Where to go next
The book ends by arguing that the frame is already being broken, in newsrooms in Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg and in work that never reaches a Western front page. This is a starting map of that work — plus the archives, funds and tools a student or researcher will actually need.
Publications doing it differently
Pan-African and independent outlets whose framing does not begin in London or Paris.
The Continent
A pan-African weekly designed to be shared on WhatsApp, edited from Johannesburg. Free.
thecontinent.org →The Elephant
Kenyan long-form journalism and political analysis, with a strong line in media criticism.
theelephant.info →Africa Is a Country
The site whose name is a joke about exactly this problem. Essays on politics, culture and representation.
africasacountry.com →African Arguments
Analysis by researchers and journalists based on the continent, run by the Royal African Society.
africanarguments.org →Patrick Gathara
The most consistent living practitioner of meta-journalism on Africa: reporting on how the reporting is done.
Columns at Al Jazeera →Congo Research Group
Founded by Jason Stearns and based at NYU's Center on International Cooperation. Rigorous, sourced work on the eastern DRC and the armed group landscape.
congoresearchgroup.org →Seven things worth your evening
How to Write About Africa
Binyavanga Wainaina, Granta 92, 2005. Four pages of satire that did more damage to the colonial playbook than most academic careers. The book opens with it; start there.
The Danger of a Single Story
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, TEDGlobal 2009. Nineteen minutes. The clearest available statement of why representation is not a soft subject.
The Congo Tribunal
Milo Rau, 2017. A staged public tribunal in eastern Congo in which Congolese witnesses, officials
and warlords testify. It passes the microphone and follows the money.
thecongotribunal.com
An Image of Africa
Chinua Achebe, 1977. The essay that named what Heart of Darkness does. Still the sharpest twelve pages on Conrad ever written.
King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild, 1998. The history without which no coverage of the Congo makes sense — and which almost none of the coverage in the corpus mentions.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters
Jason Stearns, 2011. The Second Congo War told as politics, with named actors and traceable decisions. The counter-example to the entire corpus.
Orientalism
Edward Said, 1978. The book that made it possible to study representation as a form of power. Read the introduction at minimum; it is the intellectual foundation of everything on this page.
Archives, data and funding
The practical infrastructure for doing this kind of work yourself.
Press archives
The Economist Historical Archive and Europresse / Factiva are the standard routes to a corpus like this one; most university libraries hold at least one. Le Point's archive is accessible through Europresse. Build your corpus by date range and keyword, then read everything — sampling hides exactly the patterns you are looking for.
UN documentation
The UN Digital Library holds Security Council resolutions, panel-of-experts reports and MONUC/MONUSCO records — including S/2002/1146, the report on illegal resource exploitation that names 85 companies.
Human rights reporting
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Rescue Committee published the mortality and resource studies that the press coverage largely did not use.
Reporting grants
The Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Journalism Fund and similar programmes fund collaborative teams of local and international reporters — the structural fix the book's final chapter argues for.
Method handbooks
For a first corpus study: Entman (2004) for the coding categories, Fairclough (1995) for the linguistic apparatus, and Krippendorff's Content Analysis for intercoder reliability if you are working in a team.
This project's own materials
The 2009 thesis, the full corpus list and the seminar outline are all downloadable from the research page. Cite them, replicate them, or show where they are wrong.
Something missing?
This list is partial by definition and will keep growing. If you publish, teach or fund work that belongs here, send it.