To most Americans, Africa is a continent in distress. Her mention or anything representative of her – human or object – easily conjures graphic images of backwardness, poverty, despotic government heads, refugees, child soldiers, starving and malnourished children and people living in the most awful conditions.
A couple of weeks ago, the documentary “Building a Dream: The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy” was aired on major U.S. TV channels. The highly emotive documentary goaded many viewers to tears, especially young viewers who beheld the anguish their counterparts were going through elsewhere to make ends meet.
The setting of the documentary was the town of Henly-on-Klip, a 40-mile drive outside Johannesburg, South Africa, where the amiable talk show host, Oprah Winfrey recently opened her multi-million dollar school to facilitate the education of the impoverished. It was a mixed-grill of joy and sobs as the girls took turns recounting the stories of their lives before their fate encounter with Oprah.
Some of the girls were orphans. They had lost their parents to the dreaded AIDS disease and were either living with foster parents or fending for their needs independently. Zodwa, 12, had lived with her grandmother since her mother passed away due to the disease. For biological sisters Sade and Mega, five and six years old, respectively, their parents were embroiled in a violent domestic dispute, which saw their father shoot their mom and then shoot himself.
Shortly before the grand finale of the last edition of “American Idol,” which aired in April a two-night special tagged “America Gives Back” that witnessed producers of the television show soliciting charity donations to help give respite to children and young people in extreme poverty in Africa. Footage of typically starving African children in horrible living conditions, hustling for food relief from their American benefactors was beamed before an audience of millions of TV viewers.
On and on, corporate entities and private individuals have gone cap in hand for Africa in order to be a good brother or sister's keeper, thus sustaining the dispirited image of Africa in the eyes of a vast majority of people in the western world.
How much of Africa does an average American know? This was the question begging for answers, and the response was no surprise. A sizeable number of respondents thought of Africa as merely a vast jungle of wildlife and uncivilized people. Their impression fell nothing short of the stone-age society where crudeness was a mainstay.
Arietta Franklin, an African-American nursing assistant in a health facility in Brooklyn, New York was taken aback upon hearing from this reporter that Africa was a continent of 53 countries with both traditional and contemporary landmarks and capital cities like Johannesburg, Harare, Accra, Abuja, Lagos, Nairobi, Duala, Yaounde and others, bearing similitude of social-economic life as in New York and other advanced cities of the world.
Audrey Jones, 35, is a janitor in one of the public schools in Far Rockaway, Queens. To him the lingering genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, North Africa is a personification of the hard life in Africa. Courtesy of CNN, he is well acquainted with the Darfur genocide. “I see people waiting in long queues to be served food, flies everywhere, and I wonder what sort fate is this.”
Back in November 1993, a group of tourists from Europe had left for Africa with the same general perception. They were 34 in number. Each one contributing finances to a common pool and armed with utilities such as buckets, writing materials, cameras, cooking utensils and other essentials bade homes and families farewell and headed to Africa. They planned to tour Africa by road in a maximum of 180 days.
From London to France and France to Spain, they got to Algeria and from there proceeded to the Republic of Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. By February 1994, the journey had taken them as far as Nigeria where this writer reported for a national daily
John Rider was the group's spokesman. Confronted with the abundance of landmarks and human, material, and natural resources in the countries already toured, he spoke profusely of their impression at that stage. “We really can't believe this is the same society so much has been said about in the negative. But things are different when you witness it yourself,” he said with self-satisfaction.
Though Rider acknowledged that wealth was not evenly distributed in Africa based on observable living standards of people in the rural areas, his team was fascinated by the bubbling activities in the city centers, sprawled with architectural masterpieces, opulence, and modernity. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, says the Holy Writ.
Against this backdrop, there is the other face of Africa, which is begging attention and to which a powerful coalition has turned a blind eye. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of Purple Hibiscus, an international award-winning novel published in 2003 was quick to identify the western media as major culprits. “If you follow the media you'd think that everybody in Africa is starving,” she remarked in a recent interview with The Guardian of London after winning the Orange Prize for her new novel Half of A Yellow Sun, which dramatizes the Biafran War experience in Nigeria. “We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me.”
Dr. Hellen Nwambu, a Kenyan professor of Communications and a resident in Massachusetts, sided with Chimamanda saying: “Nothing else matters when it's not negative.” Further recalling the prying by students and colleagues on how she coped while in Africa when she took up teaching job in her college, she continued: “I gave them hints of the ugly and beauty in Africa, just like you have in other places, but I suppose they were more comfortable with the former.”
According to Joe Mensah, recent films such as “Hotel Rwanda,” “Blood Diamond” and “The Last King of Scotland” further stereotype Africa from the Hollywood stables. He queried: “Why put the bad on spotlight, only to undermine the good?”
Adichie said that Africans must be ready to tell their own stories and show that Africa is not one huge refugee camp, but a continent with other interesting images.
