Challenges to Storytelling in South Sudan
JUBA, South Sudan - The group sat in the foyer of the small radio station. There were six of us, four reporters, a news editor and myself, the trainer. The news editor, was asking the reporters in turn for their news for the day. The stories themselves were diverse:
* A cattle raid in a village near the border with Sudan. Reports were coming in that a nomadic pastoralist group was suspected of being behind the raid.
* A group of nearly 100 people from two local villages were hand renovating a road. Their payment was food donated by the World Food Programme.
* A female veteran of the country's civil war was claiming that she was illegally dismissed from her job.
* Reports that people claiming to have been displaced by heavy rainfalls were in actuality fakes.
The news editor handed out the assignments. Outside, we heard the torrential downpour hitting the corrugated metal roof like artillery fire. The assignments were made, but no one moved.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "Why aren't you guys going out to do your assignments?"
"No vehicle. No transport," a reporter said. The one 4x4 used to take reporters out was waiting, but there wasn't a driver to take them out.
"And bad roads." A reporter pointed to the front of the compound, which was flooded with ankle-deep water, as the guards waded through. "Nothing will move in this."
"So make phone calls," I said.
"Can't," piped up the station’s lone female reporter. "No network. The phone network has been out for two days.” I looked at my phone and there were no bars for signal. Internet isn't much better; problems with the service provider meant that the connection was unstable if available at all.
Welcome to newsgathering, South Sudan style, where the logistics of news gathering can overshadow the story. I work as a resident journalism advisor for Community Radio Network in South Sudan for Internews, a US-based nonprofit media development organization. Internews provides media training and infrastructure in post-conflict and developing countries around the world.
Internews has been working in
South Sudan since 2006, just
after the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement (CPA) was signed.
The CPA ended more than
two-decades of civil war
between the Sudan People's
Liberation Movement
(SPLM) and the Government
of Sudan. The project was
tasked
with being a catalyst for
independent local media in the
south. Through funding from USAID and a partnership with Mercy Corps Localizing Institutional Capacity in Sudan (LINCS) project, the organization began providing news and information and giving voice to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in remote locations, including “Sudan: Light in the Darkness.”
Internews built radio stations – six in all – in remote areas and along what would become the border between South Sudan and Sudan. Through these stations the news was broadcast and sent out. With independence came a change in direction and purpose for the stations. Gone was the mandate to provide
I work with four stations in the CRN, each with a crew of seven. The stations are Leer (Naath FM), which is in Unity State, Malualkon (Nhomlaau FM), which is in an area known as Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Nasir (Sobat FM), which is in Upper Nile and near the border with Ethiopia and Turalei (Mayardit FM), which is in Warrap State and is near one of the most disputed areas of the country - Abyei. Each of these stations are near the new border between the Sudans. And each station was built with to specs to reach out to areas that cover more than 60 square kilometers, far greater than a normal community radio footprint.(See attached map)
Training people to report in a post conflict environment presents a lot of challenges. Stories are often multi-layered with nuances that are lost in translation from local language to English and back. The skill sets of the journalists also varied; some had been working at the station for years, others had only just been hired. For some I would be their first trainer and others, I would be their fifth.
I took a mentoring approach – focusing on the basics of news writing and reporting. Some of the previous trainers were still working, so I liaised with them to build on the work that they had done.
There were basic problems such as story identification and clip selection. Script writing was a challenge -- both because the scripts had to be done first in English and later translated into the local languages (Dinka, Nuer and Arabic).
There were also cultural story telling techniques to come to understand. In English, we like our sentences short and to the point. In radio, the clips for news are short -- nothing longer than 15 seconds in the US, and maybe 25 in the UK (both radio markets where I have worked). However, for the Nuer and Dinka staff, those timings didn't work, as it seemed to remove information that was vital to the listeners. As one journalist explained to me in Malualkon "When we hear the news, we like to hear ALL of what happened. People want to know that the person hear a noise, got out of his bed and went outside to find the men stealing the cattle." While in radio there is room for the descriptive, in news bulletins, there isn’t much the room for it. So it was a matter of teaching the reporters how to make this balance.
And of course, there were the physical and technical challenges to getting stories out – from downed generators to battery failures on recorders in the middle of interviews (which gave me the opportunity to teach them the vital importance of always carrying a notebook and taking contemporaneous notes at the same time); and the weather, which would render roads impassable and telephonic communication void.
But stories do get told; and told well.
The journalists and I are learning how to how to fit robust news and journalism into a country where press protection is non-existent (indeed, one of the journalists the station in Leer was arrested twice during my time here.) I have taught them how to ask tough questions to officials without causing offence (couch it in language of helping the community and deliver with a smile); to use the power of the bully pulpit of radio to advocate for changes that can improve the lives of local people. Stories that ran on these stations led to new laws for cattle sale registration (to help prevent illegal sales), a new water point for a far flung village, even a local county commissioner to change his mind about a planting curfew. They learned how ambient sound and having a variety of viewpoints can make a story transcend its parochial boundaries.
They got scoops; Naath FM had the first live interview with the deposed Vice President a mere two days after he was sacked. Nhomlaau FM had an interview with US Ambassador Susan Page straight off the plane as she went to a meeting near the disputed border.
They’ve grown stronger as journalists and have developed a real passion for the roles. As Angelina Achuol at Nhmolaau FM put it “You know, sometimes the government they don’t know what to do and what the people want. But we know. We can find out. And then we can tell them, and telling them, makes it happen. That’s what I like. I like to make the government move.”
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g By Kaylois Henry
Field work is the heart of radio reporting in South Sudan.