The Need to Centre Mass Media in African Transitional Justice

Mass media in Africa is often treated as an afterthought during transitional justice interventions. Instead, the media—especially mainstream radio, newspapers, and television—should be treated as an integral actor in shaping transitional justice.  

As a survivor of the Sierra Leonean conflict and a former journalist who covered my country’s transitional justice efforts, I witnessed firsthand the crucial role that local media played in building public understanding of the transitional justice process.

Later, leading a grant-making organisation that supported transitional justice across Africa, I saw that the media is almost always at the bottom of the priority ladder. In nearly all the countries where we worked, funding support focused on civil society organisations, while no dedicated funding was available for the media. There were active transitional justice working groups composed mainly of civil society organisations, but hardly any communities of practice for or by the media.

For this reason, we took a bold step to fund media groups in Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia. From these personal and professional experiences, I argue for the mediatisation of transitional justice in Africa, with the media playing a key role as promoters, framers, referees, witnesses, and facilitators of transitional processes.

Media as Promoters

The media is already used to promote transitional justice activities and events. For example, the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) in The Gambia used this approach extensively. TRRC hearings were broadcast live on national television and by radio stations. The argument was that this helped promote the proceedings of the commission and enabled Gambians in and out of the country to know what was going on. The media effectively publicised the happenings of the TRRC, although some argue that the live broadcasts made some commissioners into local celebrities, due to how they used their positions to interrogate testifiers at the commission.

This promotional approach is also used to spread the thematic messages of a transitional justice mechanism. In Sierra Leone, for instance, the government used the media to promote the ‘forgive and forget’ mantra of the immediate post-war era. Then President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah tasked the Sierra Leonean media to promote a message of reconciliation and moving on. The advantage of this is that it was expedient and contributed to forging a pathway for national reconciliation. Critics, however, argue that the appeal to forget meant that Sierra Leoneans did not adequately memorialise the consequences of the war. As a result, only a few civil society organisations are still making efforts to ensure that people remember past abuses.

Media as Framers

Transitional justice is often seen as a complex socio-judicial and political process. Many people, including civil society actors, shy away from it. Across Africa, there are few notable organisations known for making transitional justice understandable to both policymakers and the public. Mass media is almost always tasked with the responsibility to increase public knowledge and widespread understanding of various transitional justice processes.

Mass media is arguably the only sector that educates, informs and generates public knowledge and citizen engagement at scale, thereby increasing public trust in transitional justice. An informed and enlightened citizenry is a crucial determinant for the success and impact of transitional justice interventions.

Through information and education, mass media has also contributed to framing the dimensions of various transitional justice processes across the continent. Following the end of the Biafra War in Nigeria, the government spread the ‘no victor, no vanquished’ mantra to describe its post-war activities. The media was extensively utilised to advance that trajectory. In Liberia, mass media was effectively used to make the case for the establishment of a war crimes court. Through organisations like Talking Drum Studio, the media framed the post-war initiatives in Liberia. The same is being done today by Justice Info, a multilingual online platform dedicated to informing public understanding of various justice initiatives.

Media as Referees

As a sector, the media analyses and scrutinises the transitional justice process in a country or community. They help shape public opinion and contribute to drawing parameters for the public’s interactions with the process. This role is often manifested in articles, opinion pieces, features, and documentaries.

For decades, mainstream media has assumed the role of referees by commenting on a range of transitional justice issues. Beyond their usual role of event reporting, they take positions on issues, and some go as far as naming perpetrators of atrocity crimes. They analyse the implications of peace agreements and transitional justice mechanisms. They scrutinise the efficacy (or lack thereof) of a process. The media also tend to want to regulate how various state and non-state actors should conduct themselves in the exercise of their transitional justice duties. This function serves the additional role of providing checks and balances on transitional justice.

Media as Witnesses

In carrying out their traditional functions of informing, educating, analysing, and providing platforms for victims and survivors, the media plays another equally fundamental role in transitional justice. They serve as witnesses of atrocities and document and advance truth, justice and accountability. Many media practitioners have testified before truth commissions and tribunals on the continent.

Like other sectors, the media are also victims of conflicts and dictatorships. The media usually face direct attacks on their independence and mandate, during and after conflict. Journalists and media practitioners often get killed or injured. They witness war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by warring factions or rogue regimes. Their testimonies are as important as those of other victims and survivors.

This role of the media is often overlooked in transitional justice spaces across Africa. From South Africa to The Gambia, media practitioners have and continue to play roles that go beyond traditional reporting.

Media as Facilitators

The media play a key role as facilitators of communal agency and elevators of community voices. One example is HumAngle Media in Nigeria. Founded by an award-winning investigative journalist, HumAngle Media has shown leadership in how the media can amplify the voices of victims, survivors, and other stakeholders. Describing themselves as a conflict-reporting platform, their ‘core mandate is to advance the cause of human values and dignity by insisting on accountability in the security and humanitarian sectors.’

The HumAngle Media approach to transitional justice and conflict reporting transfers the pen and the mic to victims and survivors. In addition to accurately reporting on events, the outlet provides a platform for victims and survivors to narrate their own stories. This is arguably one of the most significant aspects of the mediatisation of transitional justice, because it upends the traditional role of the media and decentralises reporting power.

Centring the Media

The media’s role in advancing transitional justice efforts across Africa is changing and gaining prominence. However, there is still a long way to go when it comes to resource allocation. The media’s approach to transitional justice is also evolving. The emergence of new technologies is accelerating the evolution, which must not only be documented, but also systematised and contextualised.

For transitional justice to be truly transformative, the media (in all their forms) must hold a prominent place in every step of the transitional justice process. They should not be late additions to the conversation. Nor should the media be considered only for publicising transitional justice events. From inception to conclusion, state and non-state parties to the transitional justice process should give the media active and influential roles to advance transitional justice policies and initiatives. There should also be ring-fenced funding support and a community of learning and practice for the media in any country implementing a transitional process.

A version of this piece was first published on the African Transitional Justice Hub, an initiative of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.