Introducing Mamadou Gangué, spreading kindness by building bridges across diverse communities through the media
What service are you offering in your community?
When I came to Vancouver, having myself a background in media, the first thing I noticed was that every community had their own newspaper. I mentioned in the past, when I wrote editorials, thatif you go to the Italian community, they have a newspaper. You go to the Greek community, they have a newspaper. The Portuguese community, they have a newspaper. The South Asians, they have their own newspaper. You name it. But for me, something was missing. If you’re not part of that community, they can have big names coming from Italy, from Greece, from India, all coming to Vancouver, but we’re not aware of it because we’re not part of that community. Personally, I wanted to see Vancouver as a whole Community with a capital “c”, where it doesn’t matter what your background is, you can be part of it. I wanted to bring a sense of belonging not to one little group but to a big group. When I say big group, I mean we, the people who live in Vancouver.
You can be from South Africa, from France, from Italy, when you’re in Vancouver, we should identify ourselves as people from Vancouver, living in Vancouver. And we can even say we’re from Vancouver. Since we came here, we've been part of the city. And in terms of news, I wanted to go beyond the fence and see what was happening in all those different communities, and have those different communities become one community. The Source Newspaper started in 1999, 21 years ago. We have people from different origins come to The Source Newspaper. And they came there because they like the mandate of The Source, forum of diversity.
Whenever I hear the meaning of diversity, especially in the media, I say, “No, that’s not diversity.” Because I come from an ethnic background, I cannot by myself be a diversity. If you watch the media or listen to the media or read the media, they always say, “People from diversity, the diversity group.” It’s like when you’re a Caucasian, you’re not part of the diversity. And what diversity means is having you, having me, having those people, our neighbours over there, all together become a group, and that’s when we can call something diverse. But by myself, my own background doesn't make me the one item representing diversity. When you go to a newsroom, you can see people from different backgrounds, and those different backgrounds all together is what I call a forum of diversity. That’s what I mean about diversity in the media.
What is important in that, is when we have an editorial meeting and we discuss issues. It can be social, political, name it. Let’s say some issues are related to the Chinese community and around the table, you have someone with a Chinese background. That person will be able to bring something from that community to the table where we won’t be biased or have prejudice towards that culture. Because you have someone there able to explain. Or, say we talk about issues related to developing countries. When people say Africa, for them, it’s like a country. But Africa is not a country, Africa is made of so many countries! You cross a border, you’re in a different country where people don’t think the same. You cross a border, and people speak a different language. It can be English, it can be French, I’m not talking about the local languages. But from far away, when people say Africa, it’s like one thing. They say, “Oh, that’s the way they think.” No, people don’t think like that. In the media, when they show different parts of Africa, they always show people that are dying, or poor people. If you take a picture of Cape Town, of Dakar, of Abidjan, and you show it here, people will think “Ah, no it’s Vancouver.” No! The only difference is you see so many blacks walking around, but you say, “Oh, it’s different.”
All this to say, the media shapes the way we think. And they shape it in a bad way, where you miss being kind, you miss being curious towards what is far away and towards people you don’t know. As a result, you see it in how people interact when they’re not from the same country. As a journalist, what I wanted by creating The Source Newspaper, is to bring something rare where people get to know each other and get to be more kind to each other because they understand each other. Because to be kind is to get to know people. When you know that person sitting in front of you, you both have the same blood. If you cut the skin, you’ll get blood and you can share something physically. If you open the door for a person, you can talk to that person. They’re your extension, and you want to make sure to take care of them. If you open the Bible or you open all the religious books, they say help each other. When they use the words “help each other,” it means be kind to the person in front of you, and that person in exchange will be kind to you. And that’s what I wanted to bring to this community by making sure that I can build bridges. By building bridges, people can be more kind, more open and also open minded.
What inspired you to offer this service? When I was young, in high school, l always wanted to be surrounded by people from different backgrounds, because I always wanted to learn from those people. Way before the internet, the only way to learn was through books or travelling or talking to people. And I grew up with this need to be surrounded by people, this need to talk to people, this need to know more cultures. The bottom line was being interested in discovering different cultures, and doing it through journalism. Journalism was the cornerstone of being surrounded by people and ideas, and to bring issues and ideas to the table that we can debate, we can talk about.
Another reason I wanted to do it, is because of the situation you find yourself in when you come to Vancouver from elsewhere and you’re a professional. You can be a journalist from South Africa, Europe, England, France, Australia, name it. When you come here, you go and knock at the door of CTV, CBC or another big media corporation. What they’ll ask you first is: “Do you have Canadian experience?” You can be the best journalist back home, but for them, you need to have Canadian experience. Where to get Canadian experience? Because they say, “Go get some Canadian experience, then come back to see us.” And maybe back home you were editor or senior reporter, but here they ask you to get Canadian experience. And I’m talking about journalism. But the same goes if you are an accountant. They say, “Do you have Canadian experience? No? Go and do some training or go and take some courses in order to do it.”
When I started the paper in 1999, people said, “Oh, I need Canadian experience.” And they saw The Source and they said, “Oh, I can go and work there.” Volunteering can help you build your portfolio with stories about Canada, about Vancouver. Or at that time, you could be there as a freelance writer and get to know how we write stories in the Canadian way, bi-weekly or for weekly papers. And then you get that Canadian experience, and that Canadian experience can help you to reach your goal. Another reason is that you can graduate from UBC journalism school or elsewhere in the country, but you don’t have the experience. You need to build your portfolio. So you come to The Source, and you build your portfolio.
The Source is also special because it’s bilingual.
When I started the paper, I wanted to make sure to create that sense of a country, especially a country with two official languages. I didn’t want to just have people with English language. Even though we have different cultures, I wanted to bring the French as one of the two official languages and so people can interact. If you’re bilingual, you can interact with the whole group. Or you can read the entire paper. But if you’re only a speaker from the English section or the French section, you miss out because the two sections talk about different issues from different angles. I wanted to make sure that The Source reflected the two official languages of the country, Canada.
French is often underrepresented, especially when you’re on the West Coast. When you go East, you know that there is a big number of people speaking French there. We’re a bilingual country and we shouldn‘t be afraid to show it. That’s the way we have it with the paper: one side in French, the flip side is in English. It’s like when you’re on a bus. Someone is sitting in front of you and you’re reading the English side, and the person thinks that you’re trying to hide from them, you don’t want to be seen because you seem to be reading upside down.
How do you believe this particular service can help people? What are the benefits?
The Source can benefit people by getting to understand what’s happening in different cultures in Vancouver. I’m going to go back to building bridges. As I mentioned at the beginning, when I came to Vancouver, each community had their own newspaper. It means whoever speaks Portuguese, has a Portuguese newspaper and so on. But by having people from Portuguese background able to learn more about the Greek community through the festivals, to learn more about the Chinese through whatever they do, food or cultural events, name it, that benefits people. It’s making sure that you’ll be less and less of a stranger to me. You’ll be less and less of a foreigner to me, because what do we share? We share the fact that we live in the same city, in the same province, in the same country.
I remember when we started The Source, we used to feature people from different communities, unknown outside their community. Let’s say if you take the South African community, and they say, “Oh, this guy is a big name in the South African community,” or the Italian community says, “This person is a big name in the Italian community.” But outside that community, nobody knows that person. And we do a feature of that person to make sure that people know that this person is well known in that community. And for one year, we were doing a feature of people from different backgrounds in every issue of the paper. And we’re still doing it. If you look at the newspaper on the English side, on page 2, the Cultural Spotlight, it speaks about a community and whatever’s happening there, but before in our second year, it was a feature of famous people in a particular community or very well known people in their group.
It’s the same when you go somewhere and everybody says, “Oh, did you watch this on Netflix?” And if you don’t have Netflix or you don’t follow this, it’s like you become an alien. You don’t know. And the same if you go to a place where most of the people you meet that day are people really into sports, and they are talking about soccer or hockey, and you don’t know about sports, that means you cannot fit in. Or if you fit in, you have to work hard to be part of it. You find it everywhere. The kind of paper we have with The Source, is a concept you can take to Australia and put it there, in big cities like Melbourne or Sydney, because you have people from different backgrounds.
People use the word “diversity” everywhere. You need to define it, you need to give it a meaning. I’ve been working for 20 years to give it a meaning through the media, through the stories we’re putting out there. Positive and interesting stories where we can grow kindness, and when I say kindness, it’s about helping people to understand each other and building a better society. What got you into this activity? Why are you passionate about it?
When I was eleven, I told my parents that I wanted to become a journalist. And they said, “Why?” And I said that I was very interested in reading news, newspapers, magazines, and everything. For me, it was curiosity, to find out what’s going on there, to bring back what’s happening and to share it in a teaching way. To teach people about their surroundings, but not to make people afraid. Some people are afraid to grab some dailies, tabloids, because everything is bad news. My passion for journalism is something to do with that profession. You can be a storyteller, you can open doors in terms of mind, you can bring people closer in terms of understanding, you can help build a better society if that’s what you have in mind. You also have to acknowledge that some journalists always want to produce stories to divide people. But from the beginning, when I worked for big corporations in the media, I always wanted to make sure that what I was bringing there was bringing people together. And that passion is something really important in journalism for me: to be able to sit down with a person and to discuss, to talk about issues. It can be difficult issues sometimes, but you have to tackle them in order to get a better understanding of the issues.
When I started working in the media, I was a reporter, and I was doing so many things. And now I sit on the other side as a publisher, as Editor-in-Chief, and I am able to bring up issues and say, “Let us tackle this important issue,” or ask, “How do we find a good angle for this great idea?” It’s like being behind the scenes but with a good goal, to bring people together. How do you decide what to cover? How does that process work?
When you’re a journalist, it’s not 9 to 5, it’s wherever you are, whenever. I can be here talking to you and we’re talking about something you think has nothing to do with the story, and suddenly something comes up and I say, “Oh, I would be interested in covering it as a writer or assigning the story to one of our writers.” How we find stories, say our covers, I talk with Monique Kroeger, our Associate publisher and Senior Editor for the English and French sections. And we say, “Oh, for the cover, we should write about the COVID,” just to give you an example. But we don’t want to write about the COVID the way we see it in the dailies. We want to write about the COVID from a different angle where people will say, “Oh, interesting to see this approach!” Just to give you an example.
It’s not a scoop, but it’s to share with you. We were thinking about what we will put in our upcoming issue because now we’re on holiday. It’s our summer break until August. We were talking and brainstorming, and we came up with the idea that maybe we should see months later, going through this COVID time, how people interact. Will we go way back to how we were interacting socially, physically and all? We built all these things to be closer and suddenly they said, “No, it’s not good to be close to another human being.” And we thought, maybe we can have an angle about how human beings are too far apart now and how long it’s going to take us to go back to where we were in terms of being closer to each other. In some cultures, the way they greet each other, it’s hugging, it’s touching, that’s all gone. We want to see the aftermath or the impact of the COVID on social interaction.
Example, you sit over there, I have to sit here. But if someone told you two years ago that this would happen, you would say, “No way.” When you see your mom or your friend or your sister, the first thing you do is hug the person for minutes and minutes, but now it’s something you have to be careful of. Or even when you watch TV and you see people so close, you say, “Oh, my goodness, they will get the COVID!” It’s like you have to change everything.
And to go back to your question, we always try to find ideas related to our niche. Because The Source has a niche. And the niche is to be able to bring story ideas you don’t find elsewhere, ideas some mainstream media don’t talk about. For many, many years, it was only in The Source Newspaper that we were able to talk about different communities in Vancouver. You opened the Georgia Straight, you didn't see it in the Georgia Straight, or the dailies, you didn't see it. But now, years later, you can see features of people from different backgrounds in the Vancouver Sun and in the Georgia Straight, name it. But in 1999, we were the first media to talk about people from different backgrounds.
Our society is a diverse society. You cannot just say, “Oh, we’ll talk about Caucasians.” And when you say Caucasians too, it’s not one group. It’s people from different backgrounds, say Eastern European, or from different parts of the world, and maybe they have being Caucasian in common, but there are totally different cultures there. The same when you say Black people. They came from different backgrounds. You say Asian. You cannot just put all Asians in one group. I’ll just give you one example: take people from Hong Kong versus people from China, and name it. Same from India. People from Punjab state compared to people from different parts of India that live in Vancouver. Same for the Italians. All Italians are not the same, it depends which part of Italy they are from. Same for French people, and name it. So in all this, we have story ideas for The Source Newspaper.
Why does kindness count?
Kindness counts because in order to have a society where everybody can have a sense of belonging, we need to be kind to each other. We cannot be selfish. We have to think that the person we have in front of us is our extension, we have to be kind to that person. We have to make sure that person fits in or can be part of us. Kindness is important because it makes us take care of each other. If we don’t take care of each other, we become animals. And even animals, sometimes you see them fighting and suddenly they stop and one of them starts to touch the other one. And without having to discuss it. Because suddenly it’s part of their nature, too. And as human beings, a society without kindness is not a society people will appreciate living in.
Being kind is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, to be in the same mindset. Whatever that person experiences, you will experience it too. Being kind should be our way of life. But unfortunately we have to remind people every time, you have to be kind. We always say that to the kids, but we don’t say it to adults. We always say, “Oh, you’re going to school, be kind.” Or if they’re going to a birthday party, “Be kind to your friends. If you’re not kind, if you’re not good, they won’t invite you again.” Always to kids, but we should say the same to adults. We should use the same words, “Oh, as a friend we’re going to visit other friends, let’s go there and be kind to them and they’ll feel comfortable being with us.” Kindness should be a passport for every single person when you live in a society, it doesn’t matter where you live. Here in Vancouver, or elsewhere in the world, if you don’t have that passport, you cannot travel. When I say travel, I mean going from one group to another one.
Is kindness contagious?
Of course! If someone is kind, is smiling at you, is showing her or his happiness, you cannot stop it. You cannot say, “Stop your kindness! I don’t want it!” But if someone is mad, you can say, “Please, I don’t want to get into your madness. But yeah, fill me up with your kindness.” Because when you see people smiling, you want to smile. Even if you don’t know why they’re smiling, you send them back that smile. But if someone is mad, you say, “Let’s stay away from this person.” But if someone is smiling or someone is happy, you say, “Oh, I wish I was like this person.”
How can people get involved with what you're doing?
People can go to our website and also find us on social media, Facebook and Twitter, and they can send us emails. And we’re also part of Go Volunteer Vancouver. We always have postings there for people who want to contact The Source Newspaper. We have so many people from different backgrounds, they always contact us because they want to become writers. Or they want to change their life because they are not happy with the job they were doing, and they want to become journalists or whatever, so they contact The Source. If they want to build their portfolio, they meet our Associate publisher and Editor, Monique, and she interviews them and tells them about The Source Newspaper. And we have freelance writers who were journalists somewhere else. We talk to them too and help them, and show them how to write using the Canadian style.
We have a print and online version of The Source and an online PDF. We share those stories on Facebook and Twitter. We distribute over 3000 copies of the paper every two weeks to local libraries, community centres, coffee shops, etc. We’ve been a partner with the library from the beginning, and we distribute the paper to 73 libraries in the Lower Mainland. Sometimes people call us and say, “Do you have leftover copies from January because you guys wrote a story about one of my friends who is a filmmaker? He’s back in Holland and he’s dying to have a copy of your paper.” And we’re happy to tell them to come to the office and we’ll give them a copy.