JMS

Wow am I behind on blogging. A month or so ago I was part of a “new media brain trust” at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. Other than a trip to Morocco in the early 90s I’ve never traveled to Africa and had been hoping to some day, and now hope to again soon.

This trip was part of the New Media Institute (NMI), an evolving project of the National Black Programming Consortium, one of public television’s five minority production centers. NMI is becoming a real nexus of training, discussion and networking for minority multimedia producers here in the U.S. and now also in Africa (see short overview video at the end of the post). PRX has looked for ways to partner with NBPC (most recently on their Masculinity Project) and joined in several NMI sessions in Boston and Jackson, MI. So I was thrilled to be invited to join the Zanzibar voyage.

Zanzibar itself is a fascinating place. A mix of African, Arab, Indian, and Asian history and culture, Zanzibar is still often called the Spice Islands along with the other nearby islands in the archipelago. We stayed in the capital in the heart of Stone Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an intense and mysterious spot. Between getting there and back and the workshop in the middle, we only had a couple days to explore Stone Town and some of the rest of the island but what we did get to see was stunning (see some more pics with captions below).

The workshop itself was a two-day conversation (in English, with a bit of Swahili) with 40 or so participants on public service media’s transition to a digital age in both North America and Africa. The focus was on how Africa could use new media to tell stories in a new way, to connect to each other within and between countries on the continent, and to reach beyond on a global scale. Although the majority of the African attendees were broadcasters of one kind or another, the workshop started off with a blogger panel featuring Kenyan blogger Daudi Were and Tanzanian blogger Issa Michuzi who really set the pace for the rest of the discussion. Daudi talked about the complicated role of blogs and SMS in the turbulent aftermath of the recent Kenyan elections and drove home the theme of a power shift in media authority.

Later panels such as “All Politics is Local, All Conflict is Global” and “The Online Space and the Marginalized Voice” took us further into discussion of the tension between institutions and individuals as media roles start to shift. In particular the story of SMS during the post-election violence in Kenya was striking. The viral and direct potential of misinformation or incitement via SMS when mass media is unreliable or unavailable is leading to a new law banning the use of messaging that targets people by ethnicity no matter what the cause. On my panel I talked about PRX, a bit on the long tail (complete with self-serving segue to my rock star status in South Korea), and how U.S. public media is handling the transition to digital.

Highlights of the workshop included Dr. Julianne Malveaux’s keynote about telling untold powerful and positive stories of Africa, my friend and long-time Berkman affiliate Eric Osiakwan’s talk about African Internet infrastructure and the final presentation of NMI:Africa student films-in-progress. Tremendous stuff.

Feeling like we’d only scratched the surface, it was already time to head home but not without a trip around the island, catching some time at a spice farm, a spectacular beach on the eastern shore (and my first swim in the Indian Ocean), a visit with the endangered Red Colobus Monkey (I got some video of a funny encounter here on YouTube), and even a chance to jam on guitar with a Tanzanian reggae band.

I was profoundly grateful for the chance to visit Zanzibar and in such a provocative way - would that all introductions to new places mix in a film and music festival, an intensive workshop, and a taste of five different flavors from a cinnamon tree.

I’ve mainly and only haphazardly followed a variety of African developments through Global Voices and my friend and fellow Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman’s outstanding blog My Heart’s in Accra. Thinking about Ethan’s post “Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia” brought home again the simple realization that in part drove my interest in this trip to begin with: being there matters, being there changes something. It’s not one single thing, like breathing the distinctive air or the huge distance traveled, but the complete experience of being in a place has the ability to connect you with it and with people there in a way that even powerful stories - never mind news reports - can’t match. Kind of obvious, I know. Of course, this approach doesn’t scale to meet Ethan’s goal of bridging the global empathy and attention gap, but perhaps there is a strategy that makes the most of folks who serendipitously get inspired through a trip like NMI Zanzibar. I’m an aspiring xenophile.

Here’s a short video overview of NMI: Mississippi: