Having a good fixer is essential if you're a foreign correspondent. The best journalists trust good fixers. The worst journalists won’t believe their fixers, and that’s where real ethical and journalistic conflicts can arise. I've been involved in this relationship from both sides, and have learnt to “never say never”.
I wasn’t sure if they were bloodstains or squashed flies on the wall of the charge office of the main police station in central Luanda. Perhaps my mind was getting a bit paranoid, but it was late at night and the dim yellow bulb hanging over the head of the officer sitting behind the desk opposite me and my Angolan fixer was creating something of an hallucinatory effect.
We had been filming some wide shots of the city earlier that afternoon with an Australian TV crew for which I was producing. Suddenly we were surrounded by a trio of young policemen who told our fixer filming there was illegal. I understand and speak some Portuguese so I allowed the crew and correspondent to slip away into our minibus and disappear off to the hotel, while I tried to negotiate a small “cooldrink” to thank the officers for their trouble and wish them well for the rest of their exhausting day.
My fixer was having none of it. A prominent human-rights activist in Angola, he knew the constitution and the press laws intimately and was determined to fight this harassment all the way to the top. I watched and listened with immense respect, but with some personal trepidation, as he harangued the police and demanded to speak to a senior officer. It took some few hours, as we say in this part of the world, and some very grimy circumstances before we ended up in front of someone high enough up to dismiss our case.
The most difficult part of the ordeal was to know I was powerless and utterly reliant on my fixer to determine both our fates. His knowledge of the country, his skills as a negotiator and his reading of the situation were all crucial to how things were going to turn out.
Being a fixer for foreign news organisations is all too often very stressful even, in certain countries, dangerous. It is your job to negotiate the boundaries between your client’s expectations of your own country and your understanding of its realities. Particularly in today’s world of shrinking budgets, many journalists are expected to have done their research, have presented a comprehensive story idea to their bosses and then go and find the people or the situations to match their research.
This is particularly true of Africa where the outside world’s perceptions of the continent are often based on large amounts of unconscious prejudice and ignorance. You, as a fixer, are often expected to arrange interviews and set up photo or filming opportunities that match what your client imagines to be the story rather than what the story might actually be. This is not true of the best and most experienced journalists, but even they are under pressure to produce what they have already promised their editors they can deliver.
One of the worst expectations is over HIV-Aids stories. Many overseas journalists are looking for the hospital wards filled with rows of thin, dying patients. Putting aside, for a moment, the ethical issues of filming people in hospitals, there are very few, if any, South African hospitals that are even built with long wards, so the shot doesn’t exist. But if you tell your clients this before they’ve started filming you may risk losing the job as they will try to find someone else who they believe will find what they are looking for. The very worst is when journalists and photographers come here looking for the archetypal emaciated Aids “victim”. I won’t easily facilitate that, but I also have to ask myself “am I concealing a central truth of our country”. I don’t think so, especially now the government is actively providing drugs, but I am also passionately committed to the notion of a free media that is not fettered by ideology and wishful thinking. So I cannot claim the decision is an easy one.
Balancing foreign journalists' preconceived expectations of your country with what you have experienced or know to be a completely different reality is usually a delicate task. The best approach is often to nod politely and agree vaguely. As they start to encounter your country, they begin to see things differently and, usually, it all works out.
The World Cup was a good example. Many – but I stress, not all – foreign journalists believed that South Africa could not host a successful tournament. There were dozens of cases of foreign journalists simply ignoring the reality of South Africa’s painstaking preparations and focusing too much on crime and poverty – realities of this country indeed, but ones which did not stand in the way of an excellent tournament.
On the other hand, a useless, biased or control-freak fixer is equally bad. I can think of a recent experience in Mozambique where a colleague and I were trying to film the innocuous sight of charcoal being sold in a market. Our fixer kept on interfering with the cameraman and telling him it was illegal to film here or there. Finally, the harassed and exasperated cameraman ended up hitting the record button by mistake while the fixer was telling him yet again he couldn’t film. The resulting footage was hilarious.
But there is a serious side to this anecdote. Our fixer was responding to decades of Frelimo party control and suppression of religion, the media, even the market for selling fish, and no doubt, charcoal. Mozambique has certainly made great strides in recent years, but the notion of an open, democratic society is still not truly embraced by many people in power. At the heart of our fixer’s reaction was fear. As I learned in Luanda, it takes bravery and knowledge to confront the entrenched layers of bureaucracy and state control that exist in far too many countries on our continent.
One thing I have learned is never say never. My view of what the stories in my country are and of what is possible can easily fall victim to my own limitations. Foreign journalists can bring a fresh perspective to our situation to which I must always be open. Years ago, in the early 1990s, a foreign crew asked me whether we could go out and film on patrol with the police. “Impossible!” I responded. “Just ask,” the producer said. I did, and that very evening we were travelling through Soweto in a Casspir.
Sadly, in the last few years I would likely respond in the same way. The police are no longer as open to the media as they were. I hope that’s just my flawed preconception of one way in which our open society is being whittled away, but I don’t think it is. Still, I would always ask. And keep asking. It’s what we journos do for a living. It's the best way to fix things in Africa. FAM
Hamilton Wende is a freelance author, journalist, producer and fixer based in Johannesburg. He has worked throughout Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan for most of the major international networks including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and many others. His latest novel “House of War” about a search for a lost city of Alexander the Great in northern Afghanistan is in its second printing with Penguin. The fixer in the novel is called “Abdulov” and he was once in the KGB – a long time ago.
