‘You build trust’: A listener’s openness reveals a culture of giving
It serves no journalist to predict a story’s course. But a storyteller’s expectations matter. Our contributor, while based in West Africa, went looking for a story of generosity and agency in a place not widely known for either.
There’s a prevailing narrative in Western media about much of the African continent. It’s one of instability and perpetual want, of resources awaiting plunder by outsiders, of self-determination only in pockets.
That misses a lot. For the Monitor, contributor Nick Roll delivered a counternarrative: a story of generosity and agency.
Through an international aid organization, he learned of an effort in the village of Chadakori, Niger, to integrate refugees fleeing political violence in neighboring Nigeria. It isn’t a perfect arrangement, says Nick on the Monitor’s “Why We Wrote This” podcast. There is some tension, for example, around informal loans to new arrivals when repayment is slow or not forthcoming.
“But then at the same time, everyone I talked to, they didn’t regret opening their doors, opening their villages to these refugees,” Nick says. Telling their story called for setting high expectations for discovery.
“You know, if you go out looking for stories of death and destruction, you’re going to find them,” he says. “If you go looking for these stories of resilience or generosity amid really harsh conditions, people will recognize what you’re doing. People are aware of how they’ve been portrayed [before] ... and they trust somebody who is looking to do something differently.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: Many US news reports from across the African continent tend to paint countries there as being on the receiving end of Western action or inaction. There is, of course, much more to the story.
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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Monitor contributor Nick Roll worked in public health in Senegal as a Peace Corps volunteer, and has written from there and other countries in the region. He’s done editing work for the Monitor, including a stint running the weekly Points of Progress franchise. Nick has written for outlets including NPR, Al Jazeera and South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. He’s currently an editor on the English-language desk for Agence France-Presse in Washington. Nick joins me today to talk about a story of agency and generosity that he reported recently from a village in Niger that has embraced refugees fleeing violence in neighboring Nigeria. Welcome, Nick.
Nick Roll: Hi, Clay. Thanks for having me.
Collins: Yeah! So in assessing some recent Monitor reporting, our top editor called this story of yours, “a powerful counter narrative, a credible and moving affirmation of humanity, decency, and dignity.” And he called it “just the sort of story the Monitor exists to find.” That’s pretty high praise. So how did you find it?
Roll: At the beginning, I was in contact with Save the Children, which is a big charity. And they had access to a lot of these refugee camps in Niger. One of the things they were telling us was that the refugee camps were attached to these villages. The idea being the United Nations, which runs the camps, didn’t want the camps to be separated economically, socially, which is an issue that happens at a lot of refugee camps. We were discussing a slew of story ideas, but one that really stuck out to me was. Basically you have these local Nigeriens that are welcoming in these thousands of refugees from Nigeria, into their villages. Niger is a very poor country where there is not necessarily a lot to give. This is kind of an incredible show of generosity. And that really interested me.
Collins: Hmm. You also wrote that in welcoming refugees, Niger is not an outlier. About 86% of the world’s refugees live in low- and middle-income countries, and. The largess of the poor is actually a pretty big sub-story in all kinds of philanthropy worldwide. But this wasn’t necessarily an easy decision for the people of the village of Chadakori, was it?
Roll: No, it wasn’t. And I tried not to sugarcoat that in my reporting. When refugees arrived, uh, they didn’t have any money, so some people took out loans. Not everybody was able to pay back these kind of informal loans. So you had people defaulting. A lot of these refugees, they’re living in tents with dirt floors, with not a lot of possessions. They’re out begging in the streets sometimes when money from the World Food Program comes in late. So yeah, there are issues and there have been tensions at times with the communities. Other people in the community were afraid to welcome refugees, right? I mean, they fled violence in Nigeria, so what is stopping that violence from following into Niger? That was some of the thought process of people who were maybe scared to open their doors to people. But then at the same time, everyone I talked to, they didn’t regret opening their doors, opening their villages to these refugees. Ultimately, they really found it to be a win-win situation. And they felt like they had done the right thing. They were proud that they had followed international law about refugee policy.
Collins: One of your sources said: “Niger stands for humanity.” And that shouldn’t necessarily surprise anyone, but, you know, as we said up top, so much of what’s put forward in the region describes war and want. I’m wondering as a Western reporter, you must sometimes be suspected of being that kind of storyteller. How did you gain trust?
Roll: You build trust naturally depending on what you’re looking for. You know, if you go out looking for stories of death and destruction, you’re gonna find them. Whereas if you go looking for these stories of resilience or generosity amid really harsh conditions, people will recognize what you’re doing. People are aware of how they’ve been portrayed in the media, and they kind of trust somebody who is looking to do something differently. For example, we were talking to a village chief. And he is telling me this story about this guy. He was a local Nigerien guy who married a Nigerian refugee. And that was one of the angles I was looking at were these marriages, right? That’s a great example of these two communities coming together. And the photographer I was with, Guy Peterson, he says: “OK, well, tell the village chief [we want to] go visit that guy.” So we went. Next thing I know, I’m in this guy’s house. We’re laughing, we’re joking. He’s bragging about how he was the first Nigerien to marry a local refugee and then all of his friends followed suit. You know, he started the trend. And we met his family, and we met the stepchildren that he gained through these marriages. If we were only looking for death and poverty and war, we wouldn’t have found this guy.
Collins: The man in your lead, uh, was very enterprising and had an interesting story too.
Roll: Yeah, that’s right. He is a barber. He was a barber in Nigeria. And he took those skills to the village in Niger. You know, we were just out there in the refugee camp talking to a diverse array of people, people who had just arrived, people who had been there for years. You kind of need this array of experiences to fully understand what it is that you’re looking at as a reporter. But, his experience really stuck out to me just because, what a way to integrate yourself with the community by not just cutting people’s hair but doing circumcisions. I think both of those things are, are very intimate services.
Collins: Right. The Monitor recently covered an initiative in Sweden to co-house elderly Swedes and young migrants. And one goal of that, or one upshot, really, was that it produced some cross-cultural bridge building and understanding. Do you see tensions being soothed by cross-border welcoming, like what you saw in Chadakori?
Roll: I do. I, I really think that’s kind of a universal thing. One of the things that I was interested in is, in this area of Niger, there’s a lot of Hausa speaking people. They speak Hausa. That’s the language. And a lot of people speak Hausa on the northern part of Nigeria. So you might think: “Oh, OK. They speak the same language. That had to have eased integration efforts.” But some of the people I talked to actually pushed back on that. They said: “No, you know, they do things differently. They’re Nigerian. We had a lot to learn actually.” There was a cross-cultural exchange, even though they spoke the same language, and they did overlap culturally in a lot of ways.
I would see that, again, in Senegal, where I was based, you know, Senegal has a lot of ethnic groups, and they kind of famously all get along for the most part. But then you still see it kind of pop up: If somebody’s not from Senegal and they’re from a different West African country, they might be treated differently or someone might say something. But then on the other hand, you see what happens when you actually get to know someone, right? Suddenly this guy from Guinea or this guy from Nigeria, he’s your friend. He’s not this stereotype that you have in your mind.
Collins: Yeah, I want to zoom back, and ask, there’s a Western outlook that sometimes creeps into stories about Africa, especially stories about resources. Journalist Howard French called that out recently in a tweet. He said, “I’m not one for ‘scramble’ and ‘race for’ Africa frames.” And he wondered about the perspective of people in African countries to those kinds of stories. And so I wondered, how do you ensure in your reporting that those kinds of perspectives make it into the stories in a really central way?
Roll: Yeah. You know, in the whole “race for Africa, scramble for Africa” thing, especially when you have this sort of “great power” framing between the U.S., China, and Russia, you know, I think even at its best, it’s a very limited framing. Which begs the question: how do you get African perspectives? A quick example: University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, which is the capital of Senegal, is this big university that is very well renowned. It brings in students and scholars and researchers from across West and North Africa. As a journalist you would think: “Oh, well, I can call up some professors there. And that’s a great expert source on a topic.” But it’s not always so easy, because the university doesn’t have like a super easy-to-use online directory like an American university would. So that’s kinda like the first roadblock, right? Where you’re like: “OK, well, it’s easier, it’s faster to just reach out to a Western professor, who I’ve talked to before or who I saw on CNN.” So I think a lot of, like, trying to get African perspectives is just saying: “Why don’t I try a little harder? Why don’t I make some phone calls? Why don’t I reach out to other reporters and see if anybody has a good source on this?” Uh, which is, I think, kind of essential, given the history and the baggage that western media has sometimes had on the continent.
And to give an example of competing narratives. Senegal is about to tap into a bunch of oil and gas deposits that are offshore. There’s a lot of perspectives on that. The immediate, kind of big-picture perspective is: “How could you do this? We’re facing a climate crisis.” But then from the Senegalese perspective, right, it’s like: “Well, hold on. A lot of countries have tapped into fossil fuels. And this is a lot of money just sitting in the ground. We would be crazy not to take it.” And then that changes again when you talk to a Senegalese environmentalist who is still opposed to the drilling. So that’s just an example of like a million competing perspectives that, I might have to try to squish into one story, without my editor getting mad at me for going over the word count.
Collins: Right. Well, Nick, thanks for putting in the work on Africa stories, and thanks for joining us here today!
Roll: Yeah. Thank you so much.
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Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more including our show notes with links to the story discussed to more of Nick’s work and to more stories about generosity at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Alyssa Britton was our engineer, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
