8 ways to gain a better understanding of Africa
News flash: the media is biased. Ever since I can recall, Western media has flattened and stereotyped Africa and Africans. It behaves like the proverbial broken record and repeats only one narrative.
‘A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child,”’ says the author and two-time Ted Talk speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, referring to how Western writers have generally depicted Africa for the Western gaze. She explains that this ancient addiction of portraying Africa in a negative light fosters extreme levels of ignorance. ‘My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language.’
This opportunity to understand a tiny slice of current Africa that goes unnoticed by Western media isn’t just about refusing to think like a simpleton. D. Gazi, a Zimbabwean writer and scholar, says it’s important to understand that the news doesn’t offer its consumers multifaceted realities. ‘If the majority of people in the West are ignorant about the criminality of colonial rule in Africa and Africa’s contemporary state of affairs, it is because the mass media–the news media in particular–has successfully buried the news beneath a pile of gossip and other non-events,’ he writes.
For years, I have heard the highly educated, the fairly educated and the poorly educated speak about Africa. And, frankly, their knowledge has always left my brows invisibly furrowed. Even with Internet access at their fingertips, they still repeated threadbare and biased conceptions of the continent.
This clear and continuous road to a ditch of ignorance is nothing to boast about. So here are eight ways to help broaden your perception of Africa and Africans.
1. Communicate with Africans who have lived in Africa.
Africans raised on the continent know Africa’s blessings and challenges intimately. Ask them questions without sounding assumptive. Some may disclose that sometimes you don’t need to live on $2.00 a day because generosity still thrives, and your friend’s mother is also your mother. Moreover, they’ll quickly inform you that, contrary to what you see on Western news channels, 31 per cent of Africa is arid desert, and 40 per cent of Africans reside in urban cities.
But in case you don’t know any Africans, there’s a plethora of African literature you can read written by Africans. Beyond the quiet closeness of books, there are verified African content creators–for example, Tayo Aina, Charity Ekezie and Wode Maya–who create arresting and enlightening
content to show various aspects of Africa that Western media ignores.
2. Question the allocation of charitable funds.
For decades now, we’ve all seen harrowing footage of the effects of drought in the Horn of Africa. Malnourished children with distended stomachs and flies on their faces are the images that have become synonymous with Africa. With over forty years of working in the region, charities should have partnered with the private sector and East African governments. Firstly, to implement robust irrigation projects and secondly, to support farmers to grow drought-resistant crops. But, sadly, with the failure of its fifth consecutive rainy season, nearly 4 million Somalis are experiencing drought and hunger again.
And, what’s more, it turns out that the bosses of UK charities receive generous wages. Now, I’m not saying that the operation of charities in Africa is a scam, but it appears that it could be.
3. Ask yourself where Western news camera operators sleep when they visit Africa.
When Western news camera operators arrive in Africa, they don’t instantly tread on arid soil, see helpless people and then tap the record button on their cameras. You can best believe they‘ll meet their assigned African drivers at an airport in a town or city. From there, they’ll be driven along kilometres of road, passing uncountable non-starving children, infrastructure and people going about their day before reaching the destination for their ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ story.
Additionally, camera operators never sleep in a makeshift tent with a Somali family of nine. Instead, their drivers will return them to their African-art-adorned hotel in the city, where they’ll eat at a nearby restaurant.
That is to say, there are hotels and restaurants in Africa.
4. Bear in mind that Africa is huuuuuge!
The issues with map projection still plague us. They keep distorting our thoughts about people and places. Stop looking at the Mercator projection. Observe the Gall–Peters projection, and learn how to calculate distance using the scale printed on the map in the legend. Better still, remember that the distance between Nigeria and Kenya is 4,755.3 km. That is roughly the distance between the UK and Turkey.
I’ve been travelling to Kenya since I was a teenager. Hands down, the most annoying aspect about the flight is that the journey from Egypt takes five hours. Tell me that isn’t a sign of how massive Africa is.
It should go without saying that Africa is a continent, not a country. But it doesn’t. Many Africans wonder why non-Africans–who enjoy the taste of chocolate, which would be more expensive without their back-breaking labour of harvesting cocoa–talk about Africa as if it were, say, the size of Cornwall.
5. Understand that Africa is immensely diverse.
There are 56 countries on the continent. With over 3000 tribes, 2000 languages and 1.2 billion people, it would be foolish to speak about them monochromatically.
I have Nigerian and Kenyan relatives. Regarding phenotype, mannerisms, communication styles, fashion, food, language, arts and history, these two groups of Africans are stunningly different.
Nigeria, essentially an arranged marriage between 371 tribes, is divided. Citizens in northern Nigeria have a dissimilar experience of the country compared with those in the southeast and southwest. Unemployment, illiteracy, infant and child mortality rates in the North are far higher.
Meanwhile, Kenya has approximately 42 tribes. Kenyans mostly speak and write in English and Swahili; the country has a literacy rate of 82.6 per cent compared with Nigeria’s 69 per cent. I imagine that such contrasts–often overlooked by Western media–exist between so many other African nations.
And, lest I forget, Nigerians are not Nigeriens. The former are independent, and the latter are likewise on paper.
6. Pay no attention to the falsehood about Africa having no food.
When Portuguese explorers and sailors arrived on the western coastline of Africa in the 15th century, they didn’t see starving people. They met Africans who ate sorghum, yam, millet, rice, varieties of beans, nuts, lettuces, kale, beetroot, celery, turnips, coconuts, tomatoes, peppers, maize, okra, chicken, goat, ram, beef, pork, fish and oysters.
But the distressing images of abject suffering that captured seasons of drought across the Horn of Africa and war-induced famine in Ethiopia from 1983 to 1985 have compelled non-Africans to think that Africa has no food. This belief is not only absurd but incorrect. I’ve stood inside the grocery section in countless supermarkets in the UK and have seen labels on produce that say ‘grown in Kenya’, ‘grown in Tunisia’, ‘grown in Egypt’, ‘grown in Morocco’ and ‘grown in South Africa’. These African nations aren’t exporting all their agricultural products. I have visited local markets in Nairobi, and I have bought produce grown in Kenya for domestic consumption.
When it comes to cuisine, there’s an eclectic range of dishes offering a variety of delicious flavours, textures and scents from across the continent. If you wish to try African food, start with egusi and fufu, mandazi, jollof rice, biltong, brik, calulu, shakshouka, gored gored with injera, tajine, waakye, couscous, akara and bariis iskukaris.
Do you know that rice cultivation in West Africa has lasted for over three thousand years? For most of my life, I didn’t. Anyway, compared to Asian rice, the West African variety is nutty in taste and has a distinct fragrance. Oh, and whilst I’m writing about rice, it behoves me to confess: Ghanaian Jollof rice is more delectable than its Nigerian counterpart.
7. Know that there is a middle class.
Between the ages of 3 and 5, my parents’ house in Nigeria was my home. I was wrapped snugly inside a blanket of middle-class comforts. Driver, house-help, private school, private tutors after school, a Ghanaian maths tutor on Saturdays and easy access to good health care sewed the fabric of my experience. In other words, my life bore no resemblance to the dreadful images of Africans that Western media creates and circulates through the world.
Currently, many Nigerian doctors are choosing to emigrate to other nations. Knowing that resources like university fees, textbooks and electricity are not easily accessible to all Nigerians, it’s clear that these Nigerian doctors come from economically stable backgrounds.
The notion, however, that most middle-class Africans want to leave Africa is false. Many people experience frustrations, and some–depending on their region–face security challenges. Yet because they can sustain their standard of living and feel more settled on the continent, they stay. And yes, most Africans are not middle-class, but that doesn’t erase the existence of those who are.
8. Avoid learning about Africa from French politicians
‘The tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history,’ said criminal and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Senegal. ‘They have never really launched themselves into the future.’
God knows, like the Americas, Africa existed before the Western male gaze focused on how to exploit its resources and people, create charities and send foreign aid to secure preferential trade agreements.
Perhaps because Sarkozy is uninformed about the Trans-Saharan trade, ancient Egypt, the Battle of Adwa, the University of Al Quaraouiyine, the Songhai, Ọ̀yọ́, Ghāna, Mali, Dahomey and Benin empires, he talks about Africans as if we had fallen out of the sky. Anyway, I doubt any African is losing sleep over one crook’s lack of knowledge about their history. Conversely, the idea that Africa exists in some liminal space is beyond laughable.
According to a UN report, Africa is home to 30 per cent of the world’s mineral reserves. If Africa vanished, some French, American, British and Chinese corporations would suffer a monumental blow to their bottom lines. It’s a well-earned critique that African politicians are corrupt. However, as usual, Western media refuses to spotlight the non-African global commodity trading and mining companies that operate in Africa and generate billions as a result of bribery.
Why else do I find Sarkozy’s opinion about Africa more than a joke? It’s because just like Charles De Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac–whose judgements about Africa were equally skewed–he has never confessed that France still leeches off its former African colonies.
