New News Out of Africa

For twenty years an acclaimed correspondent on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and the winner of two Emmys and two Peabody Awards (the latter two for her coverage of Africa), Charlayne Hunter-Gault was until recently the Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN. In New News Out of Africa, this eminent reporter offers a fresh and surprisingly optimistic assessment of modern Africa, revealing that there is more to the continent than the bad news of disease, disaster, and despair. Blending personal memoir with sterling reportage and astute analysis, Hunter Gault presents an Africa we rarely see. She looks first at South Africa, contrasting the country she first encountered as a young reporter--when she personally witnessed the brutality of apartheid--with the black-led, multiracial society of today, a nation undergoing one of the most radical social and economic experiments in modern times. She acknowledges the great imbalance in income in modern South Africa (where upwards of 30 to 40 percent of blacks are unemployed) and describes the ravaging effect of AIDS on the nation, but she also underscores the nation's commitment to affirmative action, describes how South African universities have opened their doors to black students, and debunks many of the myths about the violence of South African society. Likewise, Hunter-Gault looks at the continent-wide efforts to promote "an African Renaissance," illuminating the political and economic conditions in Rwanda, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Angola, and Sierra Leone. Finally, the book describes the challenges of reporting on the much-maligned continent and the efforts of African journalists to tell their own story. A compelling book on a topic of vital importance, New News Out of Africa promises to re-define what is news about this vast and complex continent.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault has been a journalist for more than 40 years and has worked in every journalistic medium. She has received numerous awards for her reporting in general, and specifically for her coverage of Africa. In 1985, she received broadcast journalism's highest award--a George Foster Peabody for her 1985 five-part MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour series, "Apartheid's People." Hunter-Gault earned another Peabody in 1998 for her overall coverage of Africa for National Public Radio. She also won awards for "Rights and Wrongs," a television newsmagazine reporting on human rights, which she anchored. Hunter-Gault has lived in Africa since 1997, working as Chief Africa Correspondent for National Public Radio, based in Johannesburg, and later as Johannesburg Bureau Chief for CNN, a position she held until 2005, when she left to pursue independent journalistic projects, including reporting on the continent for NPR as a special correspondent. She is also the author of In My Place, a personal memoir of the Civil Rights Movement and her own role in it as the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia.