Reporting on Africa in the face of COVID-19
why it needs to change
Safari. Hakuna Matata. Violence. Disease. Poverty. Hunger. Rafiki. The Lion King. What do these words have in common? Africa. Africa in crisis. Africa rising, only if it can get itself out of crisis. Africa, the exotic country with tribal people, living in “…rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals, and tall thin people who are starving.” These are just a few examples that describe Africa, the idea of: the negotiations around what Africa means, how it’s conceptualized and the politics around this knowledge. As a citizen of the global south, I’ve been thinking very deeply about the representation of African countries in the face of COVID-19. In this piece, I review some articles by renowned media houses in the West trying to understand the discourse around Africa. I argue that the West is doing what it always does: perpetuates stereotypes around Africa and the developing world at large and by doing so takes away African agency in African discourse. I afterward challenge Africans and the rest of the world: What are the next steps for us? We have internalized these modern forms of colonialism where our voices are taken away from us, and our stories are told for us, but the battle is above that — we need to revisit our systems and think deeply about the systems we have created and thrive in.
The Guardian a few days ago published an outrageous ~300 word article that in ‘East Africa’, a “coronavirus hairstyle is helping to raise awareness” The hairstyle as I know it involves tying thread tightly around partitioned hair. The hairstyle now dubbed “corona virus hairstyle”, was definitely a hairstyle we’d wear anytime — most times while we were home or before going to bed. Perhaps the name has romanticized and given it umph in given current times. Don’t you just love your african people for finding comedy even in the worst tragedies? In the article two women in Kibera, Nairobi are quoted to have said that the hairstyle is affordable and keeps their children stylish.
This article is problematic on a couple fronts: the author never really acknowledges how this hairstyle raises awareness, it only states that it does and quotes two women. Aside from the fact that we don’t really know if these women were grabbed randomly from the streets (which is not unheard of) why is the setting said to be “East Africa” and not a more specific Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya? In fact, why is it Kibera and not any other place in the vast savannah grasslands of East Africa? Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the setting was the quintessential acacia tree popularised in disney movies. Why is it hard to accord African countries the dignity they deserve simply by referring to them by name?
Further, and for me more importantly, I couldn’t help but question: from the author’s perspective what was the thesis of this article? What is the point of reporting on normal people just living their lives offering no further visibility beyond “cheap” and “kibera the slum”? The tragedy of such reporting is that it pegs on depicting Africa as exotic and backward. I couldn’t quite place the intention — which in itself speaks volumes to the intentions of such writing. Can we do better than report on hairstyles in slums in “East Africa”?
Bloomberg published an article entitled, “Infect everyone, how herd immunity could work for poor countries”. Simply put, the article argues for herd infection: that the disease be allowed to infect many people after which people will eventually gain immunity for it allowing for actions such as vaccinations. The article specifically mentions India, stating that compared to the European nations, India’s population, 93.5% of which is under 65 will have a smaller death toll. Unsurprisingly, this radical proposal is hypothesized to be applicable for other developing countries like Indonesia and those in sub-Saharan Africa.
“…In some sense you are saying, we will let them get infected and recover, and take care only of those who are sick…”
I acknowledge that herd immunity is an epidemiological way of handling some diseases. However, could these arguments be applied to the lives of people living in the developed countries such as the United States, Canada or the UK? Why are some lives more disposable than others? surely, despite having gone above and beyond to build phenomenal technologies as a human race, are we simply suggesting that we go back to a survival-for-the-fittest kind of world?
Ironically, Academic institutions which should be touted as centers for knowledge are also perpetrating harmful stereotypes about African countries and African people. Oxford university began testing their potential vaccine against COVID-19 in April and reported that if trials were successful in the UK, would “approach scientists in the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the Government of Kenya for permission to evaluate it in Kenya”, on Kenyans. The Kenyan government refused the proposal — which is great for Kenyan people who probably wouldn’t even know what was going on. I remember having this discussion on a phone call with one of my close friends at oxford. We were shaking at the reality of modern day Tuskegee studies where black bodies are carelessly used as lab rats. Whose lives are deemed more valuable than others? Whose lives can be used to test vaccines, to study human anatomy, essentially advance science and technology?
The madness continues …
Dambisa Moyo, renowned critic of large-scale foreign-aid programs, wrote in the Economist recommending a “Marshall Plan” for Africa. The plan “… modeled after the big aid package that America provided European countries after the second world war could prevent a humanitarian tragedy…” Moyo goes on to give 3 reasons why Africa needs a substantial aid injection:
1. Morality: Africa is forecast to have 3.3m deaths by the end of 2020 according to the UN Economic commission for africa
2. Migration: Aid will inhibit illegal migration to Europe — broken health and economic infrastructures will unleash an exodus of refugees
3. Influence: A large aid package presents an opportunity for the West to re-engage with Africa against a backdrop of China as a prominent geo-political force.
She goes on to mention that “America needs to lead” and that “donor countries should consider direct cash payments to African households
The main concerns I raise with this article are aside from the feasibility of direct cash payments to african households given that this was glossed over are:
These arguments center the West. The positionality of the West is that it needs to save and show its power by re-establishing it’s connections with Africa which is according to the article, “at the frontier of power politics with its vast mineral resources and substantial amount of untilled arable land on the planet.” These arguments sound eerily familiar to the justifications of imperialism in the 20thC where Africa wasn’t an equal stakeholder in discussions about her own future, but only a bystander with no seat at the table. In fact, in today’s narrative, she is probably serving tea and cookies for the West and the East who seem to have prominent seats at the proverbial table. Moreover, Moyo’s arguments pit the West against the East. They present Africa as a playground for global power politics. She states that “A western aid project would be a counterweight to China’s influence and may pay itself back in security and economic terms thus serving the West’s interests” How about, for once, we shifted the conversation to how to serve Africa’s interests as opposed to the West’s or the East’s?
In all the narratives highlighted here, real people with actual lives are being stereotyped with little regard as to how harmful these narratives are. Clearly, the newsrooms took a thing or two from Wainaina’s article on how to write about Africa . Real people like me exist in spaces such as Oxford listening in on conversations about those “monkeys” in sub-saharan Africa on whom vaccines can be tested. It’s a reality for my friend Claudia, at oxford, who overhears how the lives of people like her or her family will be toyed with, or my friend Eshiwani who grew up in Majengo, one of the slums in Kenya. It’s a reality for me because I’m here and aware. I beg these questions because knowledge is political. What is Africa? What is her place in the world? Who are Africans and what does it mean to be African? Surely, does “being African” mean something to the world? Is it something different from being European or American? Ways of knowing, how knowledge is formed, who forms it, what is held as the standard for truth and objective accords power to one and consequently disempowers another.
All knowledge is inevitably prejudiced in some way: Informed by the biases and experiences of the author. The kind of visibility that news articles and publications create about Africa continue to shape and reshape the ideas of, in and around Africa. These stereotypes and associations around Africa, Africanness and people of African descent hold significance.