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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.
THE AFRICA YOU NEED TO KNOW
DEC 1, 2006 - 4:12PM PST
Posted by Gbemisola Olujobi
What is disaster pornography? Africans define it as the Western media’s habit of blacking out Africa’s stock markets, high rises, internet cafes, cell phones, heart surgeries, soaring literacy and increasing democratization, while gleefully parading her genocides, armed conflicts, child soldiers, foreign debts, hunger, disease, and backwardness. I recently found myself making small talk with an airport official in the United States. “I hear in Africa, people are very poor and hungry, they don’t have anything to eat,” he said. “I saw a documentary on Africa a few days ago on CNN, and there were all these hungry people, dying children, with flies all over their faces…” Yeah, I replied hesitantly, not knowing exactly what a correct response should be. My situation was not helped by 22 hours of travel, which had considerably dulled my reflexes. “But you look well-fed,” he queried, scanning my generous proportions. I didn’t exactly like this attention to my physical details, but I had more patriotic worries. I had to let him know that Africa is not one huge expanse of waste, but 54 countries and two islands, in different stages of development, repair, disrepair, and of course, despair. Famine in Niger does not mean hunger in Nigeria, just as war in Liberia does not mean child soldiers in Lesotho. My short lecture had no effect whatsoever on my “student.” His next question was, “But, what is the problem with Africa?” Clearly, nothing I had said could erase the “huge expanse of waste” picture of Africa from his mind. I don’t blame him. Neither do I blame another official at a different airport who asked me if Africans keep their cowries in banks. He was quite taken aback when I showed him a few Nigerian Naira notes. I also don’t blame some of my American friends when they ask me how I “picked up such good English.” Far from picking up good English, I tell them, I have a background of solid British education. My country, Nigeria, was a British Colony until 1960. No one should blame these people or anyone else who displays such profound ignorance about Africa. Rather than educate and enlighten while disseminating fair, balanced and accurate information, it seems all that the western media is keen on showing the West about Africa is backwardness, disease, hunger, want, deprivation, banditry, brigandage, slaughter fields, child soldiers, gang-raped girls, harassed mothers, wasted children, flies feasting on the living and vultures waiting to devour the near-dead. Goodness! Africans of all leanings, from all walks of life and from every part of the continent usually have only one question each time they are faced with these gory media depictions of Africa - “Where do they get these images from?” It is not only Africans who do not recognize their continent from the western media. Michael Ledeen, contributing editor of National Review Online, laments this caricaturing of Africa in an article titled “Out of Africa: “What The Western World Doesn’t Understand about the Continent.” He says, “Those of…... FULL TEXT
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Dana Marniche on February 18, 2009 @ 10:22 pm:
More systematic research or content analysis of early Western imagery in media, i.e. national geographic, etc. - wich was butttressed by anthropological theory should perhaps be done to understand why such an abusive relationship and stance survives between Western media and Africa.
I barely could see the tab next to the word below the send> No wonder no one has responded to this blog.
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