Telling our stories, ourselves: a creed for the 21st century African
When in 2009 renowned novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave her maiden TED talk, “the danger of a single story,” she came from the all too familiar backdrop of Western narrative of other countries and their cultures shaping the global perception of these countries (with the so-styled Third World Countries being the worst hit). Thus, Ms. Adichie warned the world of the danger of believing just one side of a story and not looking for other sides, other angles. This creates the danger of inappropriate, and mostly unfair, stereotypes.
Ms. Adichie should understand the adverse effects of stereotypes created as a result of years of “single stories” influencing the global consciousness; after all, She is from Nigeria, a country that has been perennially maligned and described in the worse adjectives ever. Ask a foreigner, no matter where they are from, to tell you two things about Nigeria, and 8 out of 10 times, you’d get: 419 (or its 21st-century derivative: internet scam) and Boko Haram. It is so bad that sometime in 2009, a Nigerians-in-diaspora group started a campaign asking Nigerians to post 100 positive things about Nigeria on social media platforms, “so that the next time someone googles Nigeria, the search results would have a little of positives.” And it’s not just Nigeria. The whole continent of Africa is perceived in the global arena as devastating, helpless, badly governed, diseased, starved, hopeless, and bleak; everything dark, negative and dependent. To the rest of the world, especially developed countries, Africa is like that irresponsible, emancipated relative you have to keep supporting all your life, to your chagrin and irritation.
This world-view on Africa did not just come out of nowhere. It became engraved in the global sphere through a myriad of events and circumstances that emanated through politics, sociology, and history, notably from documented “single stories” told by non-Africans (read: Americans and Europeans). This translated to the scenario whereby before the African could decipher the rudiments of mass communication, the continent the sun shines the brightest had already been designated as the dark continent in the global thought pool. This narrative sealed the fate of Africa and Africans as always helpless, hopeless and needy; not minding the fact that some of the earliest African civilizations like the Ethiopian, Egyptian, and Bini empires were self-sustaining and majestic.
This is not to say that the African continent is not all these they say it is. This is an argument to say that the African continent, like every other entity in nature, has both good and bad sides. So, why the proliferation of only the bad sides in the global consciousness? Why can’t African countries be, like India, a territory plagued with leadership problems as well as a territory of rich enterprise and human initiative?
In the words of Ms. Adichie, “the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” She further asserted that “of course, Africa is a continent, full of catastrophes…But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them”. Several African scholars and thinkers have always stressed this lopsided representation of Africa in the popular media as grossly biased and imperialist. In their paper titled, ‘The impact of International Broadcasting On Africa’, published under the Developing Countries Studies in the April 2014 issue of the IISTE journal, Asekun-Olarinmoye et al, cites Makunike (2011) narrating the global media portrayal of Africa as; “we hear of famines and coups but not the rejuvenation of the cities and the cultural vitality of its village life; about oppression and massacres but not education, self-help and political development; about poaching and habitat destruction, but not on-going action or efforts at conservation, re-forestation and environmental awareness.”
The effect of this is that Africans, especially Nigerians, are judged guilty until proven innocent, our collective human dignity reduced to sub-zero. Other World citizens instinctively treat all Africans as inferior and brainless; a liability rather than an asset in global development and sustainability.
In her TED talk, Ms. Adichie, describing her first encounter with her American roommate during her undergraduate studies in Philadelphia, said, “…what struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of a connection as human equals…So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way…”
The average American or European cannot see Africa and Africans as anything different from these negative portrayals, even when they visit Africa, they come with condescension and entitlement to gratitude and worship. Their idea of Africa does not include: healthy children, educated minds with rich independent complexity of thought, self-sustaining enterprise, inventors, self-made businesses moguls, or a fledgling community of exceptional tech In the words of Makunike (2011) as quoted in Asekun-Olarinmoye et al (2014), “…in the United States of America for instance, for listeners or viewers to be interested in news out of Africa, it must be negative; conform to the traditional stereotype in its spotlight on grotesque and sensational events; it must show misery and woe, corruption, mismanagement, starvation, primitive surroundings and in the case of Somalia, chaos and outright anarchy.” Because of the immense influence of years and years of the media of world powers of Europe and America depicting Africa and Africans in the “single story” of catastrophe and helplessness, it is very difficult for the non-Africans to be interested in any positivity out of the continent; because that to him, would be un-African. Like Ms. Adichie herself narrated that after the publication of her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, her American professor complained that the novel was not “authentically African” because “[the] characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man…[they] drove cars. They were not starving…”
How do we, the 21st century Africans, millennials and Gen Z; illustrious, ambitious and extremely intelligent, change this centuries-old entrenched worldview? How do we reinforce our ‘other stories’ to the world and ensure we get the respect and dignity we deserve? How do we change the world from viewing us first as less human with less intellectual capability and enterprise than them? How do we tell them about children coding, self-sufficient households, a thriving entertainment industry, rising culture of activism and citizen power?
The answer is right in our faces — Telling our stories, ourselves! Creating — as the late Chinua Achebe puts it — a balance of stories.
To do this, the new age African cannot sit in his/her corner of the world and whine about how the Western media propagate the misconceptions of Africa with “single stories”, the new African would have to contribute his/her voice to the global discourse on and about Africa. They (Western media) might have the power and influence and use “this ability”, as Ms Adichie puts it, “not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, ‘secondly’”.
The African has a unique form of power — Authenticity! The African is the one who experiences these things, it is their story. Unlike the European explorers and historians, who were outsiders and aliens to the African heritage and culture, the African can tell the African story as an active participant; an eye-witness.
To this end, there’s a new movement of African novelists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, creatives, scientists and techies, within the continent and in the diaspora, determined to tell the other side to the prevalent African story in the global sphere. They do this through the power of the media and the internet. They follow in the footsteps of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Peter Abraham, Buchi Emecheta, Wole Soyinka and others, in putting out there, their recollections of their homeland, in all shades.
It isn’t a but story, it is an and story. These seeming contradictions are mere layers in the complexity of a given society, not mutually exclusive exceptions. So, we say to the world: Yes Africa has tyrannical, sit-tight leaders and we have honorable leaders, Yes there’s disease and bad healthcare systems in the land, and successful heart surgery procedures have been performed in Nigeria’s University teaching hospitals, and we successfully curtailed the spread of Ebola in Africa’s most populous nation, in record time and with precision. Yes, a large percentage is illiterate and subsistent, then again, there is a difference between literacy and education. These good folks might not have the Western ideal of literacy, but they possess amazing intellectual and enterprising acumen to man their farms, engage in small-scale business, carve amazing sculptures, bring up responsible and hardworking children, and contribute their quota to nation building.
When we tell our stories of ourselves, our people and our land, we tell them with context, a proper understanding of the nuances and an authentic appreciation of the circumstances. We may have some history we are not particularly proud of, aspects of our present we ourselves loathe just like every other world citizen but we won’t be defined by these single stories when there are so many others. Why is the average Brazilian or Mexican not primarily profiled as a drug lord or mobster? The average American, not a gun-trotting maniac? The average Russian, not an unscrupulous hacker? The average Saudi Arabian, not an extremist mass murderer? But any Nigerian at a foreign immigration desk is a fraudster first, questions on any honest alternatives, a distant afterthought? Why is our default humanity judged guilty until proven innocent? You say you base your premise on the proliferation of internet fraud whose perpetrators according to recent cases are not entirely Nigerians. You say you base this hypocritical bias on previous experience of Nigerians and you conveniently tuck away your experiences of Nigerian excellence right under your nose? Is it amnesia or a poor case of selective reasoning? It’s a statistics-backed fact that Nigerians are the most educated immigrant group in the USA, and there are numerous stories of Nigerians topping their high school, undergrad and grad classes in the states, the UK and Canada. What more? Nigerians are the leading founders of local start-ups in the African tech ecosystem. Again and again, Nigerians and people of Nigerian extraction excel in sport as Nigeria representatives or representatives of another adopted country. So, why the broad strokes?
Ms. Adichie submitted that “like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by…how they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.” As the new African storytellers, we must pursue our narratives holistically and with vigor; using all the media of communication available. It might take years, decades and even centuries before the world properly align with all the sides to the African story, before the American start viewing the average African as human in the same psychological, intellectual, physical, and emotional level (or even higher) like him/her. The new African storyteller must keep pushing until he/she makes a level playing field for himself/herself and the next generation of Africans in the global arena.
Ms. Adichie rightly summarised in her famous speech, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
Let’s tell all our stories, unapologetically. With the cockiness of the American and the unassuming assertiveness of the Chinese.
We are limitless.
REFERENCE
Asekun-Olarinmoye et al (2014) — The impact of International Broadcasting On Africa. Developing Country Studies, IISTE Journal (Online PDF version) Vol.4, №4, 2014. ISSN: 2225–0565. Accessed: July 4, 2015.
www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en
Footnote: This essay was originally written in 2015 with the title “Africa and the need to tell our stories, ourselves” as a personal project during my postgrad studies in journalism school.
