When on 18 March this year the Daily Nation, one of Africa's biggest and most successful independent newspapers, celebrated its 50th anniversary, Charles Onyango Obbo, a columnist for the Nairobi, Kenya, paper, wrote, "It has mostly been hell on earth for the African media for most of these 50 years. In fact the freest period for the African media generally has been the 15-year period between 1990 and 2005."

At independence in 1960 most newspapers were privately owned, organs either of the nationalist political movements and parties or of businesses mostly established by European investors.

But by 1970 most newspapers of any signifi­cance across the continent were government-owned. Any newspaper expressing independent editorial attitudes was censored, banned or so controlled that most of the owners gave up publishing.  One man, the Liberian journalist Kenneth Best, started the first daily in both Liberia and Gambia in the 1980s. Mr. Best eventually had to flee both countries.  [read more]