coming in from Europe and the U.S. get paid overtime for working less hours than the locally-based reporters, and the locally-based reporters, I'm like: say something. No, we don't want to lose our jobs. We're just happy that we have jobs, you know. So, this posture of gratitude and submission, we've got to do away with it. And to do that, we need to be bold, and we need to be self-aware. 

 

Gathara  

Are you dealing with journalists as individuals, or within the context of them working within the mainstream system or mainstream organisations, and how they interact with that, so how they bring that boldness that you're talking about into the interactions within a system that pretty much is not designed to accommodate that boldness?

 

Oduah  

Yeah, it's not designed to accommodate them. I really got on the nerves of my editors, because I was always pushing back. When I was in the U.S., and I was always pitching just to report on African-Americans, and an editor said: you can't always report on Black people, Chika, I'm like: but why not? Why not? And you have to be willing to be that person who's always pushing back. I do feel the best way for us to have an effect with Zikora is to work with journalists individually, and some of them are independent reporters. Some are coming from these mainstream outlets. Some are reporting for the national dailies, things like this. That's fine, whatever space you find yourself in, we do bring them through our training and inject boldness in them. And injecting boldness, what it takes is like, when you read history, there's no way you're not going to have this righteous anger. You need to know history, and know that the history is still repeating itself, unless people stand up to say something. And so, in that aspect, journalists, we do need to be cultural vanguards. We need to do this for the good of our countries that gave birth to us. That's why we're doing this. I'm not here to serve the West. I'm here to serve Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, that's my priority. As Trump can say boldly, American First. we need to say Africa First.

 

Gathara  

Right, I think I love that. Jess, where do you stand on this idea of all these communications essentially being cultural productions, and what would that mean for methodologies such as yours, that seem to me to be designed to be spread across these different spaces? Should they change as they go there, or is there a way of integrating other learnings, other experiences into this methodology so that it becomes more universal?

 

Crombie  

I think storytelling shouldn't have one form. It never has had one form, and so I don't think journalism has to be the same across every - obviously, we have a very dominant form of journalism from my part of the world right now - but that shouldn't be the only form of journalism. I think the thing though, that could happen more broadly is a mindset shift, which is that if you work in partnership with people, you don't compromise truth, because there was no truth anyway. There was only interpretation. And so, there's a big shift in understanding that needs to happen across the storytelling community, to give it that terminology, you know, across all these different spaces we're talking about around that. The methodology that I've designed is definitely not fixed. So, different parts of the world will have different ways of engaging with how storytelling happens, what bits they want to focus on. So yeah, it's easy to write a process, it's really hard to actually try and shift a cultural understanding of what is the right way to do a thing. And I don't work a lot with the media around that, but I work a lot with the humanitarian sector, that's really what my work is trying to do, is ask that question over and over again around: who has the right to do this, and why do you think you have the right more than anyone else? And that's a tough question to grapple with, but really important, I think.

 

Gathara  

We've seen, especially in the humanitarian space, there's been lots of talk about changing things, but it seems to stay many times as just talk. If you were to look forward and ask, you know, what we would change? What would you think is the main obstacle to that, and how would you go about addressing it? 

 

Crombie  

So, I think what has changed in the last five, eight years internally has been the processes by which people work. What hasn't shifted is the bigger understanding of what it is to have impact, and that is the biggest blocker in my mind. So, at the moment, the way impact is measured is in terms of how many people have engaged with this? How many people have given money? Have we made a policy shift in the UK? What we don't measure in terms of impact are the longer term issues around what is this narrative doing to this part of the world in terms of global, local understanding of that part of the world? What is it doing to the audiences you're talking to, in terms of their understanding, and therefore how likely they are, or unlikely they are, to think equitably about those people, and then take big actions, like how they vote, you know, where they invest their money, whatever. That's what the humanitarian sector does not grapple with at all right now, and sees itself almost as absolved from responsibility around, because it's a sector that, for again, to use air quotes, does good. And until you have an acknowledgement that you can simultaneously do harm and do good, that's not going to change.

 

Gathara 

But what does change look like to you? So, if there is - I don't know - three things that could shift tomorrow in how crises are reported and communicated, what would those be? 

 

Crombie  

Yeah, top three things. There's so many things.

 

Gathara 

It's a bit of an unfair question, I know.

 

Crombie  

So, one of the things that I think about a lot is about less stories told with more depth, nuance and complexity. So, I would really like to see that. I think we don't need as many stories as we have in the world. What we need are stories which do a better job in communicating what's going on there. I would like to see, finally putting to sleep - gently, maybe, boldly, maybe not - of the idea of objective truth in storytelling, because you see it a lot in journalism, but you see it a lot in the humanitarian sector as well. As long as you have that, then you have a colonial mindset. That’s the bottom line. And then, I would like to see a recognition that stories add up to narratives, and narratives have a real power in terms of shaping global flows of power across the world. So, just those three small things, that would be great.

 

Gathara 

Chika, what would be your top three? 

 

Oduah  

I would say gender mainstreamising. So, I want to see more women's voices in stories. I want to see women featured as experts, as specialists, as people of concern. We often don't, if you do just an assessment of the media, the percentage of women featured is quite low. So, I want to see more women: TV, radio, all platforms. I think that's very important. Secondly, I do want to see, whether it's crisis reporting or whether it's more long-term reporting, I do want to see the majority of those reporters as Africans, or people from that region, so if you're in South America, if you're in Asia, I do want to see people from those regions there - doesn't have to be from the country, but just from the regions, because even having that regional understanding, that regional similarity, it does mean a lot. So, when we talk about fly in, fly out, if you're flying in from Nairobi to South Africa, I'm not gonna be mad at you. That's fine with me, but I do want to see people from the regions there, the majority. Secondly, when it comes to training, I believe at this point there are a lot of credible, authentic, veteran journalists from these regions - regions meaning the Global South or low income economies - who have the credibility to teach. The teachers do not always need to come from Europe and North America. Too often they're still the ones teaching and leading workshops, things like this. I want to see this change, and for that to happen, you need to engage with these veteran reporters. I would like to see more collaboration between journalists and academics, because academics do have that amazing context, I think we all need. That context needs to be there. I actually think that - I'm going to say the opposite of Jess - I think that we don't have enough stories. Because if you watch the news for the whole day, it's the same five stories of a news cycle. It's the same five - again, you know? They're just recycling. So, I'm like, is this all that is happening in the entire planet, these five stories, you know? So, I want to see more, because there's more, and it's about redefining what is news, what should be on the news agenda? 

 

Gathara   

Time has just flowed. It's really been a fantastic discussion. Jess Crombie, Chika Oduah, thank you for being on Decolonise How? 

 

Oduah

A pleasure.

Crombie

Thank you. 

 

Gathara 

Thank you for listening to Decolonise How? a podcast from The New Humanitarian that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises.

 

This episode was produced and edited by Freddie Boswell and Levi Sharpe.

 

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I’m Patrick Gathara. Thanks for listening.