Percontari

I remember growing up in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan thinking that the news was a window into some other world, a world somehow different from the one I walked around in, a world that mattered. Living in Washington and then in Delhi changed that. My surroundings were often on television; conversations on the radio often echoed stories and ideas that were already familiar. Yet it’s an odd feeling to see the common experience of your everyday life reflected back to you in the mirror of the media. Something changes in the reflection, a clarity arises giving firmness and shape to your heretofore fuzzy, ephemeral experiences. They also become heavier, and in the glare of your world reflected on the television screen, you feel somehow included in the part of the world that matters.

Based on (unscientific, nonrandom, and inconclusive) conversations over the past few days, days that marked the end of my fifth week in Freetown, I gathered that this odd feeling was shared by much of Sierra Leone and indeed Africa generally for two reasons. Their world was televised, discussed, debated, criticized, but most important of all paid attention to because President Obama - following in the steps of Presidents Bush and Clinton - came to visit the west African nation of Ghana. While Obama might have come bearing the same title as Clinton and Bush, he certainly didn’t come bearing the same ancestry. No. Clinton’s dad was from Arkansas, and Bush’s from Connecticut. But Obama’s father had herded sheep in Kenya, and so all of Africa, certainly Sierra Leone, listened with rapture to the son of a native son address parliament in Accra, the Ghanaian capital. Despite the lack of specifics of American involvement or the message of tough love, they sounded delighted even two days later.

But the world, certainly the media, can be cruel. And the new news cycle did not spare Sierra Leone today. Read more »