By Sifelani Tsiko
Harare,Zimbabwe (Jan 3 2007)

Twelve-year-old Beatrice returns from the fields with small animals she's caught for dinner. Her mother, Elizabeth, prepares the meat and cooks it on a grill made of three stones supporting a wood fire. It's just enough food, she says, to feed her starving family of six.

"Tonight they dine on rats," ranted Jeff Koinange, CNN's Africa correspondent in a news spin headlined: 'Living off rats to survive in Zimbabwe.

This powerful subliminal message was coated with a picture of the 'rats' in an open frying pan to connote 'hunger' in Zimbabwe and conjure up in his mind and that of his paymasters in the US how Africa is still a 'Dark Continent' full of hunger, savagery, animism famine, poverty and primivitism.

With the stroke of Koinange's pen, Zimbabweans and indeed Africans as a whole were pejoratively reduced to nothing.
Koinange had no time to fully understand and appreciate the culture of the Shona people who eat mice and not 'rats' and have always done this even before the coming of the white man on this soil.

He is based in Johannesburg and had to cobble up a story about a family he met, which this 'award-winning' journalist claims now survives on 'rats.'

To denigrate Zimbabwe's image even further. Koinange interviewed Pius Ncube, a Catholic cleric well known for his anti-government stance.

"Life has become extremely difficult in Zimbabwe and there is a lot of depression. People are very much depressed and they can no longer think idealistically. They're looking all the time for food…where do I get my next meal," Ncube was quoted by Koinange as saying.

In the news spin which has angered many Zimbabweans at home and abroad, Zimbabwe's ambassador to the US Machivenyika Mapuranga tried to explain why mice (not rats) is part of the traditional diet of the Shona people.

But Mapuranga's 'confirmation' that the Shona people ate mice (rats according to Koinange) actually strengthened the CNN spin.

"The eating of the field mice…Zimbabweans do that. It is a delicacy," he was quoted saying. "It is misleading to portray the eating of mice as an act of desperation. It is not."

It was not Mapuranga's explanation that won the day, but the news spin that Zimbabweans are now eating rats to survive got acres and acres of airspace justifying the myth that Zimbabwe was now a bastion of disease, savagery, famine and poverty.

Little was said about mice being an important part of the traditional diet of the Shona people who make up about 80 percent of the population.

There is a whole list of other food items like flying ants (ishwa), mubovora, grasshopper etc that people in Zimbabwe eat that had Koinange bothered to include would have given CNN those perfect Tarzan movie images that conjure up Europeans imagining Africans as primitive and barbaric.

Where is the cultural diversity that CNN often talks about? What was the purpose of communicating the negative images about Zimbabweans? What kind of darkness prevailed in the mind of Koinange and for what gain did he want to gain by bombarding the world with this unmitigated stereotype?

Was balance, objectivity, responsibility and fairness evident in the story?
Images that CNN and other globally reaching electronic news powerhouses churn remains troubling psychologically and emotionally especially when it concerns countries which are enemies of the US, Britain and their allies.

They portray a myth which one critic says is a "no culture, no history, no tradition and no people, abyss and negative void' about African culture and elevate theirs to the highest pedestal.

Africans, he says, are subjected to 'relentless vitriol and eternal marginalisation' while their resources are plundered by multinationals which are strategic middlemen for the US, Britain and their allies.

Koinange, 'Black outside and white inside' has repeatedly bludgeoned Africans reporting on CNN's favourite dose of negative news –famine, warlords, coup d'etat, epidemics, drought, tribalism, Aids and a string of other foreboding and evil things.

Zimbabweans are not angels and Koinange should have given a fair representation of facts on the ground by thoroughly researching on the lives and experiences of the Shona people before rushing to meet the CNN deadlines.

Zimbabwe has had its fair share of problems, failures, achievements and challenges. And to influence and shape world opinion by spinning that Zimbabweans are surviving on rats shows how Koinange has no understanding of the Shona people, justified the Tarzan movie myth, circumvented objectivity by reducing Zimbabweans to primitive and savage people for global consumption.

Koinange's journalistic and professional ethics are questionable in reporting about the local Zimbabwean culture and fair coverage could have led to a better appreciation of the Shona mice eating culture as part of promoting cultural diversity which the CNN boast about.

"Continual denigration of Africa and by implication its people there or in the Diaspora, is a function of white supremacy, plain and simple," Rob Chavis said in a paper presented at symposium on Africa and the western media.

In 2005, I asked veteran scribe and editor of the London-based New African magazine Baffour Ankomah whether the western media coverage of Africa was changing in any way.

He replied: "No, no, there is no change at all especially when it comes to reporting events in Zimbabwe. It's like a leopard (Western media), they will never change their spots….. British journalism follows the flag…the government lifts the flag and everyone follows. The state does not permit the media to give the masses all the facts. They will keep the large chuff and let minute chunks get to the people."

So here we are today, Koinange is still following the US flag –its national strategic interests at home and abroad and reporting into a box.

In his book, 'The Hearts of Darkness: How White Writers Created The Racist Image of Africa,' Milton Allimadi asserts that the press of those early Darwin years and its successor today continues a tradition of stereotypes, bias and disdain, racism by assaulting Africa and its people using negative images.

"Western media treat the African continent as a malignant appendage rather than as an integral, systemic part of the earth and all its natural functions in accordance with universal laws. Its indigenous populations are depicted as without value," says Chavis.

Other media critics said the CNN used people who resemble blacks (like Koinange) to 'chastise blacks.'
"Just one encounter with one rodent-frying peasant Zimbabwean woman cannot, in any way, constitute sufficient or plausible evidence on which to build a case that starvation has forced a nation of more than 12 million to resort to consumption of rats in order to survive," says one media critic.

The CNN rat story showed how Koinange is being exploited by the CNN to chastise blacks, by failing to tell the difference between a mouse and a rat and by failing to connect this Shona mice-eating tradition to similar lobster-crab American foods or dogs and cats by the Chinese peddling what one media critic says 'ill-informed and sensationalist claptrap.'

Koinange, an African born journalist has failed Africa just like Juda Iscariot sold Jesus for pieces of silver.
His taste of journalism is deeply troubling and driven by lust for the American greenback. The images he peddled bludgeoned the image of Zimbabweans in the eyes of the world.

Zimbabwe has its own share of problems, but to misrepresent facts about its people is supremely disturbing especially when it is coming from CNN which boasts about promoting cultural diversity.

Koinange is just another brush that has been used by his paymasters to paint Zimbabwe in a negative light.