Old Habits Are Hard To Break

For more than three decades Fraternite Matin, the consistently staid red-and-black tabloid of Ivory Coast, was the only paper this country knew. Every day, the paper could be counted on to herald President Felix Houphouet-Boigny's "Thought of the Day" across the top of the page. Inside every paper, the country's elderly statesman could be found looking dignified as he greeted foreign diplomats or visiting heads of state or local civic groups. As a matter of custom, the guests were shown giving fair approximations of a full Japanese bow, or at least quoted praising the president's peerless wisdom and generosity of spirit.

For those who dared ask why things were so, the response was that, in a country made up of more than fifty ethnic groups, the threat of tribal animosities required that the press contribute to consensus building. Press on, and the explanation would include what had been the barely subliminal message contained in the news all along: Ivory Coast, a French colonial backwater until 1960, was specially blessed to have a philosopher king as president. For a generation of journalists in Ivory Coast, all of this had amounted to conventional wisdom. Those who had trouble with these notions often found that they also had trouble keeping a job.

With varying degrees of refinement, the same journalistic model was, until recently, in place across much of the African continent. From "revolutionary" Benin and Congo, where the Marxist-inspired slogans of absolute leaders were doled out as news, to Zaire and Togo, where the official press portrayed leaders as single-handed nation-builders, the African press clung to surprisingly consistent guidelines.

All of these countries shared at least one other thing as well in recent years: while their leaders basked in praise, the euphoria of independence faded and their economies sank.

That changed in 1990, in the kind of transforming flash that few see coming. Almost overnight, more than a dozen countries across the continent started moving toward democracy. With a press that had long lain dormant taking a leading role, Africa's ruinous political slumber finally seemed to be ending.

Reporters and editors of the region gathered their courage, and sometimes pooled their own money; would-be publishers began pushing for licenses to print. In many countries, for the first time ever, a competitive free press was born.

In Ivory Coast it had never been illegal to publish an independent paper, but the government had always found ways to deter anyone who entertained the thought. So in early 1990, when a group of journalists, all former employees of the state media, set out to establish a new newspaper, La Voie (The Path), in the Ivorian capital, Abidjan, they found that the toughest hurdle they faced was fear.

"First we went to see the people at Fraternite Matin, perhaps a bit naively, but since they had the only real press in the country we asked if we could pay them to print our paper," recalls Raphael Lakpe, for years a business reporter at the government paper, now the editor-in-chief of La Voie. "They told us, 'No deal. You are an opposition outfit.'

"So we scoured the entire city, but every time we thought we had found a printer, when we showed up to sign a contract, their doors were shuttered and the lights were out."

La Voie got its start that August, when the journalists finally found a printer willing to risk the wrath of the government. Ever since, the paper, which is loosely associated with the leading opposition party, the Ivorian Popular Front, has been hard pressed to print enough copies.

In the wake of La Voie's success in Ivory Coast, Fraternite Matin, meanwhile, became prized as wrapping paper for the fish and fried plantains sold from street-corner hibachis, where the people of Abidjan's steel-and-glass downtown eat on the run.

Soon, Ivory Coast's press had plenty of company in the region, as alternative publications, taking measure of new freedoms, began sprouting in many countries. In countries like Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Togo, the efforts of a new generation of journalists initially ran into stiff resistance from authorities who harassed the founders and editors of papers that dared to question their countries' leaders. In places like Benin and Mali, forerunners of the democratic wave, everything from satirical weeklies to economic and political journals flourished, limited only be the economics of the marketplace.

"There have been two motors pushing the drive for change in Africa: the universities and the press," says Barthelemy Kotchy, dean of the faculty of letters at the University of Abidjan, and a leader of the push for greater democracy in the country. "Students have always played an important role in agitating for change, only to see their ferment repeatedly suppressed. This time, however, things were different. Just as the universities began to simmer, Africa's journallists discovered their pens."

In Ivory Coast -- as in Mali, Ghana, Congo, Burkina Faso, and other countries as well -- the unprecedented explosion of a free press onto the scene was quickly followed by the freest elections any of these countries had seen since independence.

For the first time, the Ivorian parliament seated opposition deputies, and policy became a matter of public debate.

But as in much of Eastern Europe, life in Africa under newly democratic rule has not ushered in the millenium. Ivory coast, an island of prosperity compared with many of its neighbors, is crushingly poor by Western standards. It remains a small country with a towering debt, where cocoa and coffee farmers labor ever harder to eke out a living against a backdrop of falling commodity prices abroad and high inflation at home. A free press and young democracy have done little, so far, to affect such realities.

For Ivorian journalists, however, there is already a clear sense that nothing will be the same again. A small but politically charged event last summer reinforced that sense of change. As the opposition leader, Laurent Gbagbo, was about to be released after 110 dyas in jail (on what Western embassies said were trumped-up political charges), Fraternite Matin tried a bit of subterfuge. Seeking to prevent any triumphal rally by Gbagbo's supporters, the weekend edition of the paper ran an article announcing that he would be released "in the beginning of the week," although he was actually to be freed quietly on the weekend.

Not so long ago this ploy would have worked without a hitch. But journalists from La Voie got wind of the plan and showed up in time to capture images of the prisoner's walk to freedom. A large rally followed, and for a week La Voie, which now prints 50,000 copies daily and has become the nation's most widely read paper, delivered stern editorial lectures to the government about "disinformation" that became the talk of the town.

"Reading La Voie is like watching a bunch of ordinary citizens upbraiding a corrupt gendarme," one young Ivorian, waiting for a downtown bus, said at the time. "It's a spectacle worth paying for." Already, however, it is becoming clear that the self-righteous swagger of the opposition press is not always merited.

With Fraternite Matin struggling in the face of the new competition, the government recently decided to privatize the newspaper. As a result, it is laboring mightily to become both more interesting and more credible.

By contrast, La Voie, for all its popularity, seems to be lapsing into many of the same excesses and faults for which it criticized Fraternite Matin. These days, Gbagbo, the opposition leader, is treated with much the same reverence formerly reserved for Houphouet-Boigny in Fraternite Matin. Just as the offices of Fraternite Matin bear thepresident's portrait on most walls, so, too, Gbagbo's posters are ubiquitous at La Voie, despite protestations that it is not a party paper.

The managing editors of these two warring newspapers, interestingly, are brothers, and the tension and ambiguity of journalism in Ivory Coast is reflected in their thinking.

For years, each had labored within the system while Ivory Coast strove to become economically vibrant, an African Singapore, with its own enlightened dictator to match.

On this score, the brothers, Michel Kouame and Atta Koffi, loyally wrote articles arguing that such extravagances as the president's five-month vacations in his sumptuous chateaux in France and Switzerland were deserved.

Now, from a cramped office at La Voice, where our conversation is repeatedly interrupted by the half dozen young reporters under his direction, Atta Koffi, a balding, bespectacled fifty-two-year-old, speaks of that period as a zombie might of his trance after being awakened. "At the time, it was still a single-party system and I was merely doing my job," he says. "Everyone was just doing his job. The only thing that held things together within the party was a community of petty interests."

Michel Kouame, Koffi's forty-two-year-old brother, who was recently made managing editor of Fraternite Matin, has betrayed uneasiness with the single-party system long before the winds of democracy began to sweep the region. Yet he remains troubled by the threat of ethnic divisions, and he wonders aloud about the maturity of his people under an unfettered democracy.

"After taking a step forward toward pluralism, we are now in the stage of great self-doubt," Kouame says, in the course of an interview frequently interrupted by the ringing of the twin telephones in his heavily air-conditioned office. "When things began to change, every young journalist said enthusiastically, 'We are going to remake things in our image now.' But that has not been simple. The same elite controls the country, unwilling to surrender any privilege. The same reflexes toward blind partisanship prevail. Old habits die hard."

"In a sense," says his brother, over at La Voie, "each of us has to learn the craft all over again, to stop being someone else's tool. But no one imagined how hard that would be in the midst of political combat."

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