Ford Grant to Endow So. African Niemans

A $150,000 Ford Foundation grant over the next three years will allow two African journalists to spend a year at Harvard, Howard Simons, curator of the Nieman Foundation, said yesterday.

The program is designed to correct the historic dearth of Black Africans among winners of the 20 annual Nieman journalism fellowships, according to Simons.

"With the exception of South Africa, which has been represented by a Fellow every year since 1960, there have been only three journalists from the rest of Africa in the 36 years the program has had foreign fellows," Simons said.

The Nieman foundation pays a stipend to its fellows, allowing midcareer journalists to take a year off and attend classes at the University.

Fernando Lima of Mozambique, who was the last Black African to receive a Nieman, was a fellow in 1986.

One of Simon's top priorities is to bring more journalists from under-represented areas such as Africa, the Carribean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

The Nieman Foundation's 1938 endowment--given in memory of Lucius Nieman, founder of the Milwaukee Journal--will not fund the new fellowships. Simons said that each international fellowship costs the foundation approximately $25,000.

Since 1951, when the first foreign Nieman fellow was named, there have 193 journalists from 47 different countries.