‘Is Togo television yours or mine?’

Abstract

When the President, General Eyadema, put this question to the presenter of the 8 o'clock evening news, there was no doubt about the answer. The debate about a New International Information Order seems for the time being to have ground to a halt. Western critics of these proposals tend to fall back on one basic argument: the safeguarding of freedom of information, already in a poor state around the world. Their concerns are shared by many journalists in countries whose governments are calling for change, which only serves to show that their arguments are not entirely without foundation. But then, how do Third World governments make use of the means of information at their disposal? Why is it that the very idea of their countries' playing a more active part in the international exchange of news should spark off such distrust, not only in the West—particularly in the United States — but even among their own journalists? The ideal way of obtaining a complete response to this question would be to take each country in turn and analyse its system of information, taking each piece of the mechanism apart in order to demonstrate the various obstacles, deliberate or otherwise, to the free flow of information. Such a study is beyond the scope of the present article. Instead, we will limit ourselves to one example which may serve to shed light on the others: the tiny West African state of Togo — 35,000 square miles and 2 1/2 million inhabitants. Not that everything that happens there is valid everywhere else; but one can find solid examples of practices employed, to a varying degree, in a significant number of other Third World countries, particularly those of French-speaking Africa.