A continent's success stories go unreported.

Africa is not short of press interest, particularly this year. But amid the successes of debt relief, the hopes pinned on the Group of 8 leaders who met, and the intervention of Bob Geldof, there is another story to Africa, one that is not concerned with famine, war or disease. It tells of economic growth, stability and political reform. But it is a story that is going unreported.
The news media are missing this story of Africa’s development. Unaware of the trend, they are locked in a historical and generalized view of Africa.
Did anyone expect that war torn Mozambique would experience an economic growth rate of 10 percent on average in the last six or seven years? Or that we would see a similar turnaround in Tanzania? That both countries would quietly transition to new presidents through the ballot box? Yet if you look at the international news media, the focus is often on the negative. In the case of Tanzania you don’t read about elections, but about the purchase of a presidential jet. This is hardly balanced and informed coverage.
In Africa today, 800 million people, half of them under 20, are determined to find a better standard of life. This year economic growth will be 5 percent – twice the rate of the European Union. Democracy and its institutions are spreading, slowly but steadily. In the last five years, two thirds of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa have had some form of multiparty elections, though clearly some are freer than others. African leaders have declared their intention to set the agenda for change and be judged on its success through the New Partnership for African Development. Africa is on the verge of a huge investment in transport, education and health, and will be a major beneficiary of a successful conclusion for the current round of international trade talks.
I am not suggesting that the news media should only cover positive stories. It’s about balanced context. Reporting exclusively on politics, conflict, famine and disease may be perpetuating an unbalanced picture of Africa and thereby obscuring the positive – and undermining investor confidence in the continent.
It is true that some of Africa’s leaders have inflicted upon their people a triple whammy of corruption, incompetence and conflict. The news media have a role to play in applying pressure to the international community to act where injustices are being unleashed, as they did last year in waking the world to the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan.
It is right, too, to tell the world that 11 million children under the age of 5 die each year in Africa, that 350 million Africans live on less that $1 a day. But this story must not eclipse the fact that vast areas of the continent have taken enormous steps forward. If we only cover Africa when disaster strikes, we perpetuate the image of a continent in constant crisis. And that image is out of step with reality.
As we consider the role of foreign journalists in shaping Africa’s image, for better or for worse, we should not forget about the continent’s own news media. If the international press is not telling the story of advancement, perhaps the rebirth of national news agencies across the continent could create the critical mass of positive stories needed to wake up the world. These agencies would also give the international news media access to independent and objective reporting from the front line.
There are plenty of examples of nations that have built or re-established independent news agencies as part of their regeneration. In Iraq, for instance, an independent news agency is being created with help from the Reuters Foundation and the United Nations Development Program that will provide reliable news information within Iraq and from Iraq to the wider world.
The news media have a responsibility to observe. They also have a responsibility to tell it like it is. Business already knows that things are changing It is no coincidence that Chinese companies are investing heavily in Nigerian telecommunications companies or Richard Branson in short-haul aviation.In the face of an opportunity to resolve Africa’s problems, we must show that Africa can rise to the challenge, confront the present and build a positive future. Much has already been achieved in some areas of the continent. That story must be told.

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Is Wim Delvoye saying art is shit or that shit is art?

In the past, artists created art from life; nowadays the most interesting ones create life from art. For centuries we have relied on the definition of art as a useless object, worth contemplating. Artists, we were told, stood aloof from society and the market – they could deal in ideas with no use-value. This idea of art reached its reductio ad absurdum with Duchamp’s readymades – useful objects transformed into useless vehicles for ideas by being presented in an art gallery. But sometime in the last 30 years, one artist (it is hard to say exactly who) had a further thought: why not exploit my independence from the market to make prototypes for a new and better world? I will make art that is useful.
And now they are all at it. There is Carsten Höller and Rosemary Trockel’s house for chickens and humans, in which people and animals would live together. There is Andrea Zitel and her mobile homes; desk and chickens as works of art. And there is Liam Gillick with his liberating architectural designs – most recently the canopy for the new home office building, which is chicken-free. These artist and their theorists call such works “parallel structures” – alternative ways of organising the world, developed free from the pressures of global capital. It is tosh, of course.
Today’s artists produce slavishly for the luxury market, and their entry into the worlds of design and architecture is just another shameless marketing strategy, devised to diversify their brand and maintain their position as the highest of cultural producers. Still, it has created some interesting, if queasy, art.
One of the artists involved in this new utopian activity is the Belgian Wim Delvoye. At first Delvoye’s work appears to be ironic. He has created realistic-looking palatial marble floors out of triangles of salami. And he has made a series of x-rays of people having sex. Bit his chef d’oeuvre is Cloaca, a machine which imitates the human digestive system. You put food in one end and it gets chewed up and piped through two gently rotating washing machines full of bacteria, then heated a little, and guess what comes out the pipe at the bottom? Yes. Shit. Real shit. I should know: I recently submitted a sample of my own and a sample from Delvoye’s machine for test at Reading University’s microbiology department. They were remarkably similar.
Cloaca has been exhibited in museums all over the world and was recently on show in Brussels in an exhibition implausibly titled “Visionary Belgium”. Delvoye freeze-dries the crap from the machine, packs it in a perspex box and sells it as a limited edition, signed and dated, at £2,000 a pop. He says that he is now building a factory of Cloacas, machines churning out shit 24 hours a day, and will be selling shares in his business enterprise which, thanks to the intellectual and economic trends in the contemporary art market, promises to be very profitable.
So Delvoye saying art is shit – or that shit is art? He is a trickster, a very 20th-century kind of arstist who knows the recipe for society and culture but puts the ingredients together in a different order – and so creates a different order. He understands that our economic systems and artistic tastes are full of contradictions. More than being what the art world calls a “critique of consumerism,” Delvoye’s machine is a real entrepreneurial device. But in his factory, machines take on human characteristics: they shit and create art. It is a utopian project – albeit at an early stage.
I have just visited a village in China, where the next stage of Devoye’s artistic ambition is taking shape. He and I drove to the outskirts of Beijing, past picturesque Chinese farmers on bicycles and through rusting ironwork gates in a village where Delvoye has established a small farm with 12 pigs. The pigs are reared not for meat –but for art. Every week they are put under a light anaesthetic and tattooed. Some have hell’s angles motifs on their flanks, others mermaids on their thighs, and others the Louis Vuitton logos on their backs.
One day the pigs will be slaughtered and their tattooed hides will be sold for tens of thousands of euros as works of art. A lot of different cultural meanings are being played with here. The status-enhancing aspects of owning works of art is being mocked; the tattoo, an originally criminal kind of artwork, is being elevated to high art; and the ghastly conditions of factory-farmed pigs in China is being replaced by an idealistic and beautiful “ art farm.”I wanted to join in. I asked Delvoye if I could be tattooed by his pig tattooist. He agreed, on the condition that a pig was given the same tattoo as me. I was taking a human form of decoration that had been applied to an animal and re-placing it on a human body. A Chinese curator from Beijing’s Millennium museum dropped by while the needle was being applied. She told me that I was adding a new layer: “It means we are all, humans and animals, tattooed. We are all tattooed, that is marked by our backgrounds, histories and societies.” But I knew there was even more meaning than that: the design, drawn beautifully by Delvoye on my right shoulder, was of Mickey Mouse crucified, with Minnie weeping at the base like the Virgin Mary. And I’m Jewish.

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