AllAfrica covers a continent the US is increasingly ignoring

The Hill

6 days ago

For the staff of the digital news service AllAfrica, this has been a typically frenetic season. The platform is the premier producer and aggregator of content from and about Africa. It reaches tens of millions monthly with news in English and French, coverage usually absent from most Western media.
A rare exception was President Trump's May 21 Oval Office ambush of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a propaganda video. Trump claimed South Africa's white Afrikaners were subjects of widespread land confiscations and 'genocide.' Seasoned negotiator Ramaphosa deftly referred questions to his team's Afrikaners: a cabinet minister, a billionaire businessman and a former world golfing champion.
The White House confrontation was a 'developing story that isn't going away, and poorly covered — without context — by all major media,' said Dr. Tamela (Tami) Hultman, AllAfrica's co-founder and chief content officer.
In fact, many Afrikaners whom the administration has deemed 'refugees' have admitted to accepting free repatriation to find easier jobs. South African polls showed most Afrikaners are uninterested in leaving South Africa. AllAfrica provided that deeper context.
Reed Kramer, another co-founder, told me South Africa's concern about Afrikaner disinformation continues as Trump's team uses it to undermine the country's current G-20 inter-governmental economic group presidency.
'We're valued for comprehensive African coverage, not just what U.S. media see as the issue of the moment,' said Hultman. (Full disclosure: Hultman, Kramer and I were classmates at Duke University in the 1960s.)
AllAfrica reported on less-noticed news, such as cancelled U.S. funding for HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis research by South Africa's world-class scientists. Most recently, Hultman said AllAfrica's audience seems more interested in New York City's Democratic mayoral nominee, Uganda-born Zohran Mamdani.
Hultman said AllAfrica seeks to spotlight other under-covered issues, such as the Trump administration's desire for minerals from war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, plus Africa's agricultural innovations and entrepreneurial culture.
'It is inexplicable,' she told me, 'that international media have largely ignored the world's worst humanitarian disaster — in Sudan — where U.S. allies support rival combatants who overthrew a democratic government, are stealing the country's gold and creating famine.' Genocide in Sudan's Darfur area, which prompted global outrage in the early 2000s, has returned.
AllAfrica was among the first to report South Sudan's refusal to accept eight deportees from Vietnam, Cuba and Mexico, leading to the administration's threatened withdrawal of all South Sudan visas, including that of basketball star Khaman Maluach, just hours before Duke's NCAA Final Four appearance.
Further evidence of the administration's devaluing Africa's strategic importance were Pentagon signals of dramatically cutting military assistance and training to African armies fighting insurgencies.
The site's groundbreaking coverage of Africa's Covid crisis exposed wealthy nations' failure to share vaccines with African countries, even when South Africa, for example, contracted to package vaccines for export to the U.K. A long-time working relationship with World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and his team facilitated that reporting.
In its early days, AllAfrica was nominated as ' Best News Site,' alongside Google and BBC, by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The website Media Bias Fact Check wrote, 'Overall, we rate AllAfrica Least Biased based on balanced and diverse story selection and High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.'
'For decades, AllAfrica has been indispensable for teaching about Africa,' said Kenneth Vickery, emeritus professor of African history at North Carolina State University. 'Nothing else provides the range, depth and quality of its coverage.'
Over 60 percent of AllAfrica's multimedia audience is in Africa, primarily using mobile devices. Users include journalists, heads of state and government, business leaders, scientists and clinicians, human rights organizations and democracy activists.
'We began early on and continue to this day to work with African journalists, some very brave and dedicated people among them,' said Kramer, who has known Ramaphosa since before he became South Africa's president.
Still, there is work to be done. On July 9, at a White House meeting of West African leaders, Trump praised Liberian President Joseph Boakai for his English skills, wondering, 'Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?' English has been the official language of Liberia for more than 200 years, as it was settled by formerly enslaved African Americans.
Hultman and Kramer attribute their career to listening to Africans, beginning with their pioneering on-the-ground research on U.S. corporations supporting apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s.
'We were in the fortunate position of knowing both the activists arising inside South Africa and a network of outside contacts who wanted to support them,' Kramer told an interviewer. 'The concept of a news agency focusing on Africa stemmed from frustration with the lack of news and information.'
Last May, Hultman and Kramer, who are married, received Lifetime Achievement Awards during the 2024 African Media Leaders Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, for 'exceptional contributions to media development in Africa.'
The third co-founder and AllAfrica's executive chair, Amadou Mahtar Ba from Senegal, said at the ceremony, 'In an era where the media landscape continues to change at a breathtaking pace, Tamela Hultman and Reed Kramer remain beacons of inspiration, reminding us of the enduring power of truth and the boundless potential of digital innovation.'
AllAfrica is using artificial intelligence to increase collaborative content creation with staff in Dakar, Cape Town, Nairobi, Monrovia and Washington, D.C. The site will help enable around 100 print and broadcast partners across Africa to use the newest Voice AI and Voice Agent technologies to boost efficiency and revenues.
Sustaining an independent news agency is increasingly challenging, Hultman says. But 'covering Africa — with its dynamism, creativity and vast untapped youth market — is critical to United States strategic interests.'
AllAfrica's multi-national staff, Hultman and Kramer say, is dedicated to being the voice of 'All Africa All the Time.'