Words from Prof Thompson # missing you Mzungu

I am standing with my co-instructor, Damas Ndumbaro, among students in our media law class. This is the largest classroom on the School of Journalism and Mass Communication campus, but we were originally assigned one all the students could not fit in and was unbearably hot. At first I moved the class outdoors, but the students then decided to move the class meeting time later so we were able to schedule this classroom



I have completed my teaching assignment at the University of Dar es Salaam School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I co-taught three classes: media law, mass media and society, and newswriting.

Of course, I knew nothing about Tanzanian media law; what little I now know I learned from my co-instructor, Damas Ndumbaro. But I was able to talk to the students about the history of freedom of expression and the First Amendment in the hope that they later would be able to make their own mental comparisons with Tanzanian law and practice. This is of special timeliness as Tanzania is drafting a new constitution that may give more direct attention to and protection for freedom of expression.

For several weeks I was on my own teaching about media and society as my co-instructor in that class, Ayob Rioba, left to defend his doctoral dissertation at the University of Tampere in Finland, which he did successfully. What an amazing accomplishment for him. While he was gone I lectured on the history of media theory, which is what I would have done in my U.S. classroom, setting the groundwork for a deeper look at media effects later. I wish I had had more exposure to Ayob’s lectures, which were tied to his dissertation. I remember one class he was showing his Power Points and he quickly passed over a slide, but not before I think I saw that it was about Western ideas about post-colonial media development theory in Africa. I think it may have been critical of the West and I wonder if he clicked past it to spare a confrontation or possible embarrassment on my part, as I was the only foreigner in the classroom. But that is a conversation I would have liked to have had.

I co-taught the newswriting class with Njonjo Mfaume. He I and worked the closest together and his was the loosest structured of the classes. Although all the classes were conducted in English, not Swahili, in this class I more often found myself having to explain what I was saying either because the students didn’t understand some of the words I was using or because the examples I used were foreign to them. For example, in one lecture on interpretive newswriting I was talking about “Wall Street” and I realized all the students’ faces were telling me they had never heard the term before. So I had to digress and explain that Wall Street was both a real place and a shorthand way of referring to the financial markets. Also, some of the American media I referred to they had never heard of, such a Rolling Stone magazine. Perhaps that should not have surprised me. But for students who listen to music (that would be 100 percent of them), this a magazine I would think they’d like to know about. (Sadly, I have no evidence anyone looked it up online after I told them about it. But I can’t be too critical. My exposure to African music is dated to King Sunny Ade, who is Nigerian, not Tanzanian, in any case. Nonetheless I was a little surprised the students had never heard of him.) So this class even more than the others became a cross-cultural learning experience for both the students and for me.

 As far as the student newswriting goes, there is a lot of work to do, at least in English. Perhaps their writing and news judgment is better in Swahili, but I have no way of knowing. Having said this, I often have similar problems with native English speakers in my own classes in Oregon. Students want to be journalism or mass communication majors but they don’t regularly read newspapers or even magazines, either in print or online. Or if they do, they read sports or lifestyle/celebrity stories, but they do so completely uncritically. It makes me wonder why they think they want to go into media work.

My general concern with the classes was the lackadaisical approach some students took. My first exposure to this was the first two or three weeks of school when I would show up for a class but no or few students would be there. There were always excuses such as the need to move into the dorm, called a hostel here, or a slow bus or train from the hinterlands to Dar. But there was no sense of urgency to be in class when the semester started. The second and related example of this was the tardiness of students even once they had committed to a class. Students wandered in an hour or more late regularly. Apparently there is a joke in Tanzania about this “Africa-time” attitude, the punch line of which goes, “We’re already late, so why should we hurry.”

But overall, I think having an American presence, even for the few weeks I was there teaching, was helpful. Most of the students’ exposure to the Western culture is from movies or television, but the exposure is as often to the BBC, al-Jazeera or Bollywood as to anything from the U.S. I remember one student asking me, incredulously, “You mean there is no malaria in America?” Yes, I said, no one in the U.S. gets malaria, failing to mention that America is not a tropical country. But I did say that West Nile virus is now in the U.S. She also asked me about power outages, which sometimes are a daily occurrence in Dar es Salaam, indeed throughout the country. She wondered how often Americans lose power in their homes. I said never. Her jaw dropped. Then I corrected myself, thinking of Hurricane Sandy and worldwide distribution of images of a darkened lower Manhattan. I said almost never, certainly less than once a year, and always because of a storm or accident, not simply because of the power company’s failure pay its bills or corruption of officials or the breakdown of mission-critical components that don’t have backups. She was stunned, but the message I intended and hoped that she took away was that it was possible for Tanzania to do better.

from bradthompsonmedia.