  
 

  
      
     
         
   

H
H

\

HI‘HI‘IHWI'

J

\
\

tlﬁlll

ill}

MIMI

\
\

"NW:

WW

I

-“\]_3
I\H>
CDCO—i

V‘

 

ﬂood

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

FRAMING DARFUR: REPRESENTATIONS OF CONFLICT,
PEOPLE, AND PLACE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE

WASHINGTON POST, 2004

presented by

JOEL BRYAN GRULEY

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment

M.A.

 

of the requirements for the

degree in GEOGRAPHY

LJ
/.
(/

Major Professor’s Signature

I

/ 77‘“ {’7

(1— ~,

Date

MSU is an Afﬁnnative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5/08 Ki/Prolecc&Pres/ClRC/DateDue.indd

 

FRAMING DARFUR: REPRESENTATIONS OF CONFLICT, PEOPLE, AND PLACE
IN THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST, 2004

By

Joel Bryan Gruley

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTERS OF ARTS
Geography

2009

ABSTRACT

FRAMING DARF UR: REPRESENTATIONS OF CONFLICT, PEOPLE, AND PLACE
IN THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST, 2004

By
Joel Bryan Gruley
In this thesis, I examine how The New York Times and The Washington Post
newspapers represented the violence in Darfur, Sudan during 2004 - the ﬁrst year that the
crisis in Darfur gained the attention of both papers. Using a content analysis method
called framing, I particularly focus on how these papers represented Darfur’s violence,
the people connected to it, and Darfur as a place. I argue that both papers offer two
dominant representations — encapsulated in information—ordering devices called ‘frames’
— of Darfur’s violence: 1) the violence stems from a chain of political issues and factors;
and 2) the violence revolves around socio-cultural differences and concomitant tensions
between ‘Afn'cans’ and ‘Arabs.’ The thesis’s focus is on showing how the latter ‘frame’
manifests itself in representations of alleged local-level social dynamics in Darfur that
have played a role in fomenting the violence. Speciﬁcally, the violence is depicted as a
tribal or ethnic war between Darfur-based ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs.’ I show how people in
Darfur were represented as ‘Arab’ or ‘African,’ and how sharp distinctions between them
were produced in various ways. I contest these depictions of people in Darfur as ‘Arabs’
and ‘Africans,’ and representations of the violence as a tribal/ethnic conﬂict between
them. I also reﬂect on the kinds of understandings of Darfur as a place that emerge from
both papers’ representations of violence and people involved in it. This thesis contributes
to work in cultural geography informed by postmodern and postcolonial theories that has

interrogated Western representations of places and peoples in the former colonized world.

 

Copyright by
JOEL BRYAN GRULEY
2009

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis and the overall completion of the master’s degree in geography at
Michigan State University could not have been accomplished without the encouragement,
support, guidance, and help of many people who merit special mention and my gratitude
here. I need to begin by acknowledging and thanking my thesis committee members: Dr.
Kyle Evered, Dr. Chris Duvall, and Dr. Antoinette WinklerPrins. Kyle was the principal
advisor on this thesis, and during my tenure in the geography program at MSU, he served
as a crucial role model, mentor, and friend to me. I am indebted to Kyle for introducing
me to and piquing my interest in several new areas of geographical thought and inquiry,
such as thinking critically about the form and character that representations of places and
peoples take, which represents the core of this thesis’s focus and analysis. The main
ideas and structure of this thesis were hatched and fostered under Kyle’s tutelage in his
critical geopolitics seminar. 1 am also appreciative of Kyle for always making himself
available to me when I had concerns or questions on all matters related to geography or
school in general, and for taking a genuine interest in my studies, development as a
geographer, and future career path. I count myself as very fortunate to have had Kyle as
a mentor and friend during my time at MSU.

Chris deserves a mammoth thank you for all the assistance he provided with the
writing of this thesis. To begin with, Chris directed me to several key literatures
pertaining to Africa, including the Myers et a1. (1996) paper upon which I essentially
based this thesis. Chris also assiduously edited every chapter, pointed out weak points
and inconsistencies in some of my lines of reasoning and arguments while also helping

me to redress these shortcomings, and provided several suggestions on how to improve

iv

 

the general organization and structure of the thesis. Because of Chris, this thesis is better
in numerous ways. I also want to thank Chris for always taking the time to listen and talk
to me about ideas, problems, or anxieties that I had related to the thesis when I would call
or show up unannounced at his ofﬁce (which happened often). Chris’s help and guidance
were invaluable from the beginning to the completion of this project.

As a constant source of support and encouragement in my studies, I must give a
big thanks to Antoinette. Antoinette has always supported my varied interests within
geography, whether they were in political ecology or postmodern critiques of
representations of places and peoples, and she has also nurtured interests of mine that lie
beyond the discipline of geography, encouraging me to take classes in anthropology and
foreign languages. Antoinette has also always been very supportive of this particular
research, expressing a genuine interest in what I explore in this thesis, and I feel like she
always believed in me even when it looked like I might not ﬁnish. Antoinette deserves
thanks for being an amazing graduate coordinator too. She looked after my graduate
student cohorts and 1, working hard to ensure that we had the necessary support and
resources to carry out and complete our graduate studies.

I need to also acknowledge the many faculty members and fellow graduate
students in the geography department at MSU who all inﬂuenced and supported me in
myriad ways, and who also made my life over the last two and a half years more
enjoyable and rewarding. In particular, I express my thanks and appreciation to Sarah
AcMoody, Steve Aldrich, Dr. Alan Arbogast, Dave Baylis, ‘Quiet Mike’ Bigsby, Brad
Blumer, Marcellus Caldas, Mark DeVisser, Adrienne Domas, Meleia Egger, Leslie

Fusina, Courtney Gallaher, Dr. Kirk Goldsberry, Dr. Jay Harman, Tony Knapp, Trevor

 

Hobbs, Audrey Joslin, Tim LeDoux, Trilby MacDonald, Jay Newberry, Rita Perreira,
Ivan Ramirez, Crosby Savage, Dr. Randy Schaetzel, Dr. Cynthia Simmons, Dante
Vergara, Beth Weisenbom, Dwight Wilhelm, Jess Winans, and Nate Zukas.

I must especially thank Bilal Butt, who has always been an important mentor and
good friend to me. I have learned a lot about geography, and political ecology in
particular, from Bilal, and he was instrumental to my academic'success at MSU, giving
me critical advice and ideas on several occasions, editing seminar papers, and helping me
create and prepare for presentations, among other things. Bilal also served as sort of an
unofﬁcial thesis committee member; he read the entire thesis and provided key feedback
and suggestions on how to improve it. I must also especially thank Kristy Stanley for her
unwavering support and ﬁ'iendship throughout the entire graduate program, and
especially during the researching and writing of this thesis over the summer and fall of
2008. Kristy listened to me talk about my research over and over again, she helped me
work through rough patches of writing on numerous occasions, and most importantly, she
always had faith in me and helped me to also believe in myself. Kristy also formatted the
thesis, made the map and ﬁgures, and gave me a wonderful place to write during most of
the fall. I am incredibly lucky to have had Kristy throughout the entire thesis process. I
also need to thank the amazing geography staff - Claudia Brown, Judy Reginek, and
Sharon Ruggles — who were always so nice and helpful to me.

Lastly, I must acknowledge the tremendous support I received from my sisters,
Kaitlin and Danielle, and my parents over the last two and a half years. I need to
especially thank my parents for encouraging me to pursue my interests in geography at

the next academic level, for giving me a quiet place in their home in Chicago to write my

vi

 

thesis, and for putting up with my constant complaining during the oﬁen-painful writing
process. My father, in particular, deserves a huge thanks for reading and editing the
entire thesis, and for making me a better writer over the years. A veteran of the
newspaper industry himself, my dad expressed a keen interest in this project from its
inception to its completion, and he also helped shed light on the news-making business

and industry for me.

vii

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ....................................................................................... ix
List of Figures ..................................................................................... x
Introduction ........................................................................................... 1
Thesis Structure ............................................................................. 3
1. Literature Review ................................................................................ 4
1.1 Cultural Geography and Postmodern Representations ........................... 4
1.2 Postcolonial Studies — Representing the ‘Other’ ................................. 8
1.3 Representing Africa — The Myth of the ‘Dark Continent’ ..................... 1 1
1.4 Colonialism’s Legacies ............................................................. 15
1.5 Africa’s Media Image in the United States ....................................... 17
2. Methods .......................................................................................... 26
3. Scholarly Representations of Darfur ......................................................... 32
3.1 Cultural Geography of Darfur ...................................................... 32
3.2 Darfur’s Sorrow — An Interpretation of Violence ............................... 37
4. Results and Discussion ........................................................................ 49
4.1 Representations of People in Darfur and their Role in the Violence ......... 49
4.2 Local Dynamics of Violence in Darfur ........................................... 53
4.3 Problematizing ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ Cultural Designations .................. 55
4.4 Differences in Physical Features of the Body .................................... 57
4.5 A ‘Clash of Civilizations’ .......................................................... 60
4.6 ‘Arab’ Nomads versus ‘African’ Farmers ........................................ 64
Conclusion .......................................................................................... 69
Appendix ........................................................................................... 78
Bibliography ........................................................................................ 81
Primary Sources Cited .................................................................... 81
Secondary Sources Cited ................................................................. 83

viii

Table 1:

Table 2.1:

Table 2.2:
Table 2.3:

Table 2.4:

LIST OF TABLES

Total news articles with “Darfur” in the headline/lead paragraphs,

2004 ..............................................................................
Representations of people and groups connected to the violence. . . .

Representations of ethnicity and tribalism ................................

Representations of physical appearances ..................................

Representations of resource conﬂicts between farmers and nomads. . ..

ix

...26

49

...54
..58

.65

“paw—:-

Figure 1:

LIST OF FIGURES

Map ofDarfur, Sudan

32

Introduction

In today’s globalized information age, American news media represent important
cultural sites where geographic knowledge about the world and its myriad peoples is
regularly produced and disseminated to news-consuming masses. Speciﬁcally, a vast
array of news media (e.g., televisual, Internet, print, and radio) perpetually feed
Americans with descriptions, images, and understandings of foreign places, peoples, and
events. News media representations of the world, however, do not constitute carbon-
copy reﬂections of ‘reality.’ The act of representation is a highly subjective and political
process to which US. news reporters, editors, and photographers are hardly immune.
Their depictions of alien cultures and places, and events unfolding throughout the world,
are inevitably refracted through and shaped by the speciﬁc cultures in which they are
entangled. Thus, cultural presumptions and biases held about non—American places and
peoples entrenched in American popular culture often color how US. newsmakers depict
the world. This is signiﬁcant when one considers that most Americans ‘encounter’ the
rest of the world through news media, and that news media representations wield
considerable inﬂuence in shaping Americans’ impressions and understandings of foreign
places and peoples (Entman, 1991; Hawk, 1992b; Fair, 1993; Klak, 1994; Myers et al.,
1996; Sharp, 2000; Debrix, 2008).

The inﬂuence of cultural stereotypes in shaping news media representations of the
world is perhaps most evident in US. news coverage of Africa. American news media
have consistently portrayed Africa as having a backward and savage disposition. The
alleged backwardness of Africa is especially prominent in coverage of violent conﬂicts

on the continent, which typically have been represented as apolitical combustions of

irrational violence between primitive ‘tribal’ groups. Africa’s negative media image is
deeply problematic though, for it does not reﬂect any brute Aﬁ'ican ‘reality,’ but
inaccurate and culturally biased representations of Africa established during European
colonialism and perpetuated in contemporary European and American popular culture
discourses. American news media representations of Africa have consequently produced
distorted and damaging understandings of Africa and Aﬁican societies for American
news audiences.

The focus of this thesis is how two major US. newspapers - The New York Times
(N YT) and The Washington Post (WP) — represented and produced meanings about the
present crisis in Darfur, Sudan during 2004, the ﬁrst year that the violence in the region
gained the attention of the Western news media. Hundreds of thousands have been killed
and millions displaced from their homes in Darﬁu' (ICID, 2005; Prunier, 2007; United
Nations, 2008). The unthinkable violence that has gripped the region demands
explication and the NYT and the WP have sought to make sense of it, sending reporters
to Darfur, bordering areas of Chad, Sudan’s capital Khartoum, and the United Nations in
New York in order to gather information, produce stories, and attempt to elucidate the
crisis’s root causes and motivations. In this thesis, I analyze how the NYT and the WP
represented Darfur’s violence and the people connected to it, and from these
representations of violence and people, I examine how these newspapers represented
Darfur as a particular type of place and society. Both newspapers’ representations of
Darfur’s violence, of people implicated in it, and of Darfur as a place and society are
placed in the context of dominant (mis)understandings held about Africa in the Western

geographical imagination. Speciﬁcally, I reﬂect upon the inﬂuence of Western cultural

stereotypes pertaining to Africa in shaping both newspapers’ representations of the

harrowing situation in Darfur.

Thesis Structure

This thesis is divided into four body chapters and a conclusion. It begins with a
literature review that harnesses insights from postmodern and postcolonial social theory
on representations of people and places to establish the origins and contours of Africa’s
predominant media image in the United States, which sets the historical, political, and
cultural context for representations of Darfur in the NYT and the WP. The second
chapter describes the methods I employed to analyze the NYT’s and the WP’s 2004
coverage of Darfur, speciﬁcally a content analysis methodology called framing. The
third chapter delineates the geographical, historical, and political context of Darfur’s
present violence using information drawn from scholarly sources. In the fourth chapter, I
present how both newspapers represented Darfur’s violence and the people involved in it.
I draw upon information from the scholarly literature on Darfur presented in the previous
chapter in order to problematize and contest aspects of both newspapers’ representations
of violence and people. In the conclusion, I summarize my ﬁndings, discuss some
important ramiﬁcations of the NYT’s and the WP’s representations of violence and
people in Darfur - including what kinds of understandings of Darfur as a place and
society these representations yield — and situate both newspapers’ representations of
Darfur within the context of the West’s dominant ways of representing and producing

knowledge about Africa.

1. Literature Review

1.1 Cultural Geography and Postmodern Representations

Representation sits at the heart of this thesis’s focus and analysis - it is the
production and concomitant communication of meanings that aim to reﬂect and describe
some aspect of ‘reality’ (Duncan, 2000). Representation has always been fundamental to
the discipline of geography. Since the age of European exploration and continuing into
the present, geographers have concerned themselves with representing and interpreting
elements of the earth’s surface - such as the biophysical environment, human societies
and cultures, and human-environment relationships — through various media, with writing
and cartography paramount among them (Barnes & Duncan, 1992; Jarosz, 1992: 105-6;
Johnston & Sidaway, 2004). The literal meaning of geography is, after all, ‘earth-
writing.’ Recently, however, much work in cultural geography has strayed from merely
attempting to represent and explain places and peoples and has instead focused on how
these mainstays of cultural geographic inquiry are socially produced through
representational practices (Duncan & Sharp, 1993; Johnston & Sidaway, 2004: 279).
This radically different approach to representation is attributed to the profound inﬂuence
of postmodern philosophy on the outlook of cultural geography.

Postmodernism has at its foundation a repudiation of the Enlightenment belief in a
given, a priori ‘reality’ that can be known universally through the application of human
reason. Postmodemists have instead maintained that our understandings of ‘reality’ are
refracted through and heavily inﬂuenced by the social milieu in which we are enmeshed,
thus, our knowledge of the world is always relative, differing according to temporal,

geographical, cultural, and political circumstances (Duncan & Sharp, 1993; Johnston &
4

Sidaway, 2004: 271-9). Nuance and plurality are therefore stressed over universality in
postmodern perspectives on human understandings of ‘reality’ (Ley, 2000; Johnston &
Sidaway, 2004: 273).

Over the last couple of decades, the inﬂuence of postmodernism on the
orientation of cultural geography has been signiﬁcant (Johnston & Sidaway, 2004: 267).
As a result, many cultural geographers have begun to question and challenge claims put
forth by their geographer peers and others that the world -- particularly places and peoples
— can be represented objectively and mimetically, precipitating a so-called ‘crisis in
representation’ in geography (Barnes & Duncan, 1992; Duncan & Ley, 1993; Duncan &
Sharp, 1993). Harnessing postmodern ideas on the contingent and heterogeneous nature
of human knowledge, cultural geographers have argued that impartial and mimetic
representations are impossible because the social context in which representations are
made comes to bear signiﬁcantly on their ﬁnal character (Barnes & Duncan, 1992;
Duncan & Ley, 1993; Duncan & Sharp, 1993). Consequently, representations often
reveal more about the cultures and historical-political positions of those doing the
representing than the actual objects being represented.

Guided by a postmodern understanding of representations, cultural geographers
have argued that because representations cannot perfectly reﬂect ‘reality,’ they actually
help to constitute it — that is, representations serve as important locations where places
and peoples are effectively made and conjured into being (Duncan, 2000; Johnston &
Sidaway, 2004: 279). Places and peoples are ‘made’ in the sense that those doing the

representing literally impose certain meanings and traits informed by their own social

positions upon the places and peoples they seek to represent, which inﬂuences how they
are ultimately perceived (Cosgrove & Domosh, 1993).

Fundamental to the social production of places and peoples is the language
employed in representations.l Language is crucial to the construction and transmission of
meanings embodied in representations, and the speciﬁc words, phrases, metaphors, and
statements used to describe places and peoples imbue them with a distinct disposition and
visibility that profoundly affects how they are envisioned and understood (Tuan, 1991;
Barnes & Duncan, 1992). The language encapsulated in representations is of course
never entirely neutral, for it is forged within the crucible of the social positionality of the
‘makers’ of places and peoples and is consequently shaped by relations of power (Barnes
& Duncan, 1992; Duncan & Sharp, 1993; Duncan & Gregory, 1999). The idea that
language is a productive force that possesses the power to bring places and peoples into
being, and the idea that the language used to convey meanings about places and peoples
is fundamentally shaped by power relations arises from the work of Michel Foucault, a
French philosopher whose ideas have been pivotal to postmodern thinking.

Foucault was interested in how knowledge about certain ‘objects’ (in his case,
objects like madness, homosexuality, and delinquency) is produced through a system of
representation he called discourse (Hall, 2001). By discourse, Foucault meant a discrete
group of words, statements, and narratives that provide a meaningful language for
representing knowledge about objects (Duncan, 1993b: 233; Hall, 2001: 72). He argued
that discourses give meaning to objects by governing the way in which they can be

reasonably talked, written, and thought about, thus discourses are simultaneously

 

1 Images — such as photographs, paintings, and political cartoons — are also critical in the making of places
and peoples (for example, see Lutz & Collins, 1993).

Wm‘jl _' Ahmliix I

enabling and constraining (Barnes & Duncan, 1992: 8; Hall, 2001: 72). In creating
knowledge about objects and establishing bounds on what is considered acceptable and
intelligible when communicating knowledge about them, discourses actually produce the
objects of their focus — that is, objects do not exist meaningfully in themselves, but only
within the discourses about them (Hall, 2001: 73). F urtherrnore, Foucault maintained
that discourses are not conﬁned solely to linguistic signiﬁcation, but also entail practice —
the meanings bestowed to objects through discourses affect our conduct toward them
(Hall, 2001: 72).

Foucault also asserted that power is central to the manner in which discourses
construct knowledge about objects (1980). One of Foucault’s most important arguments
is that knowledge, which is produced through discourse, represents a critical form of
power — it is constituted under relations of power and is wielded to advance powerful
needs and interests (1980: 93-101). “The exercise of power perpetually creates
knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power” (Foucault,
1980: 52). Thus, those who hold power produce discourses that represent knowledge
about objects in speciﬁc ways so as to reinforce and augment their power. Moreover,
Foucault contended that because knowledge is intimately linked to power, it comes to
assume the authority of ‘truth,’ and the powerful interests that shape the character-of
knowledge are consequently hidden beneath a veneer that appears disinterested and
natural (Hall, 2001: 76).

Within cultural geography, and other related social science disciplines, work
informed from a postcolonial perspective, in particular, has drawn on and incorporated

postmodern ideas on the social contingency of human understandings of ‘reality’ and

Foucault’s arguments on the disciplining nature of discourse and the centrality of power
to the discursive production of knowledge in thinking critically about Western
representations of non-Western places and peoples (Nash, 2004). Thus, it is to

postcolonial scholarship that I turn next, particularly the inﬂuential work of Edward Said.

1.2 Postcolonial Studies — Representing the ‘Other’

Postcolonialism is an interdisciplinary ﬁeld variously informed by feminist,
Marxist, and postmodern perspectives that has as its focus of analysis the practices,
discourses, impacts, and legacies of Western colonialism (Duncan & Sharp, 1993;
Sidaway, 2000; Johnston & Sidaway, 2004: 292-7; Gregory, 2004; Nash, 2004). A
fundamental concern of postcolonial scholarship is how European societies preceding and
during colonialism produced knowledge about and represented the non-European places
and peoples they colonized (Nash, 2004). Postcolonial scholars have demonstrated that
the way in which European societies represented non-European places and peoples
facilitated and legitimated European colonialism in places like the Middle East and
Africa (Said, 1978; Mudimbe, 1988; Pieterse, 1992; Duncan, 1993a). Speciﬁcally,
European representations of the world and its peoples during the ages of European
exploration and imperialism were informed by European understandings of themselves as
culturally and morally superior to the rest of mankind. Europeans regarded Europe as the
most advanced civilization on Earth and their representations of the world reﬂected this
belief as non-European places and peoples were invariably depicted as inferior and
primitive (Blaut, 1993; Duncan, 1993a; Gregory, 1995; Agnew, 2003: 15-48). An
enlightened and superior Europe juxtaposed with a rudimentary and inferior non-Europe

helped to rationalize European colonial intervention, which would purportedly bring the

fruits of civilization that non-Europeans supposedly lacked (Blaut, 1993; Duncan, 1993a;
Agnew, 2003: 30). Consequently, knowledge produced about non—European places and
peoples as backward and uncivilized became inseparable from apparatuses of European
imperial power and codiﬁed in colonial discourses that were employed to justify,
advance, and maintain European political, economic, and cultural domination in the non-
European world (Said, 1978; Blaut, 1993; Spurr, 1993; Butlin, 1995).

The idea that the manner in which Europeans produced knowledge about the
places and peoples they colonized facilitated the colonization process and justiﬁed
colonial rule is a central theme in literary scholar Edward Said’s book Orientalism
(1978), a quintessential postcolonial work. In particular, Said examined how the British
and French represented the Near East, or ‘Orient,’ in a wide array of written texts — such
as, newspapers, travel writing, academic treatises, government documents, and especially
literature -— between the early nineteenth century and World War II. Said argued that
running through the many and disparate texts he investigated were recurring
commonalities in the ways that the British and French represented the Orient.
Speciﬁcally, the Orient was consistently described as being everything that Europe was
supposedly not — backward, childlike, irrational, depraved, immoral, and so on.
Inﬂuenced by Foucault, Said understood this dominant way of representing the Orient as
constituting a discourse, which he called ‘Orientalism.’

Orientalism, Said maintained, could be thought of as constituting Foucault’s
notion of a discourse in three instances. First, Orientalism limited what could reasonably
be said, written, and thought about the Orient. “Orientalism is [best] grasped as a set of

constraints upon and limitations of thought” (Said, 1978: 42). Representations that

strayed from the Orient-as-inferior-to-Europe discourse, consequently, were repressed
and held little if any currency among Europeans.

Second, Orientalism helped to simultaneously constitute two coherent socio-
geographical entities — the ‘Orient’ and ‘Europe.’ European representations of the Orient
imparted to it meanings and characteristics that Said claimed had no empirical basis in
reality. The Orient was effectively created within the discourse of Orientalism and its
image that Europeans carried in their heads was merely a product of their culture’s
geographical imagination. Intimately related to the social production of the Orient was
the articulation of a distinctly ‘European’ space and identity. By designating the Orient
as a primitive and uncivilized space, Europe constructed a reference point for itself
against which it could fashion its own sense of a morally and culturally superior
‘European’ identity. Identity construction is not simply achieved by deﬁning what one is,
but more importantly, through deﬁning what one is not. As Agnew says, “societies can
exist only by deﬁning themselves against an external standard — an Other without which
the Self could not see itself as distinctive” (2003: 23). Characteristics, sentiments, and
behaviors regarded as antithetical to the idealized image that Europe held of itself were
projected onto the Orient, which helped to deﬁne and reinforce Europe’s understanding
of itself as the most sophisticated civilization on earth. The Orient was thus discursively
produced as Europe’s ‘Other,’ an imaginative geographical space that represented
everything that Europe was not.

Third, Orientalism was bound within relations of power and employed to advance
powerful interests. Said argued that although Orientalism was not created for the express

purpose of dominating the Orient, it was appropriated by the imperial apparatuses of the

10

British and French states and used for that very purpose. The unequal status between
Europe and the Orient that Orientalism posited was used to rationalize British and French
colonization of the Orient.

The discourse of the ‘Other’ and the asymmetrical relations of power between
Europe and the non—European world that it helped foster and vindicate were not solely
conﬁned to European representations of the Orient. ‘Othering’ was perhaps most
pronounced and at its most hyperbolic within European representations of Africa and
Africans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the example of
Said (1978), I turn next to highlighting nineteenth century European representations of
Africa while thinking critically about how those representations produced and ﬁxed a
certain image of Africa in the European geographical imagination and how the character
of that image became inextricably bound within grids of power and used to further that

power.

1.3 Representing Africa — The Myth of the ‘Dark Continent’

During the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans hitherto active primarily in
trading and slaving activities on Africa’s coasts began to travel substantially inward,
penetrating the continent’s largely unknown interior (Brantlinger, 1985). As a diverse
group of Europeans — including explorers, anthropologists, missionaries, journalists,
hunters, speculators, and government representatives — made incursions into those lands
marked terra incognita on their maps, a distinct discourse on and concomitant image of
Africa and Africans emerged within their writings, pictures, and speeches. Africa was
depicted as a ‘dark’ and forbidding place without history, lacking sophisticated

institutions of governance, art, culture, and technology, and inhabited by ‘savages’

11

devoid of rationality and intelligence (Achebe, 1978; Mudimbe, 1988; Jarosz, 1992;
Pieterse, 1992; Duncan, 1993a; Spurr, 1993). Travel writers and social scientists working
and living on the continent during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early
twentieth century, in particular, participated in producing and propagating this negative
image of Africa and Africans.

The ‘discovery’ of Africa by Europeans during the nineteenth century piqued an
intense fascination on the European continent with this new and unfamiliar place. A
strong demand consequently emerged among Europeans for images and information on
Africa and explorer writers and novelists who participated in the initial explorations and
the so-called ‘opening-up’ of the continent largely ﬁlled it as it was principally through
the writings of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley and literary authors like Joseph
Conrad that understandings of Africa and its inhabitants were initially presented to
Europeans (Brantlinger, 1985; Pratt, 1985; Terrell, 1989: 136-42; Pieterse, 1992: 64-5).
The dominant image of Africa Europeans encountered within the pages of these travel
writing accounts was of a pre-historic land shrouded in literal and moral darkness and
teeming with sub-human savages (Achebe, 1978; Brantlinger, 1985; Spurr, 1993). Travel
writers often spun sensational tales of heroic European males battling bloodthirsty
savages and a hostile environment for European audiences back home eager for titillating
stories from an unknown and exotic land (Brantlinger, 1985; Pratt, 1985; Jarosz, 1992;
Pieterse, 1992: 64-5; Duncan, 1993a: 50). Moreover, disparaging metaphors such as the
‘dark continent’ and the ‘white man’s grave’ frequently peppered travel writers’
accounts, reinforcing the negative image of Africa (Brantlinger, 1985; J arosz, 1992). In

marking ‘darkest Africa’ with a primitive disposition, travel writers delineated a distinct

12

boundary between a superior European space and an inferior African space, thus
discursively producing Aﬁ'ica, much like Said’s Orient, as Europe’s antithetical ‘Other’
(Achebe, 1978; Mudimbe, 1988; Duncan, 1993a: 50; Spurr, 1993: 76-8).

The primitive image of Africa and Africans that emerged within this discourse of
the ‘Other’ was given an air of ‘scientiﬁc’ respectability through the writings and
classiﬁcation schemes of social scientists, particularly anthropologists and geographers,
studying and working on the continent during this period. In the late nineteenth century,
the discipline of anthropology was principally concerned with documenting and
explaining putative ‘racial’ and ‘civilizational’ differences between human societies
occupying differing geographical locales (Brantlinger, 1985; Mudimbe, 1988; Lewis,
1991: 611-12). Anthropologists during this period relied heavily on Darwinian
evolutionary theories posited by the natural sciences for interpreting assumed differences
between human societies. Speciﬁcally, all human beings were argued to follow the same
path of cultural, intellectual, and moral development, a path that was marked by a
hierarchy of gradually advancing stages (Brantlinger, 1985: 182-4; Mudimbe, 1988;
Duncan, 1993a). European society was represented as the zenith of this evolutionary
hierarchy, while African societies were placed at its very bottom (Mudimbe, 1988: 17-19;
Duncan, 1993a; Spurr, 1993: 62-71). Anthropologists in fact argued that Africans
represented Europe’s ‘contemporary ancestors’ (Pieterse, 1992: 37). Africa, then,
constituted not only a culturally, intellectually, and morally inferior space than Europe,
but also a temporally different space, for a journey to Africa represented not just “a
journey in space,” but also a “journey [backwards] in time” (Duncan, 1993a: 40).

Anthropologists’ crude theories of human evolution had the effect of naturalizing posited

13

differences between European and African societies, as Africa’s ‘inferior’ status was
interpreted as merely the product of nature’s laws working themselves out (Duncan,
1993a; Spurr, 1993: 156-61).

The discipline of geography also offered ‘scientiﬁc’ explanations for Africans’
supposed inferior state vis-a-vis Europeans during this period. Particularly, geographers
maintained that the biophysical environment, especially the climate, unilaterally
determined the state of social development in human societies. More speciﬁc, tropical
climates — like those found in Africa - were argued to retard cultural, intellectual, and
moral improvement, whereas more temperate climates — such as those found in Europe ——
were asserted to have just the opposite effect (Jarosz, 1992: 106-7; Butlin, 1995: 179).
According to this theory of ‘environmental determinism,’ Africans’ supposedly primitive
state was therefore a geographical and environmental inevitability (Butlin, 1995).

The discourse on Africa as Europe’s ‘Other’ produced during the nineteenth
century by European travel writers and social scientists alike was instrumental to
facilitating and legitimating European colonialism in Africa, which formally began in the
late nineteenth century. In particular, Europeans who espoused colonization in Africa
maintained that because Europe occupied a purportedly superior cultural, intellectual, and
moral position compared to Africa, it was Europe’s moral duty — the so-called ‘white
man’s burden’ — to bring and foster social betterment there (Brantlinger, 1985; Jarosz,
1992; Duncan, 1993a; Spurr, 1993: 109-11). Europeans thus asserted that colonization
would benevolently bring ‘light’ to Africa’s ‘darkness,’ beating back the continent’s
‘wickedness’ and ‘savagery’ with the enlightened gifts of European society, such as

capitalism, Enlightenment science, and Christianity (Brantlinger, 1985; Mudimbe, 1988;

14

Jarosz, 1992; Pieterse, 1992; Duncan, 1993a; Spurr, 1993). However, the discourse of
the ‘Other’ applied to Africa and the ‘civilizing’ justiﬁcation for colonialism that it
inspired served as incredibly powerﬁrl pretexts for eventual European colonial policies
and practices that primarily enriched and beneﬁted Europeans at the expense of Africans
through the (often violent) appropriation of land, labor, and natural resources, and the
abrogation of cultural, economic, and political autonomy (Mudimbe, 1988; Jarosz, 1992;
Hochschild, 1998; Cooper, 2002). European colonial apparatuses employed the
discourse on Africa as Europe’s ‘Other’ in order to promote powerful European political
and commercial interests, thus illustrating the great importance of knowledge production
and representational practices to engendering unequal relations of power between Europe

and Africa.

1.4 Colonialism’s Legacies

While very much interested in the colonial past, as the two examples above attest,
postcolonial scholarship is also contemporary in its focus. European colonial discourses,
the distorted representations of non-European places and peoples that they yield, and the
unequal relations of power they wrought between Europe and the rest of the world did
not suddenly disappear with the formal end of colonialism following the Second World
War. In fact, colonialism’s discourses, representations, and impacts persist and inhere in
the present, and postcolonial scholars have consequently sought to expose, deconstruct,
and counter the lingering presences and legacies of colonialism (Duncan & Sharp, 1993;
Sidaway, 2000; Gregory, 2004; Nash, 2004). Colonialism’s tenacity has been illustrated,
for example, in development discourses peddled by powerful Western institutions like the

World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (Escobar,

15

 

1995; Peet & Watts, 1996b; Mitchell, 2002). Speciﬁcally, inaccurate and culturally
biased representations of non-Westem places and peoples as ignorant and backward
established during colonialism are continually reproduced in development discourses to
justify Western interventions that will purportedly pull non-Westem places and peoples
out of their ‘undeveloped’ state. Development interventions, however, have been argued
to extend and deepen Western political and economic domination over the non-Westem
world begun during colonialism, for example, by opening up non-Westem markets to
Western goods and by providing Western multinational corporations with exclusive
access to lucrative natural resources found in non-Westem locales (Escobar, 1995; Feet
& Watts, 1996b; Mitchell, 2002). In another example of colonial discourses and
practices reworking themselves in the present, Gregory (2004) maintains that the
discourse of Orientalism has been reactivated in United States representations of the
Middle East, especially following the events of September 11, 2001. In particular, the
Middle East has recently been produced as the U.S.’ barbaric ‘Other’ in need of
civilizational rectiﬁcation provided by the US. in the form of imposed democracy, neo-
liberal capitalism, and the ever-ambiguous ‘freedom.’ Gregory argues that the
Orientalizing discourse of the ‘Other’ reinvigorated by the US. helped facilitate and
justify the U.S.’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also its unswerving support for
Israel’s policies carried out in the Palestinian territories.

As the two examples provided above demonstrate, colonial discourses on non-
Westem places and peoples that reside in the present often have profound political,
economic, and cultural consequences as forms of domination and inequality created

between the West and non-West during colonialism are perpetuated and strengthened.

16

Moreover, colonial discourses and representational practices when applied in the present
have the pernicious effect of creating unrealistic perceptions of non-Western places and
peoples in the minds of Westerners (Fair, 1993; Myers et al., 1996; Said, 1997). This is
all the more problematic when one considers that these warped understandings of the
non-Westem world have over time become naturalized and now seem to constitute
‘common sense’ in the West (Duncan & Sharp, 1993; Gregory, 2004: 3-9). Work
informed from a postcolonial perspective has argued that Western news media, in
particular, have participated in the perpetuation and normalization of distorted colonial
representations of non-Westem places and peoples (Hawk, 1992a; Jarosz, 1992; Fair,
1993; Spurr, 1993; Myers et al., 1996; Said, 1997; Campbell, 2007). Indeed, analysis of
contemporary representations of Africa and Africans in American news media reveals
that Africa’s “colonial image has become the media image” (Hawk, 1992b: 13). I turn
next, therefore, to investigating Africa’s media image in the United States — an image

profoundly shaped by the colonial past.

1.5 Africa’s Media Image in the United States

News media are fundamental to shaping Americans’ understandings about the
world. In today’s globalization era of sophisticated communication and transportation
technologies, images and descriptions of foreign places, peoples, and events provided
through a wide array of news media pervade American society. It is principally through
news media, thus, that Americans experience and envision the rest of the world (Klak,
1994: 319; Sharp, 2000: 32; Debrix, 2008: 12-13). Beyond the importance of the
ubiquity of representations of the global today provided by news media, news media are

also critical to inﬂuencing Americans’ perceptions of the world due to their highly

l7

esteemed status. News-making organizations — like Reader 's Digest magazine and the
Cable News Network (CNN) for example — are commonly regarded as professional
institutions that adhere to an honorable code of objectivity, thus their foreign reporting is
often perceived as constituting mere ‘fact’ (Fair, 1993; Sharp, 2000; McFarlane & Hay,
2003: 214; Debrix, 2008). The manner in which the news media represent and interpret
foreign places, peoples, and events, however, is shaped profoundly by numerous social
factors, thereby undermining any claims to ‘objective’ reporting. The cultural and
political positions of those involved in the news-making process (e. g., journalists, editors)
always come to bear on how the global is presented. Moreover, the news media
frequently draw upon and reproduce the language and discourses of incredibly
ideological institutions in their foreign coverage (Sorensen, 1991: 223; Hawk, 1992b;
Fair, 1993: 13; Said, 1997; McFarlane & Hay, 2003; Debrix, 2008). Journalists, for
example, rely heavily on the texts and pronouncements of state foreign policy
establishments in their foreign reporting, thus the global interests of states often color
how the global is represented (Klak, 1994; Myers et al., 1996; Sharp, 2000; Entman,
2004).

Furthermore, the cultures of the audiences that news stories are targeted for affect
how the world is represented. News coverage of foreign places, cultures, and events
requires unambiguous explanations, thus, foreign news must be packaged and translated
into meanings that are immediately comprehensible to news consumers back home
(Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Sorensen, 1991: 224-5; Entman, 1991, 2004: 2-17). The news
media, therefore, rely on culturally speciﬁc conventions, rules, and codes for conveying

meanings in their foreign coverage that resonate with the cultural belief systems of their

18

readerships (Hawk, 1992b: 6-7; Fair, 1993: 9-10; Sharp, 2000; McFarlane & Hay, 2003:
214). Foreign news coverage can thus be regarded as constituting Foucault’s notion of a
discourse — how the global can be reported meaningfully is bound by culturally speciﬁc
rules (Sharp, 2000; Robison, 2004: 380-1; Debrix, 2008). As a result, foreign news
stories are inevitably imbued with widely established cultural presumptions and biases
held about foreign places and peoples (Fair, 1993; Myers et al., 1996). News media
representations of the world, however, are presented as mere ‘fact’ and the cultural
prejudices and ideological interests that structure the meanings imparted to foreign places
and peoples consequently seem ‘natural,’ taking on an appearance of ‘truth’ due to the
illusion of the news media as disinterested purveyors of ‘objective realities’ (Sharp, 2000;
McFarlane & Hay, 2003: 214).

In American news coverage of Africa, the culturally resonant ‘facts’ that
consistently serve to represent people and explain events unfolding on the continent are
grounded in notions of ‘primitiveness’ and ‘savagery,’ a phenomenon dictated by
Europe’s historical way of seeing and representing Africa (Hawk, 1992b: 5; Fair, 1993).
Africa’s predominant news media image in the United States, thus, is not a good one,
positing a poverty-stricken, violence- and disease-ridden continent populated by helpless
jungle people (Ebo, 1992; Hawk, 1992a; Fair, 1993). The colonial discourse of the
‘Other’ for representing Africa has proven to be tenacious as it now structures how the
American news media communicate meanings about the continent and its peoples to
American news consumers. In what follows, I will highlight some main themes of US.

news coverage of Africa, especially coverage of violent conﬂict.

l9

Two salient themes emerge from the literature on US. news coverage of Africa.
First, coverage is sparse compared to other regions of the world. Second, when Aﬁica
does receive news media attention, the focus is almost always on negative events like
violence, disease epidemics, poverty, and environmental catastrophe (Pratt, 1980; Terrell,
1989; Sorensen, 1991; Ungar & Gergen, 1991; Hawk, 1992a; Fair, 1993; Domatob, 1994;
Schraeder & Endless, 1998; Stock, 2004: 28—39). Scant and invariably negative coverage
does not of course create a favorable image of Aﬁ‘ica in the minds of US. news
consumers. This gloomy image is exacerbated by the fact that US. African coverage is
rife with derogatory and racist language rooted in European colonial discourses — Africa
is still depicted as a ‘timeless’ place populated by ‘savages’ (Terrell, 1989; Sorensen,
1991; Ebo, 1992; Hawk, 1992b; Jarosz, 1992; Fair, 1993). Moreover, when negative
events are reported, they are frequently stripped of their historical and political-economic
context - Africa’s woes are instead portrayed as if they merely represent the continent’s
‘natural’ condition, implying that Africans’ ‘primitiveness’ is solely to blame for
problems like widespread poverty, hunger, and disease (Sorensen, 1991; Hawk, 1992b;
Jarosz, 1992; Fair, 1993). For example, Newsweek magazine’s coverage of mass famine
in Ethiopia during the 19803 emphasized Ethiopians’ supposed reckless abuse of the land
and native “incompetence,” “dishonesty,” and “savagery” for interpreting the calamity,
while neglecting the political-economic origins of the famine, such as the large-scale
expansion of commercial agriculture at the expense of subsistence production (Sorensen,
1991: 228). In addition, discussions on AIDS in Africa in a wide array of US. news
media — from Cosmopolitan magazine to The Washington Post newspaper — have tended

to attribute Africa’s AIDS epidemic to the ‘abnormal,’ ‘bestial,’ and ‘dangerous’ sexual

20

practices of Africans rather than focusing on the speciﬁc historical, political, economic,
and ecological contexts in which the disease occurs (Austin, 1989; Jarosz, 1992: 111-13).

The constant use of disparaging language and the de-historicized and de-
politicized representation of negative events is perhaps most evident in US. media
coverage of conﬂict in Aﬁica. Speciﬁcally, conﬂict in Africa has consistently been
represented as being essentially ‘tribal’ in nature —— that is, violence is depicted as
ultimately stemming from age-old rivalries and innate animosities between different so-
called ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ groups (Nwosu, 1987; Ebo, 1992: 18; Hawk, 1992b; Fair, 1993:
11-16; Lowe et al., 1997; Stock, 2004: 45-6). From the early 1950s Mau Mau revolt in
Kenya (Maloba, 1992), to the Biafra civil war in Nigeria in the late 19603 (Artis, 1970;
Ibelema, 1992), to the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa during the 19803 (Brock,
1992), to civil war in Liberia during the early 19903 (Fair, 1993: 15-16), to the 1994
Rwandan genocide (Myers et al., 1996; Melvern, 2007), the US. news media relied
heavily on purported ‘tribal’ enmities to account for the violence that occurred in these
places, a phenomenon Artis (1970) has called the “tribal ﬁxation.”

Attributing violent conﬂict in Africa to ‘tribal’ hatreds is extremely problematic.
The term ‘tribal’ when applied to Africa in any context carries negative connotations
associated with ‘primitiveness’ (Lowe et al., 1997). “What the word ‘tribal’ does is to
instantly separate Africa from America. ‘Tribalism’ invokes the primordial; it invokes
the ‘uncivilized,’ locating Africa in a distant time in evolutionary scale from ‘our’
contemporary and modern time” (Fair, 1993: 15). The backward image that the word
conjures in fact has its roots in European colonialism. European colonial administrators

and anthropologists viewed and represented forms of socio-cultural organization in

21

Africa as being ‘tribal,’ a strictly European classiﬁcation that was reserved for and
applied to types of societal organization regarded as ‘primordial,’ ‘immutable,’ and
‘primitive’ (Southall, 1970; Brock, 1992: 153-4; Cooper, 2002: 18; Young, 2002).
Today, consequently, when the American news media interpret conﬂict in Africa as being
‘tribal,’ violence is effectively ascribed to the presumed ‘barbaric’ and ‘atavistic’ essence
of Africa and Aﬁicans, while the historical and political-economic factors surrounding
violence are elided (Brock, 1992; Ibelema, 1992; Maloba, 1992; Myers et al., 1996).
This is evidenced in the way that the American news media covered the 1994 Rwandan
genocide. This tragedy was represented as a spontaneous eruption of deep-seated ‘tribal’
hostilities between Hutus and Tutsis, while the historical and political factors that
contributed to it — such as the manipulation of Hutu and Tutsi ethnic identities during
Belgian colonial rule and the fact that the genocide was planned and carried out by the
Rwandan government and its military apparatus using sophisticated forms of propaganda
— were ignored (Myers et al., 1996; Cooper, 2002: 6-9; Stock, 2004: 47-8; Melvem,
2007)

Moreover, the US. news media’s reliance on ‘tribal’ enmities for explaining
conﬂict in Africa is troublesome because of the highly simplistic manner in which
‘ethnic’ group formations and identities in Africa have been represented within this
explanation. Speciﬁcally, purportedly warring ‘ethnic’ groups in Africa have been
portrayed as discretely bounded, homogenous, and unchanging socio-cultural entities that
have existed since time immemorial (Brock, 1992; Myers et al., 1996; Lowe et al., 1997;
Stock, 2004: 44-8; Melvem, 2007), an understanding of ethnicity in Africa commensurate

with how Europeans during colonialism perceived of it (Southall, 1970; Ranger, 1983;

22

Young, 2002). This understanding and representation is problematic because it misses
the incredibly ﬂuid, ﬂexible, changing, overlapping, and circumstantial nature of
ethnicity in Africa (Southall, 1970; Ranger, 1983; Young, 2002; Stock, 2004: 44-8). It is
also problematic in that it ignores the fact that there is nothing ‘timeless’ or ‘natural’
about ethnicity in Africa today —- many ethnic group formations and identities in Africa
are in fact quite novel and the deliberate product of cultural manipulation engineered by
colonial and postcolonial regimes seeking to bolster their authority (Vail, 1989; Brock,
1992; Young, 1994).. The oversimpliﬁed, ahistorical, and apolitical representation of
ethnicity in Africa was apparent, for example, in the US. news media’s coverage of
political strife in South Africa during the 19803. Violent struggles for political power
between the paramilitary wings of the Zulu-based Inkatha political party and the multi-
ethnic United Democratic Front were represented as ‘tribal’ conﬂicts rooted in ancient
‘tribal’ animosities between ‘timeless’ ethnic groups like the Zulu and Xhosa (Brock,
1992). The coverage neglected to mention, however, that there is nothing ‘ancient’ nor
‘natural’ about ethnic groups in South Africa in that white minority governments
deliberately fostered ethnic distinctions in South Africa throughout the twentieth century
in order to weaken African solidarity and safeguard minority rule (Vail, 1989; Brock,
1992)

In conclusion, the US. news media have repeatedly interpreted conﬂict in Africa
as resulting from ‘tribal’ hatreds between unequivocally distinct and ‘timeless’ ethnic
groups. This explanation naturalizes conﬂict in Africa by removing it from its historical
and political context and reduces incredibly complex political events to ‘irrational

savagery’ embodied in ‘tribal’ animus. This explanation also produces highly simplistic

23

and myopic understandings of ethnic group formations and identities in Africa. The
‘tribal’ explanation is profoundly inﬂuenced by the discourse on Africa as Europe’s
‘Other,’ a conceptualization that very much resonates with Americans’ understandings of
the continent and its peoples as being ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ (Hawk, 1992b; Fair, 1993;
Myers et al., 1996). Nonetheless, political scientist and Africanist Crawford Young has
recently written, “the ‘ancient tribal hatreds’ thesis. . .has largely disappeared from serious
media reporting” (2002: 1-2).

The on-going violence in Darfur, Sudan presents an excellent case to test whether
Young’s statement is accurate because it represents a deadly conﬂict in Africa that has
received signiﬁcant US. news media coverage. Beginning in early 2003 and continuing
into the present, Darfur has witnessed an explosion of violence and mass murder —
hundreds of thousands have been brutally killed and millions have been uprooted from
their homes and now languish in fetid refugee camps (ICID, 2005; Prunier, 2007; United
Nations, 2008). The violence has even been designated as constituting ‘genocide’ by the
US. government, among others. In 2004, the violence and human suffering gripping
Darfur ﬁrst registered in the West and gained the attention of the US. news media. Two
of America’s most respected newspapers in terms of international reporting - the NYT
and the WP — have since covered the horrors of Darfur extensively. For example, a
search in the Lexus-Nexus database for news stories and op-ed pieces carried in the NYT
with ‘Darfur’ in the headline and/or ﬁrst paragraph for the period 2004 to 2007 yielded
648 news articles. The same search, but for the WP, produced 606 news articles. The

focus of this thesis is both newspapers’ coverage of Darfur during the 2004 period.

24

In analyzing NYT and WP coverage of Darfur during 2004, my chief objective is
to determine how both newspapers initially explained and represented the violence
occurring in Darfur. More speciﬁc, I am interested in what the NYT and the WP
emphasized as lying at the roots of the violence. Did both newspapers point to ‘tribal’
and/or ‘ethnic’ hatreds as playing an important contributing role in the violence while
removing it from its historical and political context? Furthermore, I am interested in how
the NYT and the WP represented people and socio-political groups involved in the
violence. If the NYT and the WP did indeed rely upon the ‘tribal’ explanation for
making sense of the violence, how were ‘ethnic’ group formations and identities in
Darfur depicted? Finally, I am interested in what kinds of impressions and
understandings of Darfur as a place and society are imparted to news consumers as a
result of both newspapers’ representations of violence and people. To what extent are
these representations and understandings of Darfur shaped by and reﬂective of Western
cultural biases rooted in Europe’s historical way of representing and ‘seeing’ Africa as

the ‘dark continent"?

25

2. Methods

I conducted a textual analysis of 2004 coverage of Darfur in the NYT and the WP
using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. News articles analyzed were
obtained through the Lexus-Nexus database by searching for stories in the NYT and the
WP that carried “Darfur” in the headline and/or lead paragraphs during the period
January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2004. Editorial and opinion pieces were excluded from
analysis, while stories provided from news wires (e. g., Associated Press) that ran in either
newspaper were included. In total, I analyzed 198 news articles — 108 from the NYT and

90 from the WP (Table 1). 1 read each article twice.

Table 1 — Total news articles with “Darfur” in the headline/lead paragraphs, 2004

 

 

 

Month NYT WP Total
January 3 0 3
February 0 0 0
March 0 1 1
April 2 2 4
May 5 7 1 2
June 8 7 1 5
July 1 5 1 3 28
August 1 9 12 3 1
September 1 9 1 6 3 5
October 1 5 12 27
November 14 1 3 27
December 8 7 1 5
Total 108 90 198

 

I chose the year 2004 for analysis to determine how both newspapers initially

represented the violence and it was during 2004 that the violence and human rights

26

abuses in Darfur ﬁrst gained the attention of the NYT and the WP.2 The year
consequently witnessed a proliferation of NYT and WP stories — especially during and
following the summer (Table 1) — dedicated to describing and making sense of the
violence. Moreover, I selected the 2004 period because it included enough news articles
for distinct patterns in representations of the violence to emerge and because it yielded a
manageable number of news stories that could all be studied individually in detail. I
chose the NYT and the WP for analysis because of the esteemed reputation of both
newspapers’ foreign coverage. When it comes to international reporting, journalism
scholar Robert Entman lists them as “the two leading newspapers” in the US. in terms of
quality and inﬂuence (2004: 11). Furthermore, I selected the NYT and the WP because
both had reporters on the ground in Darfur, bordering areas of Chad, and Sudan’s capital
Khartoum producing news stories during 2004.

A textual analysis methodology called ‘framing’ informed and guided my
examination of NYT and WP coverage of Darfur. Framing directs attention to how
meanings are conveyed in news texts through the operation of ‘frames’ (Entman, 1993).
Frames are inforrnation-ordering devices that guide news consumers’ understandings of
news events - they “encourage those perceiving and thinking about events to develop
particular understandings of them” (Entman, 1991: 7). Overall, frames tell us how to
interpret events (Entman, 1993, 2004: 5-6; Klak, 1994: 321; Myers et al., 1996: 25;

Dodds, 1998). For example, a frame that emerged in the British news media for

 

2 NYT and WP coverage of Darfur in 2003 was virtually non-existent despite the occurrence of large-scale
violence in the region during this period. For example, a search in the Lexus-Nexus database for stories
carried in both newspapers during the 2003 period with “Darfur” in the headline and/or lead paragraphs
yielded only one story.

27

explaining the Bosnian Conﬂict in the early 19903 was that the violence was a result of
‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ (Dodds, 1998; Robison, 2004).

Frames work essentially through selection and salience — attention is called to
certain facets of news events, thereby elevating them in prominence, which in turn makes
them more memorable and meaningful to news consumers (Entman, 1993: 53). The
objective of scholars studying frames has been to detect and illustrate their existence in
news media. A key way in which this is achieved is by uncovering the particular words
emphasized in a news narrative, especially words that appear repeatedly (Entman, 1991 :
7, 1993, 2004: 6-8; Klak, 1994; Myers et al., 1996; Potter, 2006). Repetition of certain
words has the effect of augmenting their salience, which increases their potential for
guiding news consurners’ understandings of news events (Entman, 1991: 7). Frequently
invoked words comprise frames and their connotations help structure the interpretation of
issues and events for news audiences. The conventional approach to elucidating frames
has been through the accounting for and enumeration of words that consistently appear
throughout a news narrative on a speciﬁc event or topic (Entman, 1991; Klak, 1994;
Myers et al., 1996; Potter, 2006). The words that comprise frames are then placed into
context through the provision of speciﬁc examples of how they have been used in news
stories.

Cultural geographers have utilized the framing methodology in analyzing the
foreign coverage of several major US. newspapers (Klak, 1994; Myers etal., 1996;
Potter, 2006). In particular, these geographers examined how US. newspapers framed
issues and events in non—Westem places — such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Myers et

al., 1996), social and economic crisis in Havana, Cuba during the early 19903 (Klak,

28

1994), and environmental degradation, emigration, and political upheaval in Haiti during
2004 (Potter, 2006) -— and focused on the kinds of understandings and representations of
foreign places and peoples that emerged from the interpretive news frames uncovered in
their analyses. These geographers have demonstrated that news frames pertaining to
events in the non-Westem world are important for geographers to study because they
produce particular impressions and understandings about foreign places and peoples.

Furthermore, these geographers compared U.S. newspaper representations of the
non-West established in news frames against scholarly research relating to the same
foreign issues, places, and peoples highlighted in newspapers. Scholars and journalists
are trained differently from each other, collect their data in different ways and for
different purposes, write for different audiences, and are enmeshed within different
political and institutional structures, therefore, their representations of the same issues,
places, and peoples often differ signiﬁcantly (Klak, 1994; Myers et al., 1996). Thus,
geographers drew upon information from scholarly research to construct alternative
understandings of non-Westem peoples, places, and issues to those produced by US.
newspapers. Geographers did not regard representations of the non-West gleaned from
scholarly sources as yielding incontrovertible ‘truths,’ but deemed them, nonetheless, to
provide understandings of the world less imbued by popular cultural prejudices and more
attuned to the historical, political, and cultural complexity of foreign places, peoples, and
events than those provided by newspapers. Geographers, thus, also employed scholarly
research to challenge U.S. newspaper representations of the non-West, showing them to
be simplistic, culturally biased, and lacking serious historical, political, and cultural

consideration.

29

In analyzing the NYT’s and the WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur, I focused on how
both newspapers ‘framed’ the violence in Darfur. While reading news articles, I
concentrated on and noted how both newspapers consistently interpreted the violence.
Toward this purpose, I paid particular attention to how people and socio-political groups
involved in the violence were described and how their role in the violence was
represented. Geographers have shown that how news media describe people and groups
involved in violence provides understandings of how that violence is rationalized and
interpreted in news coverage (Myers et al., 1996; Dodds, 1998; Robison, 2004). I present
how people and groups implicated in the violence are represented and discuss what types
of understandings of violence these representations yield.

Moreover, I recorded which words were repeatedly used to explain the violence
and to describe the people and groups involved in it. I counted and tabulated these
frequently occurring words and tallied the total number of news articles that carried them
to establish a sense of how prevalent their usage was in the 2004 coverage. I reﬂected
upon the meanings of these recurring words in order to determine what kinds of
representations and understandings of Darfur’s violence that they communicate. Placing
the recurring words into context by providing examples of how they were used in news
stories facilitated this. I also reﬂected upon the types of understandings of Darfur as a
place and society that are imparted to news consumers as a result of both newspapers’
interpretations of violence and concomitant representations of people involved in it.

Additionally, I juxtaposed NYT and WP interpretations of violence and
accompanying representations of people with historical, anthropological, and

geographical scholarly research relating to Darfur and the region’s violence. I used this

30

body of academic research to develop an alternative description of Darfur focused
particularly on the political history, people, ethnic composition, and cultural ecology of
the region. I also used this literature to construct an alternative interpretation of the
current violence in Darfur that highlights the historical, political, ethnic, and ecological
factors that culminated to produce it. The descriptions of Darfur and interpretations of
the region’s violence obtained from the scholarly literature begin the next section,
preceding the analysis of NYT and WP Darfur coverage. In the analysis of NYT and WP
coverage, however, I continually refer back to the scholarly literature in order to
problematize some aspects of both newspapers’ interpretations of violence and

concomitant representations of people.

31

3. Scholarly Representations of Darfur

3.1 Cultural Geography of Darfur

Darfur is comprised of three federal states and located in western Sudan bordering

Libya, Chad, and the Central African Republic (Figure 1). Its present-day political

 

 

 

 

  

Niger

 
 
  
 

Eritrea

D'ibouti
t J

  

Somalia

  
  

   

Kenya

 

 

 

ofCongo

 

Figure 1: Map of Darfur, Sudan

boundaries are based largely on the territorial extent of the Darfur Sultanate, an
autonomous polity that existed for almost three centuries beginning in the mid-
seventeenth century (de Waal, 2005). Encompassing nearly 150,000 square miles — an
area roughly the size of France — Darfur contains a great diversity of cultures, livelihood

patterns, and ecologies. It lies entirely within the vast Sahelian belt of desert, semi-

32

desert, and savanna, and can be divided into three general regions based on
environmental conditions and predominant livelihood practices and ethnic groups
(O’Fahey, 1980: 1-8).

Nomadic pastoralist groups dominate Darfur’s northern and southern regions. In
Darfur’s arid and unfertile north, which sits south of the Sahara and annually receives
about 300m of rain, nomadic pastoralism based on camels is the principal livelihood
pursuit (Daly, 2007: 6; Prunier, 2007: 3). Darfur’s northern nomadic groups are grouped
under the name ‘Abbala,’ or ‘camel-people’ in Arabic (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 9). In
Darfur’s south, a vast sandy region where rainfall is more plentiful than in the arid north,
cattle-based nomadic pastoralism predominates (Daly, 2007: 7; Prunier, 2007: 3).
Darfur’s southern nomadic groups are generally referred to as ‘Baggara,’ or ‘cattle-
pe0p1e’ in Arabic (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 9). The generalizing labels of Abbala and
Baggara, however, mask the great number and ethnic complexity of Darfur’s nomadic
groups. Both north and south Darfur are home to a vast array of nomadic ethnic
communities and these groups can trace their lineage to several different regions of the
Arab Near East and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, the Nile Valley, North
Africa, and especially West Africa (O’Fahey, 1980: 4-6; de Waal, 2005: 187-8; Prunier,
2007: 6). Over the years, nomadic groups originating from different parts of the African
and Arab worlds have intermixed, thereby combining various African and Arab cultures
to produce a unique cultural and ethnic mosaic of nomadic communities (de Waal, 2005:
187-9; Daly, 2007: 10). Darfur’s nomadic groups have been traditionally called ‘Arab’ in
Darfur — not in a strict ethnic and cultural sense, but chieﬂy because they are nomadic (de

Waal, 2005: 185; Prunier, 2007: 5).

33

Wedged between the predominantly nomadic northern and southern regions are
Darfur’s fertile savanna lands (O’Fahey, 1980: 1; Prunier, 2007: 3). Year-round, settled
agriculture dominates here and is mainly rain-fed or practiced along and in the beds of
seasonal watercourses (O’Fahey, 1980: 2; Daly, 2007: 6-7). The region is home to
several agriculture-practicing ethnic communities, the two largest being the Fur and
Masalit. The Fur are regarded as indigenous to Darfur and they ruled the Darfur
Sultanate (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 3; Prunier, 2007: 6-7).

Darfur’s nomadic and agricultural spheres have not been isolated from one
another, but have historically been tightly linked through mutual exchange relationships
between Darfur’s farmers and nomadic pastoralists. This is particularly evident in the
farmer-pastoralist relations exhibited between Abbala nomads and Darfurian farming
communities, especially the Fur.3 Speciﬁcally, during the dry season in Darfur —
approximately October through May (Prunier, 2007: 3) — water supplies and pasture
dwindle in the arid north and Abbala groups migrate south in search of sufﬁcient water
and pasture for their camels and livestock, which brings them into contact with farming
communities (de Waal, 1989). Farmers have traditionally accommodated migrating
nomads by providing them with temporary access to pasture and water resources in return
for some form of compensation (Harir, 1994; 162; de Waal, 2005: 190). For example,
some Abbala have paid rent while others have labored on farms, taking care of farmers’
livestock and providing load camels to transport produce to store houses and markets
(Harir, 1994: 179; Daly, 2007: 216). Moreover, in addition to receiving needed pasture

and water, Abbala often obtain from farmers millet, a staple of their diet (de Waal, 1989:

 

3 Symbiotic relationships have also existed between Baggara nomads and Darfurian farmers (see Haaland,
1969).

34

5]). Mutual exchange relationships between Darfur’s nomads and farmers have
historically been important to maintaining the livelihoods of both groups and have
brought both into relations of interdependence as a result (O’Fahey, 1980: 2; de Waal,
1989). Furthermore, these exchange relationships have encouraged a great deal of
intermarrying between nomadic and farming groups (Haaland, 1969; Harir, 1994: 162-3).

As noted above, Darfur is comprised of numerous ethnic groups. Prunier (2007:
4) estimates that Darfur is populated by at least 36 and perhaps up to 150 different ethnic
groups. Distinctions between ethnic identities and physical appearances in Darfur,
however, are blurry owing to hundreds of years of interdependence, intermixing, and
intermarrying between groups (Haaland, 1969; O’Fahey, 1980: 1-8; de Waal, 2005; Daly,
2007; Prunier, 2007). Virtually all Darfurians have mixed ancestry and all villages in
Darfur are ethnically mixed with elements of ‘Arab’ nomadic groups and ‘non-Arab’
agricultural groups (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 4-5). In addition, virtually everyone is
Muslim and nearly everyone speaks Arabic, including ‘non-Arab’ groups that speak
native languages, such as the Fur (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 4; Daly, 2007: 13). In fact, the
‘non-Arab’ Fur were crucial to the promotion and spreading of Islam and Arabic
throughout Darfur during the reign of the Darﬁir Sultanate (O’Fahey, 1980: 9; Flint & de
Waal, 2005: 3).

If the ethnic map in Darfur was not complicated enough, ethnicity there has
historically been incredibly ﬂexible, always shifting according to political, economic, and
ecological contexts. “The salient point is of ﬂuidity and change, not stagnation and
immemorially ﬁxed positions geographically, socially, or economically” (Daly, 2007:

12). For example, Haaland (1969) during the 19603 documented how Fur farmers

35

invested in cattle to a point where the cattle’s value surpassed that of their farms and, in
order to protect their cattle investment, they had to cross ethnic boundaries, abandoning
their former sedentary life and indigenous language to ‘become’ Baggara. These Fur
farmers became nomadic and were incorporated into Baggara communities where they
acquired Baggara wives and adopted Baggara customs. Similarly, it has been common
for ‘Arab’ nomads, both Baggara and Abbala, to settle and ‘become’ Fur, especially
when camels and livestock were lost to drought, sickness, or war (O’Fahey, 1980: 8;
Harir, 1994: 162-3; Flint & de Waal, 2005: 5).

In summary, Darfur is a cultural mosaic marked by a diversity of ethnic groups,
some nomadic and some agricultural. Its many nomadic groups exhibit a coalescence of
various Arab and African cultures. The region’s ‘Arab’ nomadic groups and ‘non-Arab’
farming communities have also mixed extensively, partly through the complementary
economic and ecological relationships developed between them, further blending Arab
and African cultures and ethnic identities. Moreover, ethnic boundaries are slight,
remarkably permeable, and constantly changing. Despite — or perhaps because of -
Darfur’s extraordinary cultural and ethnic diversity, and the ease with which ethnic
divisions can be surmounted, there has historically existed in Darfur a coherent regional
cultural identity that is cemented by Islam and Arabic and simultaneously African and
Arab (de Waal, 1989, 2005). Today, however, ethnic identities in Darfur have become
what, historically, they were not - simple, rigid, unyielding, and mutually antagonistic.
This development is intimately related to the violence now occurring in the region and
the conﬂuence of historical, political, and ecological circumstances that led to it. An

interpretation of this violence follows, beginning with the end of the Darfur Sultanate.

36

3.2 Darfur’s Sorrow — An Interpretation of Violence

In 1916, the independent Darfur Sultanate ceased to exist as it and the rest of
modem-day Sudan were incorporated into the British Empire. British colonial rule in
Sudan lasted until 1956 and during this period Darfur was the object of severe social and
economic neglect. The British paid scant attention to Darfur, regarding the region as a
backwater, and only a trickle of funds and resources targeted for social and economic
development reached it (Daly, 2007: 2; Prunier, 2007: 26). Consequently, at the end of
the colonial period, Darfur was hopelessly underdeveloped (Prunier, 2007: 32-3).

The abysmal social and economic conditions in Darfur did not improve following
Sudanese independence in 1956. During the postcolonial period, successive Arab-
dominated regimes in Khartoum have viewed Darfur as a region of little importance and
the marginalization of it begun by the British has continued and deepened. For example,
projects for social and economic development in the region have been virtually absent,
and Darfurians have been largely excluded from national political leadership positions
(Harir, 1994: 155; Flint & de Waal, 2005: 15-18; Daly, 2007: 211-14). Khartoum’s
blatant disregard for Darfur and the poverty that it has wrought represents a key variable
in the complex equation that has led to the harrowing situation in Darfur today. In
particular, during the 19803, this disregard and concomitant destitution interacted with
drought, civil war in neighboring Chad, and the geopolitical ambitions of Libya to anchor
the roots of Darfur’s current violence.

An Arab supremacist and ardent pan-Arabist, Libya’s Muammar Gaddaﬁ sought
to establish an Arab-Islamic Empire across the Sahel during the 19703 and 19803 (Burr &

Collins, 1999). To achieve this objective, Gaddaﬁ created the Islamic Legion (IL), a

37

paramilitary group that would be used to unite and ‘Arabize’ the Sahel through military
means (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 23; Prunier, 2007: 44). ‘Arab’ militiamen were recruited
for the IL and came from all over the Sahel. In particular, the IL targeted and drew
heavily from Sahelian nomadic groups — these groups were deemed to be ‘Arabs,’
however, simply because they were nomadic (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 23). During the
mid- to late-19803, IL militiamen launched attacks against the Chadian government from
military bases located in Darfur.

Chad loomed large in Gaddaﬁ’s plans for a uniﬁed Arab-Islamic belt in the Sahel.
From 1965 to 1990, the country was ensnared in a civil war between its ‘African,’
Christian-dominated government in the south and Muslim rebels in the north. Gaddaﬁ
sought to overthrow the African-Christian government in Ndjamena and eventually annex
it by supporting the northern rebels and directing IL military strikes in Chad (Burr &
Collins, 1999). Bordering Chad (Figure 1), Gaddaﬁ regarded Darfur as a strategic
location from which to launch IL attacks against the Chadian government (Flint & de
Waal, 2005; Prunier, 2007). During the 19703 and early 19803, however, Khartoum
denied Gaddaﬁ access to Darfur due to a political rift between Gaddaﬁ and Sudan’s then
president Jaafar al-Nimeiri (Prunier, 2007: 44-6). In 1985, though, Nimeiri was
overthrown and replaced by Sadiq al-Mahdi, a Gaddaﬁ ally. Sadiq struck a deal with
Gaddaﬁ in which Khartoum received money, weapons, and oil to support its civil war
with southern Sudan in return for granting Gaddaﬁ unfettered access to Darfur, which
would be used as a military base and launching pad to achieve Gaddaﬁ’s political
ambitions in Chad (Burr & Collins, 1999; Flint & de Waal, 2005: 25). In 1985, as a

result, conveys of Libyan trucks, scores of weapons, and thousands of IL troops and

38

allied Chadian nomads from across the border ﬂowed into Darfur, all with their sights set
on Ndjamena (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 25; Prunier, 2007: 55). The Libyan military
presence in Darfur coincided with dire social and environmental conditions in the region
and the emergence of widespread tensions between Darfur’s Abbala nomads and
agricultural communities.

In the early 1980s, Darfur experienced a succession of droughts that deteriorated
into famine during the 1984-85 period and hundreds of thousands of Darfurians died, due
mainly to malnutrition-related illnesses (Bush, 1988; de Waal, 1989). Negligence and
indifference displayed by Khartoum played a crucial role in the development of the
famine. For example, Khartoum’s long-tenn neglect of Darfur’s water infrastructure left
it in a dilapidated state and thus unable to mitigate water shortages (Daly, 2007: 213-14;
Prunier, 2007: 49-50), and Khartoum eliminated in the early 19803 what was once a
successful famine prevention and relief system that was intact in Sudan’s rural areas,
including Darfur (de Waal, 1998). Moreover, urgent requests made to Khartoum by
Darfur’s regional government for assistance were met with no response — Khartoum
denied that problems existed in Darfur (Bush, 1988: 9). In fact, Khartoum actively
blocked food aid and medicines from reaching the region (Daly, 2007: 228; Prunier,
2007: 54-6). In the midst of crisis, Darfur was simply left to its own devices and
Khartoum’s neglect of the region prolonged and exacerbated the famine (Bush, 1988; de
Waal, 1998; Daly, 2007: 228; Prunier, 2007: 56).

All of Darfur suffered in the mid-19803, but the region’s Abbala nomads were
perhaps most devastated. The succession of droughts signiﬁcantly deteriorated and

diminished pasture and water resources in northern Darfur and the character of Abbala

39

seasonal migrations south into Darfur’s agricultural belt in search of pasture and water
began to radically change as a result (de Waal, 1989; Daly, 2007: 215-17). Speciﬁcally,
Abbala migrant numbers were substantially larger than in years past and settlement by
Abbala nomads became in many cases permanent as opposed to seasonal (Harir, 1994:
163; Daly, 2007: 215-17). Adding to the unprecedented number of Abbala amassing in
Darfur’s agricultural region were inﬂuxes of Chadian nomads ﬂeeing the violence of the
Chadian civil war, and also Chadian nomads coming to join the ranks of the IL (Daly,
2007: 217; Prunier, 2007: 67). The unusually large numbers of nomads overwhelmed
farmers as their camels and livestock degraded farmers’ ﬁelds and trampled and ate
farmers’ crops (Harir, 1994: 161-2; Daly, 2007: 216-29). Moreover, nomad theft of
farmers’ animals was rampant (Harir, 1994: 161).

Farmers during this period were already struggling to survive in the grips of a
famine; the damage to their ﬁelds and pilfering of their animals and crops done by
Abbala and their herds rendered this endeavor more precarious. Under such duress,
farmers refused to accommodate the nomads, camels, and livestock inundating their
ﬁelds, and blocked access to their farms, pastures, and water sources (Harir, 1994: 179;
Daly, 2007: 217; Prunier, 2007: 57). Abbala were deprived of the pasture and water
resources needed to maintain their herds and nomadic livelihoods and violent conﬂicts
over land and natural resources proliferated between them and farmers (Harir, 1994;
Daly, 2007: 217). Attempts to reconcile such conﬂicts were futile because Khartoum
never provided the regional government in Darfur with the necessary resources to

mediate natural resource disputes and enforce decisions made on their resolution — in

40

fact, law enforcement in Darfur completely collapsed during the 19803 (de Waal, 1989:
xv; Harir, 1994; Daly, 2007: 240-3).

The ecologically adverse effects wrought by the droughts in northern Darfur
coupled with the actions of farmers barring access to pasture and water had devastating
impacts on Abbala nomads. Deprived of pasture and water, Abbala nomads found it
increasingly difﬁcult to maintain their nomadic livelihoods. They became impoverished
as they lost and sold their camels and livestock in massive numbers, and many were
forced to become sedentary, abandoning a revered way of life (Flint & de Waal, 2005:
46-7; Daly, 2007: 230). Abbala were greatly shaken and suffered dramatic cultural and
mental damage as a result (Prunier, 2007: 55-6). The destitute and demoralized state of
Abbala groups in the mid-19803 rendered them ready recruits to Gaddaﬁ’s militias as
they entered Darfur in 1985.

Amid the famine conditions and escalation in farmer-herder conﬂicts, IL forces
made their way into Darfur. Smarting from the deleterious effects of the droughts and
preventative actions of farmers, and seeking a route out of poverty, Darfur’s Abbala
communities were easy targets for Gaddaﬁ’s militias who bore famine relief and money
(Daly, 2007: 266; Prunier, 2007: 55). Gaddaﬁ considered Darfur’s Abbala nomads as his
‘Arab’ allies and IL forces swiftly incorporated them into their ranks, training and arming
them to ﬁght in Chad (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 48). Khartoum, meanwhile, turned a blind
eye to Libyan recruitments of Darfur’s Abbala into the IL (Daly, 2007: 243).

In addition to furnishing money, food, and arms, IL militiamen indoctrinated
Abbala with a racist and militant ideology that espoused ‘Arab’ superiority (Prunier,

2007: 44). Darfur’s Abbala suffered great damage during the droughts and owing to the

41

racist propaganda disseminated by Libyan militiamen, their woes were increasingly
interpreted in ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ terms - that is, blame for their miserable condition was
placed squarely on so-called ‘non-Arab,’ ‘black African’ agricultural groups in Darfur
(Prunier, 2007: 57-8). Libyan propaganda asserted that lowly and detestable ‘black
Africans’ had trampled upon the ‘rights’ to land and natural resources of ‘Arabs’ (Daly,
2007: 243). This Arab supremacist ideology is important because it exposed Darfurians
to ﬁxed and polarized ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ identities for the ﬁrst time (de Waal, 2005;
Prunier, 2007: 79). Although these understandings of identity were hitherto alien to
Darfurians, thrust upon them by the outside world, in the milieu of catastrophe visited
upon Darfur’s Abbala, the notion that there existed in Darfur two coherent socio-cultural
communities — ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ — and the explanation that ‘Aﬁicans’ were chieﬂy
responsible for the plight of the ‘Arabs’ increasingly gained credence among Darfur’s
Abbala (de Waal, 2005; Prunier, 2007: 57-8). The supremacist Arab ideology and the
mutually antagonistic ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ identities that it posited would prove to have
devastating consequences for Darfur’s agricultural communities.

Heavily armed and imbued with a racist ideology, Abbala nomads during the late
19803 began ruthlessly attacking ‘African’ - especially Fur — farms and villages with the
overall objective of removing ‘Africans’ so as to claim the emptied land as their own,
thereby securing access to pasture and water resources in perpetuity (Harir, 1994; Daly,
2007: 217). The Arab supremacist ideology justiﬁed the character and goals of the
attacks (Daly, 2007). Adding to this violence were frequent battles between Chadian and
IL forces on Darfur’s soil (Daly, 2007: 243; Prunier, 2007: 61). As a result of the Chad-

Libya conﬂict spilling into Darfur and the marauding activities of Abbala nomads,

42

thousands of Fur were murdered and hundreds of Fur villages destroyed in the late 19803
(Daly, 2007: 246; Prunier, 2007: 63-5). Fur protested the Libyan presence in Darfur, but
their objections fell on deaf ears in Khartoum (Prunier, 2007: 63). Fed up, Fur organized
defense militias and by the late 19803, Darfur was in the throes of a civil war between
Libyan-backed Abbala nomads and Fur militias, which blended with the Chad-Libya war
(Daly, 2007: 244; Prunier, 2007: 60-1). Finally, in 1990, the war in Chad ended and
Libya consequently lost interest in Darfur and its presence there subsided (Prunier, 2007:
71). Darfur, meanwhile, was irrevocably changed for the worse — a deep rift had been
driven between Darfur’s Abbala and agricultural communities and a powerfully militant
and racist ideology had been instilled in the Abbala nomads that produced historically
bogus and mutually antagonistic ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ identities. Nonetheless, following
the end of the Chad conﬂict and subsequent exit of Libya from Darfur, a period of
relative calm fell upon the region. The lull would be broken in the late-19903, however,
as West Darfur erupted into violence.

During the mid-19903 in West Darfur state, several Masalit were stripped of
inﬂuential regional government positions because of constitutional reforms imposed by
Khartoum; their jobs were given to local Abbala ‘Arabs’ (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 58).
The positions bestowed to ‘Arabs’ the power to grant rights to land, which nulliﬁed
traditional Masalit claims to land (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 58-9; Daly, 2007: 262).
Incensed, Masalit resisted and unrest grew in West Darfur. Khartoum construed Masalit
resistance as being insurrectionary and responded by mobilizing and arming a proxy
militia picked predominantly from Darfur’s Abbala nomads to quash it (Flint & de Waal,

2005: 59-65; Daly, 2007: 262-3). Khartoum’s selection of Abbala nomads was purely

43

opportunistic for three main reasons — ﬁrst, it allowed Khartoum to conserve its own
stretched military resources as it fought a civil war with the south of Sudan (Flint & de
Waal, 2005: 57); second, Abbala nomads remained in a destitute state and therefore were
ripe for the picking as a proxy instrument as Khartoum coaxed nomadic groups with
money and promises of development projects (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 103; Prunier,
2007: 97); and last, relations between Masalit and Abbala nomads were already hostile
due to Libyan-inspired ideological manipulation and long-running grievances over access
to land and natural resources (Prtmier, 2007: 97-8).

In a situation reminiscent of the actions of IL-supported Abbala militias in the late
19803, the Khartoum-sponsored nomadic militias engaged in unremitting attacks on
Masalit villages and farms in which they ruthlessly murdered and raped, set ﬁre to
villages, and destroyed everything that made life possible, such as agricultural ﬁelds and
drinking wells (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 59-60; Daly, 2007: 263). In sabotaging the
Masalit’s sustenance base, the nomadic militias sought to render life untenable for
Masalit farmers so that they could conﬁscate the land — land that they believed belonged
rightfully to them owing to the Arab supremacist ideology foisted upon them by Libya
(Daly, 2007: 267). The nomadic militias earned a name among the Masalit as the
‘Janjaweed,’ “a word that means ‘hordes’ or ‘rufﬁans”’ (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 55).
During the period 1996-98, Janjaweed attacks on Masalit villages claimed hundreds of
civilian lives and displaced 100,000 (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 59; Daly, 2007: 263). The
Janjaweed militias operated with Khartoum-sanctioned impunity, and in several
instances, even worked in tandem with Sudanese military forces in razing Masalit

villages (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 59-61; Prunier, 2007: 75).

44

Adding further to Janjaweed-dispensed violence was an attempt in 2001 by
southern Sudan’s main anti-govemment rebel group — Sudan People’s Liberation Army
(SPLA) — to move into Darfur and create alliances with beleaguered ‘non-Arab’
communities, such as the Fur and Masalit, and support incipient anti-Khartoum
movements emerging in Darfur (Prunier, 2007: 87). In response, Khartoum harnessed
the Janjaweed militias to successfully foil the SPLA incursion. The Janjaweed
subsequently carried out devastating attacks on Darfurian groups suspected of being ‘in
league’ with the SPLA — hundreds died, hundreds of villages were torched (especially
Fur), and tens of thousands ﬂed their homes (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 62-5; Prunier, 2007:
87-8). Again, the nomadic militias acted with impunity.

In addition to the many years of neglect in Darfur when it came to social and
economic development, political participation, famine relief, and security provision,
several Darfurian groups in the late 19903 and early 20003 were again being murdered
and violently removed from their land by nomadic militias that operated with Khartoum’s
blessing and military support. In response, Darfur’s Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa4
communities — groups that were frequently the target of Janjaweed attacks — forged
political and military alliances in the early 20003 in order to combat the predations of the
nomadic militias, and more important, to demand serious political change from Khartoum
in the hopes of signiﬁcantly improving social, economic, and political conditions in
Darfur (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 66-96; Daly, 2007: 268-9). These alliances were formed

under the banners of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality

 

4 The Zaghawa are a camel-herding nomadic group based in Darfur’s northwest (Daly, 2007: 6).
Historically, the Zaghawa were aligned with Darfur’s other Abbala groups, but relations between them
frayed during the 19803 droughts and violent battles between them proliferated (Flint & de Waal, 2005:
73).

45

Movement (JEM) and labeled ‘African’ (de Waal, 2005). It is important to note,
however, that the ‘African’ label is purely opportunistic in that it was chosen by SLA and
JEM leaders as a prudent means to building political alliances - it serves to unite
disparate Darfurian groups that have suffered at the hands of the Arab Sudanese
government and ‘Arab’ nomadic militias (de Waal, 2005). The ‘African’ label when
applied to any Darfurian group, however, is historically and anthropologically naive —
Darfurians had never seen or represented themselves as ‘Aﬁican’ until rather recently
when the label was imposed upon certain non-nomadic groups as a result of the Libyan
discourse on Arab superiority brought into the region (de Waal, 1989, 2005; Prunier,
2007: 76-80).

Weary of the violence and wretched conditions in Darfur, the ‘African’ SLA and
J EM promulgated political agendas that called for an end to the political and economic
marginalization of the region (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 82-96). In their condemnations of
Darfur’s condition, both groups placed the blame solely on Khartoum and not Darfur’s
‘Arab’ nomads. The SLA and JEM regard Darfur’s nomadic populations as essential
components of Darfur’s social fabric and attribute their violent activities ultimately to
Khartourn’s political machinations and disregard of the region (Flint & de Waal, 2005:
70-83). The SLA and JEM regard political change in Khartoum as essential to ending the
violence plaguing Darfur and to improving Darfur’s political and economic lot (Flint &
de Waal, 2005: 82—96). The means through which both groups have attempted to achieve
this desired political change have been bold military strikes directed against government
targets, particularly military installations, throughout Darfur beginning in 2001 and

escalating in the beginning of 2003 (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 97-100; Prunier, 2007: 92).

46

In response to the SLA and JEM attacks, Khartoum mobilized its Janjaweed
militias in Darfur in the hopes of swiftly crushing the resistance. In particular, during the
summer of 2003, Khartoum increased its efforts in building up the nomadic proxy
militias, establishing numerous military camps all over Darfur to recruit and train Abbala
nomads — militia recruits were heavily armed and paid well and ‘Arab’ leaders were
promised development projects if they assisted in the building of the proxy armies (Flint
& de Waal, 2005: 102-3; Daly, 2007: 277-82). The militias were eventually organized
into coordinated military units and unleashed on a grand scale in July 2003 to suppress
SLA and IBM attacks. In the fall of 2003, however, Janjaweed attacks turned
increasingly toward civilian villages far from rebel positions, to stanch the ﬂow of rebel
recruits (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 104-9). Revealed in a captured government
communique to J anjaweed leaders, Khartoum in fact ordered the nomadic militias “to
change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes” through the killing “of
intellectuals and youths who may join the rebels in ﬁghting” (Flint & de Waal, 2005:
106). Moreover, Janjaweed attacks on civilian villages were closely coordinated with air
force bombardments by the Sudanese army (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 104-9).

The character of the Janjaweed attacks mirrored those of the past carried out by
nomadic militias on civilian villages in Darfur — mass murder and rape was rampant,
entire villages were leveled, and pillars of sustenance, such as agricultural ﬁelds and
water pumps, were destroyed. Again, the overarching goal of the attacks was permanent
removal of the inhabitants so as to take their land (Flint & de Waal, 2005: 104-8; Prunier,
2007). As in the past, the Libyan-introduced Arab supremacist ideology inculcated in

nomads justiﬁed the attacks and their aim of conﬁscating the land of ‘non-Arabs’ (Flint

47

& de Waal, 2005; Daly, 2007; Prunier, 2007). These attacks differed signiﬁcantly than
those in the past, however, in the scope of their killings and in the magnitude of the
displacement of peoples that they triggered. Since the summer of 2003, hundreds of
thousands of Darfurians have died due directly or indirectly to the coordinated Janjaweed
and Sudanese government attacks and millions more have ﬂed their homes, many of them

seeking refuge in the hundreds of refugee camps that have sprouted all over Darfur and

neighboring Chad (ICID, 2005; Prunier, 2007; United Nations, 2008).

48

4. Results and Discussion

I begin this chapter by providing general descriptions of how the NYT and the
WP represented the chief people and groups implicated in Darfur’s violence and their
role in the violence. Based on these descriptions, I identify two frames employed by both
newspapers for explaining Darfur’s strife: 1) violence stems from a chain of connected
political issues and factors; and 2) violence revolves around socio-cultural differences
and concomitant tensions between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans.’ I devote the remainder of this
chapter to problematizing aspects of the second frame and demonstrating how it
manifests itself in both newspapers’ representations of alleged internal, local-level factors

within Darfur that have contributed to the region’s carnage.

4.1 Representations of People in Darfur and their Role in the Violence

The NYT and the WP identiﬁed four principal groups involved in Darfur’s
violence: 1) Darfur-based rebel groups, 2) the Sudanese state, 3) nomadic militias (the
Janjaweed), and 4) Darfurian civilians. The rebel groups are represented as emerging in
2003 when they attacked Sudanese military installations in Darfur. These groups, and
those who they are said to represent, are consistently described as “Aﬁican” (Table 2.1).

Table 2.1 - Representations of people and Eoups connected to the violence

 

 

Key words and phrasesa NYTb WPb Totalb "/oc
Rebels & those they represent — “African” 21 35 56 28%
Sudanese central government — “Arab” 20 23 43 22%
Nomadic ‘Janjaweed’ militias — “Arab” 79 75 154 78%
Civilian victims - “African” 57 58 1 15 58%

 

a Key words and phrases used in the NYT’s and the WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur.
b Total number of news articles that carried the speciﬁed word or phrase.

C .
Percentage of total news articles.

49

For instance, Wax writes, “The Darfur conﬂict began in early 2003, when. . .African rebel
groups, attacked military installations, charging that the government had treated Africans
unjustly” (emphasis added: WP, July 4). The motivation for the rebels’ emergence and
strikes against government targets is represented as Khartoum’s marginalization of
Darfur’s ‘African’ communities and a related desire to improve the political and
economic lot of Darfur’s ‘Africans.’ This is illustrated in the comment, “The rebels have
fought. . .for more resources for the black African majority in Darfur, which they say has
been neglected by a government in Khartoum dominated by Arabs” (Lacey, NYT, Aug.
3).

As the last quotation illustrates, the Sudanese central government is regularly
described as ruled or dominated by people who are “Arab” (Table 2.1). In addition to
being portrayed as responsible for the grievances that inspire the violent actions of
Darfur’s ‘African’ rebels, the ‘Arab’ government in Khartoum is represented as
implicated in Darfur’s violence in two ways. First, Khartoum is depicted as mobilizing
and arming nomadic militias in order to quash Darfur’s rebels. Second, the Sudanese
military is represented as working in tandem with the nomadic militias in displacing and
murdering Darfurian civilians. Khartoum’s complicity in the violence is shown when
Wax comments, “The violence erupted. . .when African tribes rebelled against the Arab-
led government. The government responded by bombing villages and arming and
supporting an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed to put down the rebellion” (WP, Sept.
28). The nomadic militias, thus, are represented as operating at the behest of Khartoum
and are nearly always described as “Arab,” as shown in Wax’s previous statement (Table

2.1). In cooperation with the Sudanese military, the ‘Arab’ nomadic militias are depicted

50

as inﬂicting massive violence in Darfur, torturing, murdering, and uprooting from their
homes bewildering numbers of innocent Darfurian civilians, who are regularly described
as “African” (Table 2.1). For example, Elbagir asserts, “As many as 50,000 African
villagers have been killed and 1.5 million displaced in Darfur by an Arab militia”
(emphasis added: WP, Aug. 8).

Based on these general descriptions of how the NYT and the WP represented
during 2004 the violence in Darfur and the chief peoples and socio-political groups
implicated in it, two important observations can be made. First, unlike the majority of
past US. news media representations of violence in Africa, the NYT and the WP point to
deeply political factors as contributing to Darfur’s violence — namely, the violent actions
of Darfur-based rebels aimed. at redressing the political and economic inequities suffered
by Darfurian communities at the hands of the Sudanese state, and also the Sudanese
govemment’s use of its military and mobilization of proxy militias to curb the rebels and
murder Darfurian civilians. By appreciating and shedding light on some of the critical
political factors and processes underlying Darfur’s carnage, the NYT and the WP did not
reduce all aspects of the violence to apolitical, primitive ‘tribalism,’ as has been the
standard practice in American news media portrayals of conﬂict in Africa (Hawk, 1992b;
Fair, 1993; Myers et al., 1996).

Second, the NYT and the WP consistently represented the main peoples and
groups involved in Darfur’s violence as either ‘Arab’ or ‘African’ (Table 2.1), and both
newspapers invariably represented discord and violence as taking place along an
‘African’-‘Arab’ chasm. For example, an Arab-dominated government in Khartoum is

represented as neglecting the ‘African’ community in Darfur, which serves as inspiration

51

for the ‘African’ rebels’ attacks on the Arab government. Additionally, ‘Arabs’ —
embodied in either the nomadic militias or the Sudanese military, or both in conjunction
- are represented as attacking ‘Aﬁican’ groups in Darfur, as shown in the comment,
“Sudan’s Arab-dominated government is accused of carrying out bombing raids in
coordination with ground attacks by Arab tribal militias on the villages of non-Arab
Aﬂican farmers” (emphasis added: NYT, Nov. 6). Therefore, by always representing
antagonism as occurring between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs,’ the NYT and the WP create the
impression that socio-cultural differences between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ groups
connected to the violence have played an important role in both igniting and driving the
violence. This mirrors past US. news media interpretations of violence in Africa, which
have tended to heavily emphasize social fractures in African societies in accounting for
the emergence and spread of violence (Brock, 1992; Idelema, 1992; Fair, 1993: 15;
Myers et al., 1996; Lowe et al., 1997; Melvem, 2007).

Two frames for interpreting Darfur’s violence are thus established based on the
manner in which the NYT and the WP represented violence and the people and socio-
political groups implicated in it highlighted above in the two observations: 1) the
violence in Darfur stems from and revolves around a series of connected political issues
and factors (e. g., Khartoum’s neglect of Darfur, a Khartoum-launched counterinsurgency
employing proxy militias); and 2) Darfur’s violence fundamentally constitutes a conﬂict
between various ‘Arab’ (Khartoum and the nomadic militias) and ‘African’ (Darfurian
rebels and civilians) groups, and the socio-cultural divisions between them have
contributed to sparking and fueling the violence. The ideas encapsulated in the second

frame that Darfur’s violence represents a conﬂict between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ and

52

that the cultural differences between them constitute an important contributing factor to
the violence is omnipresent in NYT and WP representations of local-level social
dynamics in Darfur that have allegedly played a crucial role in bringing about and

sustaining Darfur’s misery.

4.2 Local Dynamics of Violence in Darfur

While the NYT and the WP devoted considerable attention to highlighting the
Sudanese govemment’s role in Darfur’s violence, both newspapers focused heavily on
local social and cultural dynamics within Darfur that supposedly represent crucial
contributing factors to the crisis. In particular, purported cleavages in Darfur’s cultural
make-up are represented as fundamental to fomenting and sustaining the bloodshed.
Instances of conﬂict and violence are frequently represented as occuning between native
‘African’ (embodied in the rebel groups and civilian victims) and ‘Arab’ (often depicted
as comprising the Khartoum-backed nomadic militias) communities in Darfur, with the
latter mostly inﬂicting harm on the former. This is shown when Sengupta asserts that
Darfur represents a “brutal war pitting black Aﬁican tribes against Arab communities”
(emphasis added: NYT, July 30); and similarly in the comment, “The ﬁghting in Darfur
pits. . .Arab nomads against black African residents” (emphasis added: WP, May 10).

Thus, in positing two discrete socio-cultural communities in Darfur — ‘African’
and ‘Arab’ — and representing violence as always taking place between them, the NYT
and the WP imply that Darfur’s violence is partly an ethnic or tribal conﬂict. Indeed, the
‘Arab’ and ‘African’ designations are often represented as constituting bona ﬁde ethnic
or tribal group formations and identities in Darfur, as illustrated in the statement, “it was

largely tribes that call themselves African that crowded into refugee camps” (emphasis

53

added: Sengupta, NYT, Oct. 3); and similarly in the comment, “tensions in this strategic
town in North Darfur had boiled over, pitting ethnic Africans and Arabs against each
other in mob violence (emphasis added: Sengupta, NYT, Nov. 29). Moreover, the words
“ethnic” and “tribe” and words derived from them such as “ethnicity” and “tribal” were
prevalent in the 2004 coverage (Table 2.2), thereby reinforcing the notion that ethnicity

or tribalism is an important factor in fueling the violence.

Table 2.2 - Representations of ethnicity and tribalism

 

 

Key words and phrasesa NYTb WPb Totalb %c
“Tribe(s),” “tribal,” or “tribalism” 24 41 65 33%
“Ethnic” or “ethnicity” 40 26 66 33%
“Ethnic cleansing” 21 14 35 18%
“Genocide” 37 43 80 40%

 

a Key words and phrases used in the NYT’s and the WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur.
b Total number of news articles that canied the speciﬁed word or phrase.

c .
Percentage of total news articles.

Furthermore, readers are many times explicitly told that Darfur’s violence does
indeed stem from ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ differences and related hostilities. This is shown
when Sengupta writes, “As Aﬁica’s longest-running civil war comes to a close in one
comer of this vast country, a terrifying new theater, fueled by old ethnic divides. . .opens
here [referring to Darfur] in another” (emphasis added: NYT, Jan. 17); and also when
Wax comments, “The conﬂict in Darfur is the result of long-simmering ethnic tensions”
(emphasis added: WP, June 30); and lastly in the statement, “The Darfur rebellion began
in February 2003. . .where tribal tensions have long simmered” (emphasis added: NYT,
Dec. 22). Alleged ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ antagonisms in Darfur are often represented as

entrenched and immemorial, as shown in these three comments.

54

Similarly, the NYT and the WP represented the violence as driven by differences
and tensions explicitly between Darfur’s ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ ‘ethnic’ groups, as shown
in Lacey’s statements, “An ethnic dimension to the attacks is undeniable. The militants
are Arab and the villagers they attacked were. . .from black African tribes” (NYT, July
23); and likewise in the assertion, “The antagonism has been primarily ethnic, pitting
Arabs against African villagers” (Chan, NYT, Nov. 21). Moreover, the term “genocide”
and related phrase of “ethnic cleansing” were both frequently used to represent Darfur’s
violence as an attempt by ‘Arab’ militias to completely eliminate Darfur’s ‘ethnic
African’ communities, further supporting the idea that ethnicity is a crucial motivation of
the violence (Table 2.2).

Thus, in summary, the NYT and the WP represent Darfur’s violence as
- constituting not just a conﬂict between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans,’ but an explicitly ‘tribal’ or
‘ethnic’ conﬂict between Darfur-based ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ groups, and the ‘tribal’ or
‘ethnic’ hatreds between them are presented as deep-seated and age-old, adding fodder to

the violence.

4.3 Problematizing ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ Cultural Designations

According to the scholarly literature on Darfur, there are problems with the
second framing of the violence, especially the manner in which it assigns ‘African’ and
‘Arab’ cultural labels to communities within Darfur.5 Use of the ‘Arab’ and ‘African’
group designations constructs an image of Darfur as populated by two well-deﬁned and

starkly different ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ communities that are socially and geographically

 

5 Within the scholarly literature on Darfur, the Arab designation given to the rulers of the Sudanese central
government is not treated as problematic.

55

separated from one another. This representation is remarkably simplistic in that it misses
the great diversity of ethnic groups in Darfur, the signiﬁcant amount of intennixing and
intermarrying that has historically occurred between them -— including between so-called
‘Arab’ and ‘African’ groups —- and the constantly shifting nature of ethnicity in Darfur.
Moreover, the ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ ethnic identities attributed to Darfurian
communities are represented as if they were timeless and natural. Recognition of the
political and ideological factors that, only in recent years, have contributed to shaping
these identities is entirely absent in the NYT’s and the WP’s coverage. For example,
there is not a single mention of Libya’s role in inculcating the notion of mutually hostile
‘Arab’ and ‘African’ identities among Darfur’s Abbala nomads, many of whom make up
the ranks of the Janjaweed militias (Flint & de Waal, 2005). Nor is there any recognition
of the rebels’ politically opportunistic uses of the ‘Aﬁ'ican’ label to unite Darfur’s
beleaguered communities under its sign. Indeed, the ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ identities have
become very powerful, and in a sense ‘real,’ in Darfur recently (de Waal, 2005;
Campbell, 2007; Prunier, 2007). In fact, even Darfurian civilians exposed to the violence
have insisted on claiming the ‘African’ label, not because it naturally represents them, but
because it serves as a sign of difference from those who attack them and claim an ‘Arab’
identity, and it serves as a symbol of solidarity with the ‘African’ rebels who battle their
‘Arab’ tonnentors (de Waal, 2005). It is crucial to understand, however, that there is
nothing historically salient or ‘natural’ about these ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ identities. They
are, rather, modern creations engendered through the large-scale violence that has
bedeviled the region since the late 19803 (Flint & de Waal, 2005; de Waal, 2005;

Campbell, 2007: 363; Prunier, 2007). As de Waal says, “identity markers that had little

56

salience in the past are extremely powerful today, and the overwhelming reason for this is
the appalling violence inﬂicted on people” (2005: 200).

In what follows, I would like to illustrate how the NYT and the WP produced the
‘Arab’-‘African’ divide in Darfur beyond the practice of repeatedly distinguishing the
Darfur-based groups involved in the violence as either ‘Arab’ or ‘African.’ Such an
exercise is important because the establishment of divisions between ‘Africans’ and
‘Arabs’ in other ways strengthens the idea that there exist in Darfur two unequivocally
distinct and separate ethnic communities, a notion that is essential to the larger argument
that Darfur’s violence represents a ‘tribal’ conﬂict between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ groups
in Darfur. Speciﬁcally, both newspapers produced the ‘Arab’-‘African’ distinction in

Darfur in three ways: 1) in physical appearances, 2) space, and 3) livelihood pursuits.

4.4 Differences in Physical Features of the Body

The ‘Arab’-‘African’ divide is drawn onto the bodies of Darfurians. In the NYT’s
and the WP’s coverage, we often ﬁnd bodily descriptions of Darfur’s ‘Arabs’ and
‘Africans,’ with both groups represented as exhibiting physical features different from
each other. In particular, ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ are depicted as having different skin
colors, with the former represented as having darker skin than the latter. This is apparent
in representations of the purported ‘Africans’ of Darfur — the rebel groups and civilian
victims of the violence — who are regularly described as “black” or “dark(er)-skinned”
(Table 2.3). This is demonstrated when Hoge writes, “The violence in Darfur goes back
to February 2003, when black African rebel groups rose up against the government”
(emphasis added: NYT, June 26); and also in Wax’s statement, “The militia, known as

the Janjaweed, has. . .displaced close to 1.5 million darker-skinned African villagers”

57

Table 2.3 — Representations of physical appearances

 

 

Key words and phrasesa NYTb WPb Totalb %c
Rebels — “black” or “dark(er)-skinned” 14 15 29 15%
Civilian victims - “black” or “dark(er)-3kinned” 45 30 75 38%

 

a Key words and phrases used in the NYT’s and WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur.
b Total number of news articles that carried the speciﬁed word or phrase.

c .
Percentage of total news articles.

(emphasis added: WP, Aug. 7). We can also discern the ‘Arab’-‘African’ skin color
divide in comments like, “The [‘Arab’] nomadic tribes primarily speak Arabic and have
physical features like. . .light brown skin that are more Arab than Aﬂican” (emphasis
added: Wax, WP, Sept. 29); and likewise in, “[African] women have been subjected to
racial insults because their skin is darker than that of Arabs ” (emphasis added: Lacey,
NYT, July 19); and ﬁnally in, “Jittery eyes followed the statuesque, copper-skinned man”
(emphasis added: Wax, WP, July 18). The last quotation refers to Musa Hilal, a
notorious ‘Arab’ Janjaweed commander. The use of “copper-skinned” to describe him
accentuates his ‘Arabness,’ since ‘Arabs’ supposedly have lighter skin than ‘black
Africans’ in Darfur.

Furthermore, purported differences in physical features between ‘Arabs’ and
‘Africans’ in Darfur extend beyond skin color to encompass differences in eye color and
hair type. In particular, Arabs are described as having lighter eyes and wavier, curlier
hair than Africans. This is conspicuous, for example, in a story that features an ‘Arab’
woman named Aisha Mohamed living in a refugee camp in Chad among scores of
displaced ‘Africans’ (Wax, WP, Sept. 29). The focus of the story is a mutual unease and
suspicion that exists between Aisha and some of the camp’s ‘African’ inhabitants. This

tension is represented as stemming from Aisha being ‘Arab’ and thus belonging to “the

58

same ethnic group as the attackers” of the Africans. But how is it that some camp
refugees perceive Aisha as ‘Arab’? According to Emily Wax, the story’s author, Aisha’s
physical appearance ostensibly marks her as such and Wax illustrates in detail those
supposed ‘Arab’ bodily features, describing Aisha as having “almond-colored eyes” and
“long wavy hair. . .with spirally curls and eyes that turned light brown in the sunlight.”
Moreover, Wax describes a scene she observed when a few ‘African’ women ridiculed
Aisha for being ‘Arab’ immediately after, Wax claims, “noticing her light eyes in the sun
and her curly hair” — purportedly telltale signs of an ‘Arab.’

The alleged differences in hair type between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ in Darfur can
also be seen in a story that highlights the Janjaweed’s rampant use of rape as a tool to
humiliate and terrorize ‘Aﬁican’ women. There were numerous cases in which
Janjaweed rapes resulted in pregnancies and the resultant babies are represented as
exhibiting ‘Arab’ physical characteristics, such as lighter skin, distinct from the ‘African’
features of their mothers (Wax, WP, June 30). Referring to one of these cases, Sengupta
asserts, “[an ‘African’] woman held up the product of a violent assault: a baby boy with
wavy hair, whom she called the son of a janjaweed” (emphasis added: NYT, Oct. 26).

In conclusion, the NYT and the WP represented ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ in Darfur
as exhibiting sharply different bodily features. These physical differences are depicted as
being ‘etlmically’ exclusive — people with copper skin, light eyes, and wavy hair are
invariably ‘Arab,’ and likewise, people with black skin are always ‘African.’ Such strict
and ‘ethnically’ conﬁned bodily representations, however, are troublesome, especially
when considering the great extent of blending and intermarrying that has historically

occurred between different communities in Darﬁrr, including between ‘African’ and

59

‘Arab’ groups. Indeed, many scholars assert that differences in physical appearances
among Darfur’s myriad communities are non-existent to slight and that Darfur’s ‘Arab’
nomadic communities have acquired ‘African’ physical features and vice versa (Haaland,
1969; Flint & de Waal, 2005: 4-5; Campbell, 2007; Daly, 2007; Prunier, 2007: 4-5). For
example, Flint and de Waal write, “all Darfurian Arabs have mixed ancestry and are as
black as their ‘African’ neighbors” (2005: 123), while Haaland comments, “while they
[nomadic ‘Arabs’] have remained culturally distinct from earlier inhabitants of negro
stock [e.g., the Fur], they can today hardly be distinguished from this population on the
basis of physical features” (1969: 59). The notion implied by both newspapers that all
‘Arabs’ in Darfur possess ‘ethnically’ unique physical traits that are in stark contrast to
the physical features of ‘Africans,’ and likewise, that all ‘Africans’ in Darfur have
‘ethnically’ exclusive bodily characteristics that are sharply different from the physical
traits of ‘Arabs’ is problematic, for, according to the scholarly literature on Darfur, strict
and ethnically exclusive divisions in outward appearances between ‘Africans’ and

‘Arabs’ simply do not exist in Darfur.

4.5 A ‘Clash of Civilizations’

Following the demise of the Cold War geopolitical order, political scientist
Samuel Huntington sought to explain what global conﬂicts in the post-Cold War era
would look like. In an inﬂuential Foreign Affairs piece (1993), Huntington argued that
while global conﬂicts during the Cold War were driven primarily by competing
ideologies, the source of future conﬂicts would be fundamentally cultural. Huntington
painted a picture of the world as comprised of seven or eight discrete and territorially

ﬁxed cultural blocks that represented different ‘civilizations.’ Future wars and conﬂicts,

60

Huntington maintained, would occur along the “fault lines” of these designated cultural
blocks. “The most important conﬂicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault
lines separating. . .civilizations from one another” (Huntington, 1993: 25). Thus, cultural
differences between the world’s major ‘civilizations’ would ultimately fuel the world’s
next conﬂicts, a thesis that Huntington called the “clash of civilizations.”

The inﬂuence of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis is apparent in some
of the NYT’s and the WP’s coverage on Darfur. Speciﬁcally, Darfur is represented as
sitting at the “crossroads” (Wax, WP, Sept. 29), or lying on a “geo-cultural fault-line”
(Duke, WP, Aug. 18) between two distinct and territorially rooted cultures — ‘African’
and ‘Arab.’ Thus, the ‘Arab’-‘African’ division in Darfur is also expressed
geographically in the form of discrete, spatially ﬁxed cultural blocks. Following
Huntington’s logic, both newspapers interpret the region’s violence as stemming from
tensions between the ‘Arab’ and ‘Aﬁican’ cultures lying on either side of the purported
cultural ‘fault line’ running through Darfur. When the ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ cultural
spheres come into contact, there is inevitable friction, like when two tectonic plates rub
violently against each other. The notion that Darfur straddles distinct and spatially
separated ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ cultural blocks and that when they come into contact
tension is produced is obvious in two particular feature-length news stories highlighted
below.

NYT journalist Somini Sengupta highlights Abdalla Adam Khatir, a Darfur native
who challenges the notion that the violence plaguing Darfur essentially constitutes an
ethnic war between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans,’ arguing instead that Khartoum is solely

responsible for the violence (Oct. 3). Khatir demonstrates the shallowness of the

61

presumed strict ‘African’-‘Arab’ divide in Darfur by underlining his own mixed ancestry.
“His grandmother was an Arab, her grandfather was a member of an African tribe. ‘1 am
African,’ he says, ‘who has absorbed Arab and Islamic culture.”’ Sengupta seems to
echo Khatir’s sentiments on the problems with assuming diametrically opposed ‘Arab’
and ‘African’ cultures in Darfur when he writes, “For generations, race itself has not been
all that signiﬁcant in Darfurian society. People regularly referred to themselves by their

9”

tribe afﬁliation, and rarely as just ‘Arab’ or ‘African. However, following this
statement, Sengupta asserts, “But the Darfur crisis has laid bare an unspoken Arab-
African fault line that runs across this arid belt of Africa — from Mauritania in the west, to
Sudan in the east. Racial consciousness is, in fact, embedded in the history of central
Africa” (emphasis added). With these statements, Sengupta suggests that monolithic and
opposed ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ cultures and concomitant identities do indeed exist in
Darfur (and also throughout the larger Sahel region) and that the divisions between them
are sharp and spatially delimited, as implied in the use of the fault-line metaphor, thereby
dismissing Khatir’s claims to the contrary. Sengupta implies that the ‘Arab’-‘African’
cultural divide in Darfur has always been real, but just “unspoken” and dormant. Now,
however, “embedded” ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ consciousnesses in Darfur have been “laid
bare” by the violence and have resurged for the worst as a result.

In the spring of 2004, a small contingent of African Union (AU) soldiers was sent
to Darfur to monitor a peace-agreement between the Sudanese government and the SLA
and JEM rebels. WP reporter Emily Wax wrote a story on how the soldiers were faring

months aﬂer their deployment (Dec. 11). In the story, Wax makes note of the remarkable

cultural diversity among the AU soldiers, highlighting their many nationalities, religions,

62

and languages. In particular, Wax illustrates the cultural differences between AU soldiers
by describing a row she observed between soldiers over which cassette tape should be
played in a military jeep — a tape of Koranic verses in Arabic advocated by a group of
Muslims, or a U2 tape advocated by a group of non-Muslims. Wax follows her
description of the quarrel by saying, “In many ways, the African Union’s interaction in
Sudan reﬂects the racial tensions underlying the conﬂict -— one that falls along the
continent’s ethnic fault lines between sub—Saharan black A ﬁlm and the more Arabic
North Africa” (emphasis added). With this statement, Wax posits discrete and
geographically separated ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ ethnic blocks lying side-by-side in Darfur,
and she implies that the ethnic differences between them generate “tensions” that underlie
and drive Darfur’s violence.

Returning to Huntington, his “clash of civilizations” thesis has been criticized for
the way in which it interprets conﬂict in distinctly cultural terms, which neglects and
obscures the multitude of historical, ideological, political, and economic processes and
variables that contribute to producing violence (Dodds, 2007: 107-12). Furthermore, the
manner in which Huntington represents ‘cultures’ or ‘civilizations’ has received much
criticism (Said, 2001; Agnew, 2003: 115-20). Huntington depicts cultures as unchanging
and homogenous phenomena bounded off and disconnected from one another throughout
space in a jigsaw puzzle-like fashion, which neglects the signiﬁcant interrnixing and
cross-fertilization that has occurred between different peoples and cultures and the

constantly changing nature of cultures and ethnicities over time and space (Wolf, 1982;

Lewis, 1991; Said, 2001).

63

The example of Darfur is emblematic of what is troublesome about Huntington’s
conﬂict explanation and related conceptualizations of ‘culture.’ The Huntingtonesque
explanation offered by both Sengupta and Wax that Darfur’s violence is essentially
rooted in cultural differences and accompanying tensions between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’
groups in Darfur is problematic because it ignores the complexity of the violence and
occludes the myriad political factors that have contributed to producing it, such as
Khartoum’s long-term marginalization of Darfur. It is also problematic in the way that it
posits ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ cultures or ethnicities in Darfur as homogenous, distinct from
one another, and spatially separated, as suggested by the supposed cultural “fault-line”
that cuts through Darfur evoked by both Wax and Sengupta. As the scholarly literature
on Darfur demonstrates, however, various ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ cultures have mixed and
blended extensively throughout Darfur, thereby blurring any cultural and geographical
lines that indicate where the putative ‘African’-‘Arab’ division in Darfur ends and begins.
It is thus problematic and disturbing when the NYT and the WP represent Darfur’s

violence as a veritable “clash of civilizations.”

4.6 ‘Arab’ Nomads versus ‘African’ Farmers

Both newspapers often pointed to scarcities in natural resources as contributing to
the violence in Darfur. In particular, drought and desertiﬁcation are blamed for
signiﬁcantly diminishing Darfur’s land and water resources over the last thirty years. As
a result, violent conﬂicts between nomadic pastoralists and sedentary farmers in Darfur
are said to have proliferated as both groups struggled for access to diminishing water and
land supplies (for example, see Wax, WP, July 18; Duke, WP, Aug. 18; Wax, WP, Sept.

29). When the NYT and the WP represented Darfur’s violence as partly stemming from

64

clashes between nomads and farmers over natural resources, the nomads were described
as “Arab” and the farmers as “African” in this context (Table 2.4). This is illustrated in

Table 2.4 — Representations of resource conflicts between farmers and nomads

Key words and phrasesa NYTb WPb Totalb %c

 

“Aﬁican” farmers versus “Arab” nomads 9 7 16 8%

 

a Key words and phrases used in the NYT’s and WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur.
b Total number of news articles that carried the speciﬁed word or phrase.

c .
Percentage of total news articles.

the assertion, “The violence in Darfur stems from longstanding tensions between
nomadic Arab tribes and their African farming neighbors over dwindling water and
agricultural land” (emphasis added: NYT, Aug. 26); and also when Lacey comments,
“The ﬁghting is partly a result of a rivalry over resources between groups of Muslims in
Darfur. The Arabs are nomads who have long competed for land with black African
farmers” (emphasis added: NYT, July 12). Thus, the ‘Arab’-‘African’ dichotomy in
Darfur is also expressed in livelihood pursuits, with nomadic pastoralists represented as
‘Arabs’ and farmers as ‘Africans.’ In the context of purported natural resource scarcities,
the notion that the violence in Darfur constitutes a ‘tribal’ conﬂict between ‘Africans’
and ‘Arabs’ in Darfur is given another dimension as ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ ‘ethnicities’ are
conjoined with differing livelihood groups who clash over an increasingly shrinking
natural resource base.

According to the scholarly literature on Darfur, conﬂicts over water and land
resources between farmers and nomadic pastoralists have indeed been rampant in Darfur
over the last couple of decades (de Waal, 1989; Harir, 1994; Flint & de Waal, 2005;
Daly, 2007). When considering this literature, however, certain aspects of the manner in

which the NYT and the WP represented such conﬂicts become troubling, especially the
65

way that both newspapers uncritically posited ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ ethnic labels as if
they naturally ﬁt with respective agricultural and nomadic livelihood communities in
Darfur. This practice partly arises from a lack of consideration on the part of the NYT
and the WP of the political and ideological context in which farmer-nomad conﬂicts have
occurred since the 19803. As indicated above, famine, diminishing water and land
resources, and strained relations between farmers and pastoralists due to the former
denying the latter access to resources during the 19803 in Darfur all coincided with the
Libyan military presence in the region and the Chadian-Libyan conﬂict spilling into
Darfur. In this context, farmer-nomad resource conﬂicts mixed with the pernicious,
racialized ideologies circulating in the region associated with Libya’s Islamic Legion
forces in Darfur and the larger Chadian-Libyan war, which was fought along ‘Arab’
(Libya and its nomadic paramilitary allies) versus ‘African’ (Chadian government forces)
lines (Burr & Collins, 1999; Prunier, 2007).

More speciﬁc, the ideology of Arab supremacism and concomitant African
inferiority propagated by Libyan forces in Darfur and inculcated in Darfur’s northern
nomadic communities imbued fanner-nomad resource conﬂicts with a toxic ethnic
character that had not previously existed in Darfur, as Abbala nomads represented
themselves as superior ‘Arabs’ with rightful claims to land and water resources in central
and southern Darfur, while also representing farming communities who barred them
access to resources as lowly ‘Africans’ with no legitimate claims to the land and water in
Darfur’s traditional agricultural belt (Harir, 1994; Flint & de Waal, 2005; de Waal, 2005;
Daly, 2007). Conﬂicts over resources (and animal theﬁ) between farmers and nomads

have historically been a regular feature of life in Darfur — however, these conﬂicts never

66

exhibited a virulent ‘African’ versus ‘Arab’ ethnic character until the late 19803 and
afterwards (de Waal, 1989, 2005; Harir, 1994). Thus, in stripping resource conﬂicts
between ‘African’ farmers and ‘Arab’ nomads in Darfur from their historical, political,
and ideological contexts, the NYT and the WP naturalize ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ ethnic
labels respectively joined with nomadic and farming livelihood groups in the region.
Farmer-nomad resource conﬂicts, then, are represented as nothing more than primitive
ethnic battles over scraps of natural resources between Darfur’s ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ as

a result.

In conclusion, the NYT and the WP represented Darfur as a place populated by
two distinct ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ groups — ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans.’ The social boundaries
separating them were portrayed as stark and insurmountable, with no room for any
cultural overlap. In particular, both newspapers drew rigid divisions between ‘Africans’
and ‘Arabs’ expressed in physical appearances, space, and livelihoods. In drawing
salient social boundaries between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ in multiple ways, the NYT and
the WP strengthen the notion that Darfur is home to two completely different socio-
cultural groups, which in turn lends credence to and helps validate the explanation
promoted by both newspapers that Darﬁrr’s violence stems partly from an ‘ethnic’ or
‘tribal’ conﬂict between Darfur-based ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans.’

As I have argued and shown above, though, the way in which the NYT and the
WP represented ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ groups in Darfur as starkly different and socially
and geographically separate from one another, and also the manner in which they posited
‘African’ and ‘Arab’ ethnic group identities and formations in Darﬁrr as age-old and

natural, is problematic. Both newspapers’ ignorance of the remarkable amount of

67

interrnixing and blending between ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ cultures in Darfur coupled with
their failure to acknowledge the novelty and political roots and uses of the ‘Arab’ and
‘African’ labels enables the frame that explains Darfur’s violence as an ‘ethnic’ conﬂict
between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs,’ as an understanding and appreciation of Darfur’s
cultural diversity and of the political and ideological factors that have led recently to the
polarization of identities in Darfur would render untenable the ‘Arab’ versus ‘African’
ethnic conﬂict thesis. In overlooking these crucial factors, however, the NYT and the
WP naturalize and reify ﬁxed ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ group formations and identities in
Darfur, which bolsters and corroborates the notion that Darfur’s violence indeed stems

from a ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans.’

68

Conclusion

I identiﬁed two frames for explaining Darfur’s violence in the NYT’s and the
WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur. The ﬁrst frame points to a series of connected political
factors - such as the emergence of Darfur-based rebels provoked by Khartoum’s
marginalization of Darfur, and Khartoum’s backing of nomadic militias and the use of its
military to suppress the rebels and murder Darfurian civilians — as contributing to
Darfur’s violence. This framing of the violence is encouraging in that both newspapers
recognized and highlighted deeply political forces and issues underlying Darfur’s
bloodshed instead of completely divorcing violence from its political context and thus
naturalizing it, as has been the case with the majority of past US. news media
representations of large-scale violence in Aﬁica (see Brock, 1992). This is signiﬁcant
because it suggests that US. news media representations of violence in Africa are less
beholden to culturally biased understandings of Africa established during European
colonialism, and that US. news coverage of African violence has improved in some
important regards since coverage of the Rwandan genocide (see Myers et al., 1996).

The second framing of the violence, however, is less encouraging. Within this
frame, the NYT and the WP interpreted violence as stemming from discord and conﬂict
between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans.’ In particular, this frame manifested itself starkly in
representations of local-level social and cultural dynamics within Darfur that, according
to both newspapers, have contributed signiﬁcantly to both igniting and sustaining the
region’s strife. Speciﬁcally, both newspapers represented Darfur’s violence as partly
constituting a ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict rooted in entrenched and festering animosities

between Darfur-based ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs.’ The NYT and the WP represented socio-

69

cultural differences between Darfur’s ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ as sharp and impermeable,
and delineated salient boundaries between both groups expressed in bodily appearances,
space, and livelihood pursuits. These boundaries served to substantiate the idea that two
distinct ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ groups inhabit Darfur, a notion that is indispensable to the
‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict explanation seeming logical.

Cultural identities in Darfur, however, are at odds with and defy the rigid ‘Arab’-
‘African’ axis of identity posited by the NYT and the WP. Darfur is a cultural and ethnic
mosaic characterized by a mixture of various ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ cultures that blend and
overlap, and identities in the region are remarkably ﬂuid. Recently, nevertheless,
identities in Darfur have indeed become ﬁxed along ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ cultural lines
due directly to Libya’s ideological machinations in the region in the late 19803, and to the
bouts of large-scale violence that have continually afﬂicted Darfur over the last twenty
years. The role of Libya and the recent violence in the region in actively producing
monolithic and mutually antagonistic ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ identities in Darfur, however,
is entirely missing in both newspapers’ coverage, and therefore, historically bogus ‘Arab’
and ‘African’ identities are portrayed as ‘natural.’ Thus, in representing Darfur’s
violence as a ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ while treating as
‘natural’ anthropologically na'r've ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ group identities in Darfur, and in
going to great lengths to demarcate social divisions between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans,’ the
NYT and the WP demonstrate that US. news media — the nation’s elite foreign coverage
newspapers nonetheless — are still producing knowledge about Africa that is shaped by
and reﬂective of Western stereotypes and geographical imaginings held about the

continent and its peoples grounded in European colonial discourses that posit Aﬁica as a

70

 

place inhabited by ‘tribal’ peoples predisposed to irrational violence fought along strict
socio-cultural lines. Regrettably, it seems, “‘Africa’ in the Western mind [still] cannot
endure outside Western discourses” (Fair, 1993: 10).

The NYT’s and the WP’s troubling representations of people in Darfur and
interpretations of violence as a ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’
have important ramiﬁcations. To begin with, both newspapers perpetuate and reinforce
damaging misunderstandings about Africa and African peoples ﬁxed in the Western
geographical imagination. Speciﬁcally, both newspapers reinforce stereotypical Western
conceptualizations of African societies as comprised of tribal or ethnic groups
characterized by timelessness, homogeneity, ﬁxity, and exclusiveness, a remarkably
simplistic understanding of socio-cultural organization in Africa that forecloses
alternative ways of envisioning African cultures and cultural identities as diverse, ﬂuid,
overlapping, novel, and socially constructed, and that conveys a sense of primitiveness to
Aﬁican peoples. Also, both newspapers reinforce Western presumptions held about
violence in Africa as being fundamentally ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ in nature, an understanding
that has the effect of de-contextualizing, simplifying, and naturalizing violence, while
simultaneously imparting to it a backward and barbaric character. The perpetuation and
reafﬁrrnation of these stereotypes in the NYT and the WP undermines and damages
efforts to improve understandings of Africa and African peoples in the US.

Moreover, the NYT and the WP provide inaccurate understandings of Darfur’s
violence that could have implications for how international actors — such as the US.
government — decide to act, or not act, toward Darfur. News media play a crucial role in

providing information to Western government ofﬁcials on foreign places and peoples,

71

and on events taking place in the world (Fair, 1993: 7; Dodds, 1998; Entman, 2004).
How news media represent overseas crises -— like large-scale violence —- has been shown
to inﬂuence signiﬁcantly how Western policymakers adopt and justify policies in relation
to them (Rotberg & Weiss, 1996; Shaw, 1996; Luke & O Tuathail, 1997; Dodds, 1998;
Robison, 2004). For example, some analysts have argued that the US. news media’s
representation of the Rwandan genocide as a savage tribal conﬂict played a signiﬁcant
role in inﬂuencing and justifying the US. government’s circumscribed policy of non-
intervention in Rwanda (Myers et al., 1996: 42; Rotberg & Weiss, 1996; Melvem, 2007).
Speciﬁcally, the tribal framing of the genocide constructed a powerful image of
Rwanda’s violence as primitive, chaotic, and rooted in intractable tribal hatreds, an image
that increased the physical and psychological distance between the US. and Rwanda, and
that consequently placed Rwanda beyond the universe of US. moral responsibility and
intervention.

Like Rwanda, the NYT’s and the WP’s framing of Darfur’s violence as a tribal
conﬂict steeped in deep-seated and age-old ethnic animosities imparts to it a primitive
character and a concomitant sense that little can be done to redress it. As the nation’s
leading and most respected foreign coverage newspapers, the NYT and the WP wield
considerable inﬂuence among Washington’s foreign policymaking elites (Entman, 2004),
and thus, their invocation of the tribal frame to explain the violence in Darfur may have
conceivably dampened American policymakers’ sense of ethical duty toward Darfur and
consequently legitimated the American government’s avowed stance of non-intervention
in Darfur. This sentiment is expressed when talking in 2005 about the US. government’s

role in Darfur, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State at the time Robert Zoellick commented,

72

“Frankly I don’t think foreign forces want to get in the middle of a tribal war of
Sudanese” (emphasis added: Wax, WP, Nov. 21).

Lastly, the NYT’s and the WP’s representations of violence and people in Darfur
have important consequences for how Darfur - and by extension Africa -— are perceived
and understood as a place and society by American news consumers. Events, such as
mass violence, and people do not exist in a spatial vacuum — they are rooted in and
inextricably connected to speciﬁc places. How news media represent events and people
imbues the places in which they are grounded with particular types of meanings and
understandings, or as Robison says, “most people rely on storytelling and identity
production in the media for their information about places and, as an important register of
language and understanding, the news contributes to an understanding of society and
place” (emphasis added: 2004: 381). In the case of the NYT’s and the WP’s coverage of
Darfur in 2004, a distinct “place image” (Klak, 1994; Myers et al., 1996) of Darﬁrr
packaged with certain powerful traits and meanings emerges from both newspapers’
overly simplistic and problematic representations of violence and people. Speciﬁcally,
the NYT’s and the WP’s framing of Darfur’s violence as a ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict
between two groups clearly identiﬁed as ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ marked Darfur — and also
Africa — as a backward and savage place, a timeless place of primitive ‘tribal’ warfare,
and a place that is all-together different from and inferior to the West. Darfur as a place
and society was thus irredeemably cast as the West’s distant cultural and moral ‘Other’ in
the NYT and the WP during 2004.

The place image of Darfur as the West’s antithetical ‘Other’ formed within the

pages of the NYT and the WP, however, does not of course represent some mimetic

73

geographic ‘reality.’ On the contrary, it more reﬂects culturally biased understandings
ﬁrmly held about Aﬁica in the Western geographical imagination entangled within and
shot through Europe’s colonization of and the West’s historical unequal engagement with
the continent. Following Fair, then, when she comments that “through the process of
signiﬁcation in news stories, place takes on particular meanings and so creates spaces”
(emphasis added: 1994: 38), the image and understanding of Darfur as a place and
society found in the NYT and the WP is one that is fundamentally made or socially
produced out of an archive of knowledge about and discourses relating to Africa forged
during European colonialism. This culturally determined place image of Darfur conﬁrms
what postcolonial critics like Edward Said (1978, 1997) and Derek Gregory (2004) have
vehemently argued — that knowledge about and representations of non-Western places
created directly out of European colonialism are tenacious, continuing to shape
profoundly how Westerners — such as newsmakers at the NYT and the WP - today think
about, represent, and produce knowledge about formerly colonized places, like Darfur,
Sudan. This unfortunate phenomenon has resulted in the defamation of Darfur, which
consequently impoverishes Americans’ understandings of the region, its peoples, and its
plight, and also increases the physical, cultural, and moral distance between the US. and
Darfur.

Inaccurate and culturally biased understandings of Africa indebted to European
colonial discourses still have a stranglehold on the geographical imaginations of many of
America’s top and most respected newsmakers, as illustrated vividly in the NYT’s and
the WP’s 2004 coverage of Darfur. The persistence of this phenomenon is deplorable,

for it produces distorted, false, and hurtful understandings of Africa and African peoples.

74

It is thus incumbent upon folks like myself who are critical of the way in which US.
news media produce knowledge about Africa to ask what can be done to improve US.
news coverage of Aﬁica so that inaccurate and damaging Western stereotypes no longer
infuse representations of Aﬁican peoples and events unfolding on the continent. I believe
that part of the solution lies in formal education in the US, particularly a more robust
geographic education in our high schools and universities.

Americans, including newsmakers (e. g., reporters, editors), form their
understandings and imaginings of foreign places and peoples in myriad ways and from
numerous sources. Education is especially crucial to shaping how Americans perceive
the rest of the world. Geography, in particular, is well-positioned to provide young
Americans — some of whom will go on to become this nation’s newsmakers - with
sophisticated and culturally balanced understandings of foreign places and peoples, and
perhaps more important, with the critical thinking tools necessary to question biased
representations of alien places and cultures ingrained in American society and culture.
This is due to geography’s explicit focus on producing and communicating knowledge
about other places, peoples, and cultures; the discipline’s acute sensitivity to how
jingoistic representations of non-Westem places and peoples established during
colonialism still color profoundly today how many Americans think about and represent
the rest of the world; and geography’s ﬁrm commitment to exposing, contesting, and
destabilizing representations of the non-Westem world inherited from the colonial past
and reworked in the present. However, the status of geography in our universities and
especially in our high schools has traditionally been one of unimportance and irrelevance,

and thus geography’s potential for shaping Americans’ understandings and imaginings

75

about the world and its peoples has been limited -— the average American’s remarkable
ignorance about the rest of the world is partly to show for this. Stronger support for
geography in America’s high schools and universities, I believe, would aid signiﬁcantly
in bestowing to Americans — again, some of whom will one day write and edit for the
NYT and the WP — more sophisticated understandings of non-Westem peoples and
places, and also the ability to recognize and eschew inaccurate stereotypes held about the
former colonized world. A more vigorous geographic education in this country, then,
could conceivably contribute to improving US. news media representations of events,
peoples, and places in the non-Westem world, and in particular, ameliorate the
lamentable coverage of violence in Africa 30 marred by Western cultural biases, as
evidenced in aspects of the NYT’s and the WP’s initial coverage of Darﬁrr.

Furthermore, there are additional, more direct, ways in which critics of US. news
media coverage of Africa can attempt to effect some sort of positive change in the
character that media representations of African peoples, places, and events take. News
media organizations that participate in perpetuating the ‘dark continent’ image of Africa
need to be made aware of the extremely problematic nature of their coverage. Critics of
news media coverage of Africa can thus write letters to news-making organizations that
draw attention to the troublesome aspects of their coverage and its deleterious effects in
the hopes of changing it for the better. I did just this, sending identical letters to both the
NYT and the WP that highlight what I have argued — and hopefully have convincingly
shown — in this thesis to be the problematic characteristics and negative consequences of
their representations of conﬂict, people, and place in Darfur during 2004 (see appendix

for the letter).

76

APPENDIX

77

January 5, 2009
Dear Editor of The New York Times,

I am writing in regard to your newspaper’s coverage of the violence in Darfur, Sudan
during 2004, the ﬁrst year that the crisis in Darfur gained the attention of the Times. I am
a former graduate student in geography at Michigan State University and for my master’s
thesis I examined how the Times - along with The Washington Post — during 2004
represented the violence in Darfur. In my analysis I found that there were positive
elements of the Times ’s coverage, but also troubling aspects of it, which is the principal
reason why I am writing this letter.

US. news media coverage of mass violence in Africa (e. g., the 1994 Rwandan genocide)
has generally suffered from simplistic and stereotypical depictions of violence and of
African peoples. Speciﬁcally, instances of violence have tended to be portrayed as
essentially ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ conﬂicts. Representing violence as such is problematic for
many reasons. To start, it locates the roots of violence within presumed cultural
differences — encapsulated in ‘tribal/ethnic’ divisions — and concomitant animosities
between African communities. This marginalizes and obscures the historical and
political factors that contribute to engendering violence, and as a result, places the blame
for violence solely on Africans themselves, thereby creating the sense that acts of
violence are somehow innate or natural to Aﬁican peoples.

Moreover, the mere use of the words ‘tribal’ and ‘ethnic’ to account for violence in
Africa is troublesome for these words carry negative connotations associated with the
primordial and backward. When described as ‘tribal/ethnic’ in character, violence in
Africa is consequently seen as more primitive and irrational than instances of violence
taking place in other parts of the world.

Additionally, the ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict explanation is worrisome because it assumes that
forms of cultural organization and identity — again, embodied in ‘tribal/ethnic’
designations - in Africa are discrete, homogenous, and diametrically opposed to one
another. Assuming stark social and cultural divisions between African communities
supposedly engaged in ‘tribal/ethnic’ war is problematic because it overlooks the
remarkable amount of intermixing, sharing, and intermarrying that has occurred between
different communities in Aﬁica, which has thus blurred considerably social and cultural
lines that indicate where one ‘tribal/ethnic’ group ends and another begins.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict explanation is problematic
in that removing violence from its historical and political context, in imparting to
violence and African peoples a primitive character, and in assuming strict black-and-
white distinctions between African communities, it produces inaccurate and culturally
biased understandings of violence in Africa and of African peoples.

In the Times ’s 2004 coverage of Darfur, deeply political factors and processes underlying
the region’s strife were acknowledged and highlighted — in particular, the emergence of
Darfur-based rebel movements provoked by the Sudanese government’s marginalization
of Darfur, and Khartoum’s mobilization of proxy militias (the ‘Janjaweed’) and use of its

78

military to quash the rebels and to terrorize and murder Darfurian civilians. In this
regard, the Times attributed more political causality to Darfur’s carnage than has
traditionally been the case with US. news media portrayals of violence in Africa, and it
did not reduce all aspects of the violence to an eruption of irrational, apolitical
‘tribal/ethnic’ war. This is encouraging because it places blame for Darfur’s violence
where it ultimately needs to be — the murderous regime in Khartoum.

There were, however, less encouraging and deeply problematic aspects of the Times ’s
2004 Darfur coverage. In particular, the use and reliance on the ‘tribal/ethnic’ language
to rationalize and interpret Darfur’s violence was very strong throughout 2004. This was
especially the case when Times reporting focused on internal, local-level social and
cultural dynamics within Darfur that have contributed allegedly to sparking and driving
the strife. Speciﬁcally, several Times news stories assert explicitly that the violence
stems from ‘tribal/ethnic’ clashes between ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ groups native to Darfur.

A distinct image of Darfur therefore emerges from the Times ’s reporting that posits two
communities — ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ — who battle and kill each other along strict
‘tribal/ethnic’ lines. Also, the Times delineate stark divisions between Darfur’s
‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ in different ways. For instance, boundaries are drawn between
both in physical appearances — ‘Africans’ are described as exhibiting darker or blacker
skin than ‘Arabs,’ while ‘Arabs’ are represented as having wavier, curlier hair than
‘Africans.’ Divisions established between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ help bolster the idea
that two distinct ‘tribal/ethnic’ groups inhabit Darfur, a notion this is crucial to the
‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict explanation seeming logical. Thus, the Times represented the
crisis in Darfur as an archetypical ‘African’ conﬂict — one rooted fundamentally in
‘tribal/ethnic’ differences and hatreds, and one fought between ‘tribal/ethnic’ groups
thought to be entirely different and socially and culturally separate from one another.

The ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict explanation applied to Darfur is problematic for all the reasons
listed above. For example, it deﬂects attention from and minimizes the larger historical
and political context surrounding the region’s discord (e.g., Khartoum’s neglect of
Darfur, Khartoum’s harnessing of the Janjaweed militias). Violence in this light is
presented merely as a primitive ‘tribal/ethnic’ clash of opposing cultural groups in
Darfur. The ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict explanation also presents a false societal image of
Darfur, one of a region inhabited by two distinct and rigidly divided — expressed in
physical appearances for instance — ‘tribal/ethnic’ communities. In reality, though,
Darfur is a tightly knit cultural mosaic where ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ groups have mixed
and blended extensively, and also share several cultural traits, such as the Islamic faith
and the Arabic language. Thus, in reverting to the ‘tribal/ethnic’ conﬂict trope for
interpreting the violence in Darfur, the Times in 2004 provided inaccurate understandings
of Darfur’s violence, while also perpetuating damaging stereotypes pertaining to Africa —
namely, that violence on the continent is fundamentally ‘tribal/ethnic’ in nature. This
could have had adverse consequences for how readers of the Times — including foreign
policymakers — came to initially understand the nature of the violence bedeviling Darfur.

Thank you for considering my concerns outlined here,

Joel Gruley (gruleyjo@msu.edu)

79

BIBLIOGRAPHY

80

Primary Sources Cited

Chan, S. 2004. Darfur Strife Behind Them, Two Detainees Win Freedom. New York
Times, 21 November: A39.

Duke, L. 2004. Bittersweet Oasis; In Baltimore, an Uncertain Life for a Sudanese
Family Who Fled the Killing Fields. Washington Post, 18 August: C1.

Elbagir, N. 2004. Sudan Accepts African Troops, but No Peacekeepers, in Darfur.
Washington Post, 8 August: A19.

Hoge, W. 2004. UN. Chief to Join Powell in Sudan to Try to Halt Masses. New York
Times, 26 June: A2.

Lacey, M. 2004. Singers of Sudan Study War No More. New York Times, 12 July: A4.

Lacey, M. 2004. Amnesty Says Sudan Militias Use Rape as Weapon. New York Times,
19 July: A9.

Lacey, M. 2004. In Darfur, Appalling Atrocity, but is that Genocide? New York Times,
23 July: A3.

Lacey, M. 2004. Evicted from Camp, Sudan Refugees Suffer in Limbo. New York
Times, 3 August: A3.

NA. 2004. Sudanese Fighters Raid Chad Village. Washington Post, 10 May: A22.

NA. 2004. Sudanese Ofﬁcial Asserts Aﬁican Peacekeepers Aren’t Needed. New York
Times, 26 August: A13.

NA. 2004. Sudan Peace Talks Stall Over the Issue of Flights Over Darfur. New York
Times, 6 November: A7.

NA. 2004. Sudan and Rebels Suspend Peace Talks, as Aid Group Withdraws. New
York Times, 22 December: A13.

Sengupta, S. 2004. War in Western Sudan Overshadows Peace in the South. New York
Times, 17 January: A3.

Sengupta, S. 2004. Sudanese Workers are Stranded in Iraq. New York Times, 30 July:
A7.

Sengupta, S. 2004. In Sudan, No Clear Difference Between Arab and African. New
York Times, 3 October: D3.

81

Sengupta, S. 2004. Unrelenting Attacks on Women in West Sudan Provoke an
International Outcry. New York Times, 26 October: A10.

Sengupta, S. 2004. African Union Strives to End Deadly Cycle in Darfur. New York
Times, 29 November: A3.

Wax, E. 2004. ‘We Want to Make a Light Baby’; Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use
Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing. Washington Post, 30 June: A1.

Wax, E. 2004. Sudan Pledges to Disarm Militias, Protect Refugees. Washington Post, 4
July: A19.

Wax, E. 2004. In Sudan, ‘A Big Sheik’ Roams Free; Militia Leader Describes
Campaign Against Africans as Self-Defense. Washington Post, 18 July: A].

Wax, E. 2004. Frist Calls Darfur Killing ‘Genocide’; Senate Leader Tours a Camp in
Chad, Cites Sudan’s Deadline to Stop Militia. Washington Post, 7 August: A14.

Wax, E. 2004. In Darfur, Rwandan Soldiers Relive Their Past; Protectors Hope
Presence Will Halt Another Genocide. Washington Post, 28 September: A20.

Wax, E. 2004. A Family Torn by Sudan’s Strife; Tensions in Arab-African Marriage
Follow Flight from Ethnic Conﬂict. Washington Post, 29 September: A1.

Wax, E. 2004. A Peace Force With No Power; African Union Monitors in Sudan Face
Frustrating Limits. Washington Post, 11 December: Al.

Wax, E. 2005. Peace Force in Darﬁrr Faces Major Challenges; Aﬁican Troops Styrrried
by Shortages, Mission. Washington Post, 21 November: A10.

82

Secondary Sources Cited
Achebe, C. 1978. An Image of Africa. Research in Aﬁican Literatures 9(1): 1-15.
Agnew, J. 2003. Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge.
Artis, W. 1970. The Tribal Fixation. Columbia Journalism Review 9(3): 48-49.

Austin, SB. 1989. AIDS and Africa: United States Media and Racist Fantasy. Cultural
Critique 14: 129-152.

Barnes, T. and J. Duncan. 1992. Introduction: Writing Worlds. In Writing Worlds:
Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, eds. T.
Barnes and J. Duncan, pp. 1-17. London: Routledge.

Blaut, J. 1993. The Colonizer ’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and
Eurocentric History. New York: The Guilford Press.

Brantlinger, P. 1985. Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark
Continent. Critical Inquiry 12(1): 166-203.

Brock, L. 1992. Inkatha: Notions of the ‘Primitive’ and ‘Tribal’ in Reporting on South
Africa. In Aﬁica ’s Media Image, ed., B. Hawk, pp. 149-161. New York:
Praeger.

Burr, J. and R. Collins. 1999. Africa’s Thirty Years War: Libya, Chad, and the Sudan,
1963-1993. Boulder: Westview Press.

Bush, R. 1988. Hunger in Sudan: The Case of Darfur. African Affairs 87(346): 5-23.

Butlin, R. 1995. Historical Geographies of the British Empire, 0. 1887-1925. In
Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1 940, eds. M. Bell, R. Butlin, & M. Heffeman,
pp. 151-188. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Campbell, D. 2007. Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conﬂict. Political
Geography 26: 357-382.

Cooper, F. 2002. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Cosgrove, D. and M. Domosh. 1993. Author and Authority: Writing the New Cultural
Geography. In Place/Culture/Representation, eds. J. Duncan and D. Ley, pp. 25-
38. London: Routledge.

Daly, M.W. 2007. Darfur '3 Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

83

Debrix, F. 2008. Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics. London: Routledge.

Dodds, K. 1998. Enframing Bosnia: The Geopolitical Iconography of Steve Bell. In
Rethinking Geopolitics, eds. G. O’Tuathail and S. Dalby, pp. 170-197. London:
Routledge.

Dodds, K. 2007. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Domatob, J. 1994. Coverage of Africa in American Popular Magazines. Issue: A
Journal of Opinion 22(1): 24-29.

Duncan, J. 1993a. Sites of Representation: Place, Time, and the Discourse of the Other.
In Place/Culture/Representation, eds. J. Duncan and D. Ley, pp. 39-56. London:
Routledge.

Duncan, J. 1993b. Representing Power: The Politics and Poetics of Urban F orrn in the
Kandyan Kingdom. In Place/Culture/Representation, eds. J. Duncan and D. Ley,
pp. 232-248. London: Routledge.

Duncan, J. 2000. Representation. In The Dictionary of Human Geography, eds. R.J.
Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, and M. Watts, pp. 703-704. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.

Duncan, J. and D. Gregory. 1999. Introduction. In Writes of Passage: Reading Travel
Writing, eds. J. Duncan and D. Gregory, pp. 1-13. London: Routledge.

Duncan, J. and D. Ley. 1993. Introduction: Representing the Place of Culture. In
Place/Culture/Representation, eds. J. Duncan and D. Ley, pp. 1-21. London:
Routledge.

Duncan, N. and J. Sharp. 1993. Confronting Representation(s). Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 1 1: 473-486.

Ebo, B. 1992. American Media and African Culture. In Africa ’5 Media Image, ed. B.
Hawk, pp. 15-25. New York: Praeger.

Entman, R. 1991. Framing U.S. Coverage of lntemational News: Contrasts in Narratives
of the KAL and Iran Air Incidents. Journal of Communication 41(4): 6-27.

Entman, R. 1993. Framing: Toward Clariﬁcation of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of
Communication 43(4): 51-58.

Entman, R. 2004. Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and US.
Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

84

, Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fair, J .E. 1993. War, Famine, and Poverty: Race in the Construction of Africa’s Media
Image. Journal of Communication Inquiry 17(5): 5-22.

Fair, J.E. 1994. “Black-on-Black”: Race, Space, and News of Aﬁicans and African
Americans. Issue: A Journal of Opinion 22(1): 35-40.

Flint, J. and A. de Waal. 2005. Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. London: Zed
Books.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-
1977, ed. C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.

Galtung, J. and M.H. Ruge. 1965. The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of
the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. Journal of
Peace Research 2(64): 64-90.

Gregory, D. 1995. Between the Book and the Lamp: Imaginative Geographies of Egypt,
1849-50. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20(1): 29-57.

Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan/Palestine/Iraq. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.

Haaland, G. 1969. Economic Determinants of Ethnic Processes. In Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries, ed. F. Barth, pp. 58-73. London: Allen & Unwin.

Hall, S. 2001. Foucault: Power, Knowledge, and Discourse. In Discourse Theory and
Practice: A Reader, eds. M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, and S. Yates, pp. 72-80.
London: Sage Publications.

Harir, S. 1994. ‘Arab Belt’ Versus ‘African Belt’: Ethno-Political Conﬂict in Dar Fur
and the Regional Cultural Factors. In Short-Cut to Decay: The Case of the Sudan,
eds. S. Harir and T. Tvedt, pp. 144-185. The Scandinavian Institute of African
Studies.

Hawk, B. 1992a. Africa ’3 Media Image. New York: Praeger.

Hawk, B. 1992b. Introduction: Metaphor of African Coverage. In A ﬁica ’s Media
Image, ed. B. Hawk, pp. 3—14. New York: Praeger.

Hochschild, A. 1998. King Leopold ’3 Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in
Colonial Africa. New York: Houghton Mifﬂin Company.

Huntington, S. 1993. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22-49.

85

ICID. 2005. Report of the lntemational Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United
Nations Secretary-General, pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1564 of 18
September 2004. New York, United Nations.

Idelema, M. 1992. Tribes and Prejudice: Coverage of the Nigerian Civil War. In
Aﬁica ’s Media Image, ed. B. Hawk, pp. 77-93. New York: Praeger.

J arosz, L. 1992. Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as Geographic
Representation of Africa. Geograﬁska Annaler B 74(2): 105-115.

Johnston, RI. and J. Sidaway. 2004. Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American
Human Geography Since 1945, 6‘h ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Klak, T. 1994. Havana and Kingston: Mass Media Images and Empirical Observations
of Two Caribbean Cities in Crisis. Urban Geography 15(4): 318-344.

Lewis, M. 1991. Elusive Societies: A Regional-Cartographical Approach to the Study of

Human Relatedness. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81(4):
605-626.

Ley, D. 2000. Postmodernism. In The Dictionary of Human Geography, eds. R.J.
Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, and M. Watts, pp. 620-622. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.

Lowe, C., T. Brimah, P.A. Marsh, W. Minter, and M. Muyangwa. 1997. Talking about
“Tribe”: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis. Background Paper 10. Africa
Policy Information Center: Washington DC.

Luke, T. and G. O Tuathail. 1997. On Videocameralistics: The Geopolitics of Failed
States, the CNN lntemational and (UN )governmentality. Review of International
Political Economy 4(4): 709-733.

Lutz, C. and J. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Maloba, W. 1992. The Media and Mau Mau: Kenyan Nationalism and Colonial
Propaganda. In Africa ’3 Media Image, ed., B. Hawk, pp. 51-61. New York:
Praeger

McFarlane, T. and I. Hay. 2003. The Battle for Seattle: Protest and Popular Geopolitics
in The Australian Newspaper. Political Geography 22: 211-232.

Melvem, L. 2007. Missing the Story: the Media and the Rwandan Genocide. In The
Media and the Rwanda Genocide, ed. A. Thompson, pp. 198-210. London: Pluto
Press.

86

Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.

Myers, G., T. Klak, and T. Koch]. 1996. The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage
of the Conﬂicts in Rwanda and Bosnia. Political Geography 15(1): 21-46.

Nash, C. 2004. Postcolonial Geographies: Spatial Narratives of Inequality and
Interconnection. In Envisioning Human Geographies, eds. P. Cloke, P. Crang,
and M. Goodwin, pp. 104-127. New York: Arnold Publishers.

Nwosu, I. 1987. Towards Better Understanding of World Media Reportage of African
Wars. In Mass Media and the African Society, eds. J. Domatob, A. J ika, and I.
Nwosu, pp. 203-219. Nairobi: The Aﬁican Council on Communication
Education.

O’Fahey, R. 1980. State and Society in Dar Fur. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Pieterse, J.N. 1992. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular
Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pratt, CB. 1980. The Reportage and Images of Africa in Six US. News and Opinion
Magazines: A Comparative Study. International Communication Gazette 26(31):
31-45.

Pratt, ML. 1985. Scratches on the Face of the Country; Or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in
the Land of the Bushmen. Critical Inquiry 12(1): 119-143.

Peet, R. and M. Watts. 1996. Liberation Ecology: Development, Sustainability, and
Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism. In Liberation Ecologies:
Environment, Development, Social Movements, eds. R. Peet & M. Watts, pp. 1-
45. London: Routledge.

Potter, A. 2006. Haiti’s Identity Crisis: Representation of US. Newspaper Coverage.
Unpublished master’s thesis. University of Kansas. Lawrence, KS.

Prunier, G. 2007. Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, 2nd Ed. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.

Ranger, T. 1983. The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa. In The Invention of

Tradition, eds. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, pp. 211-262. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

87

Robison, B. 2004. Putting Bosnia in its Place: Critical Geopolitics and the
Representation of Bosnia in the British Print Media. Geopolitics 9(2): 378-401.

Rotberg, R. and T. Weiss, eds. 1996. From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public
Policy, and Humanitarian Crises. Cambridge: World Peace Foundation.

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.

Said, E. 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See
the Rest of the World, 2nd Ed. New York: Random House.

Said, E. 2001. The Clash of Ignorance. The Nation. Oct. 21.

Schraeder, P. and B. Endless. 1998. The Media and Africa: The Portrayal of Africa in
the New York Times (1955-1995). Issue: A Journal of Opinion 26(2): 29-35.

Sharp, J. 2000. Condensing the Cold War: Reader ’5 Digest and American Identity.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, M. 1996. Civil Society and Media in Global Crises: Representing Distant
Violence. London: Pinter.

Sidaway, J. 2000. Postcolonial Geographies: An Exploratory Essay. Progress in
Human Geography 24(4): 591-612.

Sorenson, J. 1991. Mass Media and Discourse on Famine in the Horn of Africa.
Discourse and Society 2(2): 223-242.

Southall, A. 1970. The Illusion of Tribe. Journal of Asian and African Studies 5(1/2):
28-50.

Spurr, D. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourses in Journalism, Travel
Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press.

Stock, R. 2004. Africa South of the Sahara: A Geographical Interpretation, 2"d Ed.
New York: Guilford Press.

Terrell, R. 1989. Problematic Aspects of US. Press Coverage of Africa. International
Communication Gazette 43: 131-153.

Tuan, Y.F. 1991. Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive
Approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81(4): 684-696.

Ungar, S. and D. Gergen. 1991. Africa and the American Media. Occasional Paper No.
9. The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, New
York.

88

United Nations Ofﬁce for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 1 October 2008.
Darfur Humanitarian Proﬁle, No. 33.
http://ochaonline.un.org/sudan/SituationReports/DarfurHumanitarianNeedsProﬁ1e
/tabid/3368/1anguage/en-US/Default.aspx. Accessed 4 December 2008.

Vail. L. 1989. Introduction: Ethnicity in Southern African History. In The Creation of
Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. L. Vail, pp. 1-20. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

de Waal, A. 1989. Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

de Waal, A. 1998. Privatizing Famine: Sudan, 1972-93. In Famine Crimes: Politics and
the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, ed. A. de Waal, pp. 86-105. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.

de Waal, A. 2005. Who Are the Darfurians? Arab and African Identities, Violence, and
External Engagement. African Affairs 104(415): 181-205.

Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Young, C. 1994. The Colonial Construction of African Nations. In Nationalism, eds., J.
Hutchinson and A. Smith, pp. 225-231. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Young, C. 2002. Ethnicity and Politics in Africa. Critical Themes in African Studies.
Boston University African Studies Center.

89