Broadcasters focus a new lens on Africa
Anchor aweigh: Komla Dumor will present the BBC’s daily programme, Focus on Africa. (Madelene Cronjé, MG)
To get to the boardroom of the BBC Africa bureau in Johannesburg is like a mini-journey through the international broadcaster’s past, present and future of eight decades’ of news-gathering on the continent.
You pass its state-of-the-art radio and TV studios and go through a small but busy newsroom, with large wall-mounted monitors broadcasting BBC World news, next to clocks ticking away the different time zones. Then you go along a corridor of editing rooms, where someone is digitising the bureau’s massive tape collection.
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The walls of the corridor are covered with sepia photographs of slim and smiling old BBC hands such as George Alagiah, Milton Nkosi and Glenn Middleton set against African sunsets.
The future of the BBC’s African broadcasting fills the boardroom with a big voice and a large smile, and exudes a passion for the continent. His name is Komla Dumor and he will be the anchor of the broadcaster’s new television programme, Focus on Africa, starting on Monday evening on BBC World.
It will be the first daily television news programme (30 minutes long) dedicated to Africa by an international broadcaster.
Ghanaian-born Dumor was in South Africa recently on a whirlwind promotional tour.
Challenges and prospects
“I am incredibly excited to be part of a programme that will provide solid coverage of Africa’s challenges and prospects,” he said.
Africa is no longer the lost continent – it is now a continent with audiences that broadcasters want to capture. It is a three-horse race at the moment between the BBC, CNN and
Al Jazeera International, but the
Category: Africa News
