Paper short abstract:

The role of the private press during the African transitions at the turn of the 1990s has been abundantly commented, neglecting the official press. This manichean and holistic view of the State press needs to be reassessed in order to reveal the nuanced reality in our Beninese case.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on Michel de Certeau's distinction between « strategy » and « tactics » my analysis aims to disrupt the stereotypes about the official press in Africa during the political transitions at the turn of the 1990s.

In Benin, under the declining regime of Mathieu Kérékou, the journalists of the official newspaper are engaged in a situation that cultivates ambivalence. As the regime moves towards the freedom of the press, acknowledging the creation of private newspapers and encouraging the critics, the workers of the press continue to suffer threats and intimidations.

That is why some journalists start to develop « tactics of escapism » that consist of exercising their right of expression and right of withdrawal by circumventing censorship and subtly distilling criticism into their daily articles while they carry on with their perceived role of the regime's griot. At the same time, the newspaper - and the journalistic field - becomes the stage where various factions of the State settle their grievances. Finally, everything works as if the official newspaper were encrypted in an insider's language where everyone knows what and how to read in order to catch up with internal rivalries.

This paper tries to nuance both analyzes that pours into the heroic illusion of the journalist fighting against the dantesque machine of the State, as well as the vision of presenting the State as a monolithic and panoptic block.