I
discovered that foreign editor Freedman shared Bigart’s contempt
for Africans, as became evident in his letter to Bigart dated
March 4, 1960: “This
is just a note to say hello and to tell you how much your
peerless prose from the badlands is continuing to give us
and your public. By now you must be American journalism’s
leading expert on sorcery, witchcraft, cannibalism and all
the other exotic phenomena indigenous to darkest Africa.
All this and nationalism too! Where else but in The
New York Times can you get all this for a nickel?”
Colluding
with Freedman, the foreign editor, Bigart concocted scenarios
to fulfill his and Freedman’s morbid fantasies about Africa.
For example, as independence neared for what was then Belgian
Congo, Bigart complained to Freedman in a May 29, 1960
letter from Leopoldville, which is now Kinshasa: “I
had hoped to find pygmies voting and interview them on the
meaning of independence but they were all in the woods.
I did see several lions, however, and from Usumbura
I sent a long mailer about the Watutsi giants.”
(The reference to Usumbura was to Bigart’s
stopover in what’s now known as Bujumbura, in Burundi.)
The
Belgian Congo had experienced the most bloody and brutal history
of European colonial rule and exploitation in Africa. During
the rule of King Leopold II, an estimated 10 million or more
Africans were exterminated and countless more permanently
maimed or disfigured, all in the quest for wealth. Under the
Belgians, African slave laborers, who did not deliver their
designated quota of ivory and rubber to their European masters
in the Congo, had their hands severed, in order to motivate
other slackers. Yet Bigart’s utmost concern was to find pygmies
to malign.
Having
failed to find Pygmies for his news report, Bigart employed
the next best solution – he concocted them, as evidenced by
his article, published in the
Times on June 5, 1960 under the derisive headline “Magic
of Freedom Enchants Congolese.” The article began: “As
the hour of freedom from Belgian rule nears, ‘In-de-pen-dence’
is being chanted by Congolese all over this immense land,
even by pygmies in the forest.”
“Independence
is an abstraction not easily grasped by Congolese and they
are seeking concrete interpretations,” Bigart added, before
continuing to denigrate the pygmies: “To the forest pygmy
independence means a little more salt, a little more beer.”
Was
this some sort of aberrant episode between Bigart and Freedman?
Hardly. The Times
tolerated concoctions so long as the newspaper managed to
get away with it. In the newspaper’s African coverage,
primary consideration was given to creating scenarios that
depicted barbarism and savagery. Even when Times reporters complained, editors continued to insert concocted
scenes and quotes into their articles.
Consider
the case of Lloyd M. Garrison, a descendant of the great American
abolitionist, who was the
Times’ first West African correspondent during the 1960s.
Garrison covered the Nigerian civil war but was expelled by
the military government there for alleged bias in favor of
Odumegwu Emeka Ojwuku’s Biafran secessionists. In a letter
from Nigeria dated June 5, 1967 Garrison complained bitterly
that “tribal” scenarios had been concocted and inserted into
the edited version of his story, which had been published
on May 31, 1967 in the newspaper:
“The
reference to ‘small pagan tribes dressed in leaves’ is slightly
misleading and could, because of its startling quality, give
the reader the impression there are a lot of tribes running
around half naked,” Garrison complained
about the concoction by the Times editors. He protested
the numerous use of the derogative term in his story, and
added: “Tribesmen
connote the grass leaves image. Plus tribes equals primitive,
which in a country like Nigeria just doesn’t fit, and is offensive
to African readers who know damn well what unwashed American
and European readers think when they stumble on the word.”
Garrison noted that the concoction “invites
the image of savages dancing around the fire.”
Moreover,
my research shows that the fabrications were not confined
to the 1960s. Consider the case of Joseph Lelyveld, when he
was a correspondent in South Africa twice. His early tour
of the continent during the 1960s was cut short when the apartheid
regime expelled him for suspected socialist leanings. He returned
to South Africa as the Times’
correspondent during the 1980s.
Lelyveld
once wrote a series of articles about South Africa’s segregated
education system and how it discriminated against Blacks by
denying adequate funding to their schools. Editors, who were
perhaps sympathetic to the apartheid regime, distorted the
article, prompting Lelyveld to fire off an angry letters to
the foreign editor. In one letter, dated January 6, 1983,
Lelyveld complained that “virtually all the original reporting” conducted over a one month
period had been omitted. In one story, the subject of white
control and racial hierarchy in the education system was completely
deleted, he complained. The printed version of the article
was like “a salami sandwich without the salami, just slabs of stale bread,” and
he added, “if you prefer a baseball image, the wind up without
the pitch, in other words a balk.”
When
another article was tampered with, Lelyveld sent another angry
letter to foreign editor, Craig Whitney, dated April 18, 1983:
“I wrote the following sentence: ‘the idea
of a referendum among blacks was never considered for the
obvious reason that it would be overwhelmingly defeated.’
That became: 
‘officials
made it clear that the idea of a referendum among blacks…
etc.’ To what officials did the rewrite person talk? How does
he or she know they made it clear? This exact phrase has been
written in my copy before. Officials make damn little clear
here.” Lelyveld
later wrote, “Move
Your Shadow,” a Pulitzer Prize winning book about
the corrosiveness of apartheid. He later became managing editor
of the Times in the early 1990s, and then executive editor, before retiring
in 2001. He is now the crisis-time executive editor.
While
one can understand why the Times’ publisher Arthur
Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. and the newspaper’s top editors would
prefer the public to believe that Jayson Blair’s misdeeds
are uniquely aberrant, the evidence clearly shows otherwise.
Moreover, Sulzberger and the Times’ editors can’t pretend
that they are unaware of my research.
Long
ago, on January 26, 1992, during the early stages of my research,
the Columbia Journalism
Review (CJR) which is reputed to be the bible of journalistic
integrity agreed to publish a paper I wrote on the subject
of the Times’ African coverage. CJR later backed out,
claiming some editors felt “these things happened a long time
ago.” When I read CJR’s pre-publication edited version of
my paper, it was clear that CJR editors feared the possible
reaction by editors at the Times – many writers secretly hope to end up working for the Times.
The following is what the Review’s editors had inserted into
my paper on my behalf:
“Recently, the
Times granted me access to its archives, including correspondences
from the 1950s, when the paper sent Bigart to Africa on a
temporary assignment. After studying the archival material,
I interviewed several present and former Times reporters.
The following excerpts from that material and from lengthy
interviews are not intended as an indictment of the Times
– whose African coverage has occasionally been distinguished
– but as a means of highlighting a problem that all news organizations
need to address.”
So
I did the CJR editors a favor and sent a copy of my paper
to Times publisher,
Sulzberger, Jr. Eventually, I received a letter from Joseph
Lelyveld, who at the time was the Times’ managing editor, on behalf of Sulzberger.
Lelyveld agreed that my research had unearthed articles with
“crude and ugly” language. However, there was no offer to
publish a correction and later when I proposed to publish
an article in the Times to shed light on the ugly episode
the paper’s editors did not respond.
Finally,
in February this year, I published a book, “The
Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image
of Africa,”
(Black Star Books,
ISBN 0974003905) which details western newspapers' history
of demonization of Africans as well as the Times concoctions
and fabrications.
In
March, I sent copies to Sulzberger and to other Times
editors, before Jayson Blair’s concoctions burst into the
limelight. I have yet to receive any response from the Times
or any offer of publishing an apology for the wrongs that
were perpetuated against Africa. Until that occurs, all the
genuflections regarding Blair’s cheating could be construed
as a public relations campaign and the newspaper’s motto of
“All The News That’s Fit to Print,” will ring hollow.
Milton
Allimadi, a former Times stringer, publishes The Black Star
News, a weekly newspaper in New York City. His e-Mail address
is [email protected].
“The
Hearts of Darkness, How White Writers Created The Racist Image
of Africa,” is available through, www.amazon.com,
www.justbookz.com,
www.theheartsofdarkness.com,
St. Marks Bookstore in the West Village and Hue Man Books
in Harlem.
