Say more, Dumor

Dumor, thanks to his role in Focus On Africa, is well-placed to tie the various threads in such business together.

“A little over a year ago, for the first time, the BBC launched a dedicated daily news programme to cover the continent,” says Dumor.

“It’s been a long time coming. Focus On Africa on radio, on the BBC World Service, is well-known. It’s been around for many years and given the BBC a huge footprint of reporters and editors and teams on the ground in Africa. And at some point, looking at the changing nature of the African audience, it was judged that we should adapt to those changes and launch a TV programme, which I present with Sophie Ikenye.”

What’s the difference between these new perspectives and the established way of doing things?

“The objective is to present a balanced view of Africa,” says Dumor. “The coverage has always been based primarily on news and current affairs. But there are a lot of exciting changes and trends that are important and affecting the lives of millions of people. Those are stories that need to be told. And where current affairs are being explored, we need the right kind of context.

“We need to celebrate the individual nations for what they are doing. There is a tendency to speak of Africa as a whole; as if it’s one place doing one thing. To a certain extent, that’s reasonable – there are some shared histories and experiences in terms of social and economic development – but different countries are using their own ways to deal with various si-tuations.”

How does Dumor stay dissociated from the stories he’s reporting on, particularly when they’re particularly emotionally taxing – a natural disaster or a terrorist attack?

“It’s a question I often ask myself,” Dumor says. “I don’t think a good reporter should lose their passion for a story, but you do need to ensure that you don’t become part of the story. An example for me was when I was sitting at home and reports started coming through about the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. I know Kenya well; I’ve spent a lot of time in Nairobi. So I was sending texts to a few friends.

“But I wasn’t working that day, so by evening, I had forgotten about the story; I was just keeping tabs on it. But then I get a phone call from my editor saying, ‘Komla, you have to go to Nairobi now – this is a lot bigger than we thought.’ So I packed and the next day I was in Nairobi. There’s a mental process of focusing on what has to be done. Yesterday it was my friends; now it’s a job. I had to call contacts and work with the team that had already started covering the story. You shift into that mode. But I always make time to reflect on what I have reported on – the content and accuracy, but also how I feel.

“You are a human being communicating to other human beings things that you are seeing and hearing. You can’t create false detachment.”

The BBC offers counselling for team members who find themselves in stressful situations.

“In another life, I spent four years in medical school,” says Dumor, “so I have seen cadavers, but that’s a very different situation to experiencing inexplicable violence being applied to some innocent person.”