A Critical Discourse Analysis Study of British Reporting of the Kenyan Elections 2007 

Abstract

This paper studies two tabloids and two broadsheets in their reporting of post-election Kenya in January 2008 – thereby, their presentation of Kenyan and other actors, the newspapers’ interregional comparisons between Kenya and other African nations and their discussions of colonialism, independence and tribes are investigated from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective.

With this study spanning so much history and a desire to read these texts with knowledge of intertextual and interdiscursive references, I choose to use the “discourse historical approach” and the consequent “triangulation” (Reisgl and Wodak, 2001; Wodak et al, 1999; Wodak 2001). Thus, the analysis of four British newspapers’ articles is cross-referenced with Kenyan and various European media as well as with historical and political contextual knowledge. This paper adopts the position of historians, including Berman and Lonsdale (1992), Mudimbe (1988) and Odhiambo et al (1977) as well as anthropologist Haugerud (1995), that colonialism plays a crucial role in modern political issues in Kenya and other former colonies – especially relevant here to the controversy over the division of land amongst tribes at the handover of power in 1963.  

The approach of Wodak et al is though also supplemented by consideration of transitivity and syntactic transformation, (Fowler, 1991; van Leeuwen, 1996), lexis (Fowler, 1991), deixis as well as modality, implicature, presuppositions and speech acts (Chilton, 2004). Therefore, the emphasis of this study at sentence level is less on rhetorical devices and more on the pragmatic, syntactic and lexical levels (Fowler, 1991:80-5, 92-3). Overall, there is overt interest in the presentation of actors and how they are predicated (in relation to other actors).

This paper demonstrates how four British newspapers prominently feature western actors in their reporting of the Kenyan elections and all four report the opinions and advice from the EU and most frequently from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. On the other hand, Kenyan political actors are frequently foregrounded in sentences from the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Times where they are predicated with negative connotations, including low assessments of their political credentials, e.g. “not statesmanlike” or the repeated reporting of counter-accusations from Kibaki and Odinga of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”.

In studying (African) inter-regional comparisons made by the papers, analysis of implicature and attribution yielded some interesting points. All the British newspapers were keen to give a ‘before and after’ account of Kenya, such as “previously seen as one of Africa’s strongest democracies” or “economic powerhouse”.

A discussion of post-election Kenya opens into an analysis of the newspapers’ reporting of aggression where attribution of “violence” was repeatedly presented as “tribal” in the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Times. The Guardian more often used the less aggressively connotated “ethnic tensions”. More interesting in itself, however, was the observation that the papers dedicated very little or no space to a discussion of political organisation being a cause of the violence. Indeed, we noticed how references that could have potentially have signalled historical problems involving British governments did not do so, e.g. choices such as “since independence” and not ‘after colonialism’, no discussion of the “Commonwealth” and umpteen references to “tribe” without a single mention of ‘divide and rule’.

(520 words not including title) Keywords: “Them” group, Kenyan elections, Critical Discourse Analysis, colonialism, discourse historical approach