Sorious Samura says he did it because he could. The television journalist's documentary, Living with AIDS, broke an almighty taboo by scrutinizing male sexual promiscuity as a cause of Africa's HIV epidemic, and last week earned him Broadcaster of the Year at the One World Media Awards in London. No white person, Samura says, would have dared.
"The things I said in Living with AIDS about the African male's sexuality are things that no white journalist can say," he muses, relaxing over a drink at a pub in Clapham, south London.
"There are honest things that the Western media ought and need to say about Africa but political correctness has prevented them. If you're black and you're wrong, it should be said. That's the advantage that I have, because now I can say things that they can't because they don't want to be labelled racist or have people saying: `Who the hell are they? It's neo-colonialism. They're coming to tell us what to do, where to go,'" he said.
In Living with AIDS, broadcast last year, Samura confronted Zambian men who said they could see no point in wearing a condom once they had HIV.
In an interview at the time, Samura described a culture of sexual recklessness internalized in childhood and cited his own experience growing up in Sierra Leone, where he became sexually active at the age of seven and had unprotected intercourse with multiple partners.
He was braced for a fierce public backlash, but it never came.
"The film has been seen all over Africa and you had close to a million people when it was aired here on Channel 4 [in the UK], but I got fewer than 10 serious e-mails or phone calls denying the reality, more from Westerners who were scared than Africans. In Zambia they backed the film and are now distributing it all over. Even the UN were behind it, saying we know about this but we're not allowed to interview under-age kids. Why should the West, then, be scared?" he said.
Samura, 43, certainly believes in living his subject, making for a kind of televisual New Journalism. For Living with AIDS he moved to Zambia to live with a family suffering from HIV and spent a month working in a hospital where more than half the patients had the virus.
For Living with Hunger, he moved into an Ethiopian village and lived off their diet for a month. And for Living with Illegals earlier this year, he joined a group of economic migrants smuggling themselves from Morocco into Spain and then on a cross-Channel lorry into Britain, making no excuse for ruthless African people-smugglers.
Why has Samura felt able to go further than his journalistic colleagues in this country in suggesting that Africans can be culpable rather than always the passive victims? The answer, his analysis implies, is a post-imperial guilt among a liberal white intelligentsia who dominate newsrooms.
He believes the AIDS issue is just one symptom of a political correctness that has stymied our journalism.
"I think the Western media have failed Africa," he says.
"The media have got enormous power to help influence change, but they have been scared to say certain things that ought to have been said about Africa. That's what journalism's all about: poking truth in the eye," he said.
"One of the key problems in Africa is corruption. I'm not saying the West is not corrupt, but at least people are doing checks and balances. Nothing like that is happening in Africa: it's a free-for-all and it is holding back Africa's progress. In my country, Sierra Leone, we are perhaps even wealthier than the UK in terms of natural resources, but about 85 percent of Sierra Leone's budget is being run by Western aid. This is down to corruption right down to the grassroots," he said.
"During Live8 in almost all the interviews people were going round and round, touching on corruption but nobody would point fingers. You had Africans themselves saying corruption is the biggest problem we have. But not one broadcaster has actually done a proper documentary or film on corruption in Africa because they're scared," he said.
"They don't want to be seen as offending politicians or Africans," he said.
He continues with passion: "We should turn round and say this is happening because people are bad to the bone, people are greedy, people are selfish, people are corrupt; because you are putting square pegs in round holes; because you put the wrong politicians in the wrong places; because of bad management. But nobody in the West is prepared to tell the stories the way they are."
"We must be prepared to say journalism is not about color or race. It should cross boundaries, it's about truth, it's about telling the stories the way they are, even if it hurts: so be it, that's our job. We owe it to ourselves because we made a decision to be in the media, to represent people, to give voice to voiceless people. If we can be honest with ourselves when we sit over a pint and talk but are then scared to address it in our papers or programs then we should be ashamed of ourselves," he said.
Samura's breakthrough film was Cry Freetown, in which he captured unique footage of rebel troops storming the capital of Sierra Leone in 1999, resuming filming even after being captured and threatened with execution. It made him Hollywood's first choice as a consultant on the forthcoming Warner Brothers film The Blood Diamond, a thriller about "conflict diamonds" set during Sierra Leone's 10-year civil war and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Britain's David Harewood.
"Almost everyone was shown Cry Freetown," he explains. "It was the first time Leo [DiCaprio] knew that these things happened. Then he became really engaged and wanted to know how and why. He would ask very interested questions, like `Why didn't my country get involved?' `Why wasn't the West there to prevent this happening?'" Samura said.
The movie, due to be released at the end of this year, will raise ethical questions about African diamond exports, but will not be a polemic against De Beers, the dominant trader.
"De Beers is really worried, but I made it clear when I got involved that I don't want people to turn around when this film goes out and say we're not going to buy diamonds anymore. There are still a few countries in Africa that are doing well out of diamonds, like Botswana," he said.
Next, Samura, who lives in the UK with a Sierra Leonean-British partner and their two children, is planning a "very dangerous" project which is still secret. He will, as ever, be looking for the human interest story at its heart, the personal on which to hang the political.
"We've got to do what you guys did for America when 9/11 happened," he concludes. "I was in the US for the first anniversary and every face, every name of the 3,000 people who died was shown on television. They are individuals and you tend to engage and care for them. That's how the reporting of Africa should start happening. People should be seen as individuals: they've got names, streets where they live, personal experiences. If we start telling the stories like this, people would want to know more."
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