National Geographic, Somalia, and Rwanda

I noticed a very interesting and troubling trend while continuing my research in National Geographic this week. 

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s the magazine was treating Sub-Saharan African more respectfully than it had in the 1970s.  The photographs of black Africans were less exotic.  More black Africans were quoted in the articles and depicted doing modern activities: going to school, working as professionals, protecting national parks.  Even articles on big game and the need to preserve them also mentioned the need to balance the needs of humans and animals, recognized that humans were part of the ecosystem.  There was even a piece by Paul Theroux, the old Peace Corps Volunteer and arch anti-romantic, returning to Malawi to find the populace generally capable and optimistic.

Then the magazine's coverage of African people (as opposed to wildlife) plunged around 1992-93.  This was evidently due to two events.  First, the killing of several American marines in Somalia; second, the genocide in Rwanda.  The magazine had offered a pretty upbeat piece on the arrival of American soldiers in Somalia.  It offered no such treatment of the bloody aftermath.  The bloodshed in Rwanda also took it by surprise.  It published two pieces in the aftermath, both of which focused on the fate of the mountain gorillas made famous by Dian Fossey rather than the stunning loss of human life.  The following month the magazine published a cover article on Jane Goodall, the famous British researcher of African chimpanzees.

I think that these choices and silences speak very loudly to Americans' unease with African tragedies.  The easy way out is to ignore them--or to focus on the continent's charismatic mega-fauna.