I was passing through Accra recently and while walking through the lobby of the hotel was stopped by a poster for a regional conference on Freedom of Information and at the same time ran into several colleagues and old friends. It was an interesting exercise to be very aware of an issue and personalities but be on the outside looking. The conference was well attended, drawn by the start power of former US president Jimmy Carter, his center and high level activist and political figures from Africa. The Carter Center which has been at the forefront of this work is able to draw attention to and raise the profile of the issue in West Africa.

But what did it all mean to local people? When I asked Ghanaians working or staying at the hotel about the conference, there was very high recognition but mostly it was linked to former President Carter. But the issue drew little recognition or excitement. Ghana did announce that after years of languishing on the books an FOI bill would be introduced into Parliament. But to the people outside of the conference this would have little impact on their daily lives. Their worries were much more about food, shelter, safety, schooling and the actions of the government in power on their lives. [read more]

WRITING crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides,” a monk wrote in the margins of a manuscript he was copying in a medieval monastery. Printing had much more evil potential. It was attacked on aesthetic grounds. Shortly after Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable type, a great copyist, Vaspasiano, said “a gentleman would never foul his library with a roughly inked, manufactured book on coarse rag paper”. More seriously, those who had controlled the flow of information — notably the church — feared losing their hold on people’s minds and beliefs.

As late as the 1660s, England’s chief book censor, Sir Roger L’Estrange, was asking “whether more mischief than advantage were not occasioned to the Christian world by the invention of typography”. Poet Andrew Marvell wrote: “O Printing! How thou has disturbed the peace of Mankind!”   [read more]

Johannesburg — SA's first bilingual "m-novel" - a novel written for publication via cellphones - was so successful that sequels would be released this year, the Shuttleworth Foundation, which published the novel, said last week. In two months 63 000 people - 28 000 of them teenagers - signed up to read the m-novel, Kontax, written in English and Xhosa, after the launch in November. The novel, written by a "mobilist" called Sam Wilson, describes the experiences of a crew of young graffiti mural artists and their search for a girl who goes missing in suspicious circumstances. [read more]

In a meeting last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the African Union Commission (AUC) and the European Commission (EC) announced that they no longer intend to create a Pan African Media Observatory (PAMO) due to opposition from the media community, and African and international organisations - including a number of IFEX members, reports Media Rights Agenda (MRA). PAMO was proposed by the AUC and the EC in 2009 to mediate disputes within the media and enforce professional standards and conduct for the media. But the project ignored the reality of brutal state repression of the press as it was set up to give African leaders control over the media environment, reports MRA. MRA and other IFEX members at the meeting, including the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), the Media Institute of Southern African (MISA), the Center for Media Studies and Peace Building (CEMESP), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and ARTICLE 19, rejected presentations of the PAMO project.

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