Gambitzero
The Hispanic community, feminists and liberals are up in arms in the United States against a cartoon that appeared last week in a conservative newspaper, The Oklahoman. The cartoon is about President Barack Obama’s US Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, a Latino judge of Puerto Rican descent. The cartoonist, Chip Bok, is the target of many who accuse him of unfairly targeting Judge Sotomayor’s Latino background. Many of Bok’s critics accused him of disrespect and insensitivity.
As Churchill said, a joke is a very serious thing. When asked by reporters to react to the accusation, Bok shot back that A cartoon is disrespectful, it is insensitive. That’s what we do. We’re not in the business of carrying out socially responsible dictates. That’s somebody else’s job. That’s not my job. Whether you approve of Bok’s conservative take on the Sotomayor case, as evident in the cartoon – or not, you cannot fault the essence of cartooning which he articulated in a radical way. The English novelist and essayist, George Orwell, had insisted that whatever is funny is subversive. For the famed polemicist, one shouldn’t care if no one is laughing. The author of the world famous anti-totalitarianism and anti-dictatorship novels, Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, elaborated further that the aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
Nigerian journalism has had its age of glory in cartooning. In the 1970s and 1980s, the cartoon in the Nigerian newspaper was one of the most compelling sections of the newspaper. No newspaper was complete without its famous cartoon, many of which said more important things that even the editorials. A few of the cartoonists were even the subject of attention in a famous edition of TIME magazine on political cartooning. But the Nigerian political cartoon, like other aspects of newspapering, declined with the SAP years. These days, there is hardly anything compelling about the political cartoons that appear in Nigerian newspapers. Occasionally, you might enjoy a flash of genius, but the regular brilliance that dominated the op-ed pages of the Nigerian newspaper is now history. Leadership’s re-christened Nigeria Must Go (ex-Ghana Must Go) constantly insults and inveighs against those the cartoonist considers guilty of malfeasance in the Nigerian story, but even where this sometimes invite malicious enjoyment, it hardly ever matches, in its art or words, the genius of masters past.
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Which brings us to the contemporary Nigerian journalist and the business of interviewing. Recently, Solana Olumhense in his Guardian column raised the absence of the tradition of follow up in Nigerian journalism. Critical issues arise or are raised, and after a few days, everyone forgets about it. It is almost criminal for journalists to be implicated in this, because one of the sacred duties of the journalist is to struggle against forgetfulness. Journalism, as instant history, also carries the historical obligation of taking up arms on the side of memory against the evils of forgetting.
One of the ways by which this sacred duty is performed is through interviewing. Daily, Nigerian journalists conduct interviews from which they source news and flesh out features. In many cases, these interviews, the longer ones, are published as full-length interviews. Of particular relevance are the political interviews, that is interviews with public office holders or important political figures. Except in very few cases, many of the interviews hardly ever betray the adversarial virtues of political journalism. Even when the interviews are conducted by the most senior journalists, readers are left wondering if they were chats at a cocktail party among friends and whether cocks and tails were involved!
In many cases, you find that the journalists did not do any elaborate research on the subject of the interviews. The most asinine is when you even find the journalist starting out by asking a fairly famous person, May we meet you! But beyond this illiterate class of journalists who ask the latter question are the supposedly polished ones who conduct a full length interview that should be a medium of the extraction of the most critical information and opinion from their subject, but who end up encouraging only platitudes.
As reporters, Laolu Akande, who now reports for The Guardian from the US, and your truly told our editor that we were interested in interviewing Prof. Tam David-West, after what many progressive journalists saw as his indefensible defence of General Sani Abacha on the BBC during his vacation in the UK. Our editor simply dismissed the idea because, as he said, both of you are too close to the man to ask him any critical question about the unforgivable thing he did in England. We also ignored our editor and went to interview the man. Indeed, we were very close to the former oil minister. By the time we were half-way through the interview, Prof. David-West was wondering if this was the same young men he knew well. We couched one critical question in the language of some people are saying that. The professor shot back, those who are saying so, including the two of you who are asking me, you are all compound fools!
We compounded our foolishness in the next question: Prof, you may say this is foolish again, but Yes, if it is foolish, cut in David-West, I will say so again. It turned out to be a great interview that our editor was too glad to put on the front-page. Yet, our relationship with the great virologist and patriot was not diminished by the encounter. However, this story is not told as a model, but as an illustration.
Let our political journalists show more disrespect and insensitivity to those who are running the country aground. They are not statesmen, neither are journalists!
