Voices in the hills of Rwanda: African press accountability of the 1994 pogrom

Abstract

This study attempts to discern the frames that dominated the coverage of the 1994 Rwandan crisis and genocide in Kenya’s Daily Nation and Nigeria’s Guardian, two leading African dailies. The study found that there was a great deal of overlap between the two newspapers with regard to the major frames: bane of a nation, Rwandan national introspection, an(other) African cataclysm, together with world inaction and indifference emerged as the dominant themes. However, there were also differences in coverage. The national/regional interest emerged as a theme in the Daily Nation but did not develop in the coverage by The Guardian. Both papers also went to considerable lengths to explore the background to the crisis and its wider implications.