"Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated"

Exhibit A...

The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina has, in finest There is No They fashion, delivered a tour de force article, "How to Write About Africa," in Granta savaging the common stereotypes behind much ostensibly sympathetic coverage of the continent:

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

He gets even harsher. More, below the fold.

From there, he gets even harsher:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too specific.

But wait, we're not through yet!

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the 'real Africa', and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

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After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa's most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or 'conservation area', and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa's rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Yeah, ouch. After reading this I realized that it does in fact describe most of the reporting I've ever read about Africa. A recent exception was Jeffrey Goldberg's The Hunted, in a recent issue of The New Yorker, an account of controversial researchers Mark and Delia Owens, their time in Zambia and their attitude towards the surrounding area as well as its people. The Owens' writings, at least those quoted in the article, read right out of Wainaina's handbook, and one of the Africans who dealt with them sums up their attitude as "nice continent, pity about the people."

A much-needed reminder that any plans, for today or tomorrow, have to realize that every culture is fully human, not just because that's the right thing to do, but because that's how the world actually works.

Comments

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It's a nice complaint, to decry the characterization of a continent and it's people...however this borders on ridiculous. There is literally no way to discuss any of the problems that haunt the countries of the African continent without stepping on any of the thousand or so toes he enumerated. Also...that's journalism. You CAN'T write an article about something without characterizing situations or people. You can't write about some villiage and include a chronology of every life and death, birth and marriage, every woe and wonder. It just doesn't work that way. For every happy story, there is a sad story going untold and sad one, a happy one is unwritten. The very nature of writing about something means that it is going to be characterized in a certain way. Journalists, like Documentarians sometimes get confused between the reality they're reporting on and the reality of THEIR REPORT. There is no way to depict anything as a whole, real experience, or whole real people. Any article, or documentary that appears to is just well made, it's not any more complete though. The very act of taking a photograph, even of a "real" event is already going to be effected by the bias of the camera's scope and what the photographer chose to include in the photo. The mistake is believe that any sort of media can represent the totality of direct experience, and living reality. Just as it's foolish to believe seeing a beautiful painting of a mountain range is the same as standing on a precipice.

Also some one complaining about Africa being associated with wildlife, civil wars, post-colonial anarchy, or oppressive white minority ruled regiemes is like Australians complaining about being associate with the Koala Bear, or the South being associated with Banjo music...or really any other stereotype one area believes about another because of it's limited direct experience.

Realizing any culture other than your own as fully human is completely at odds with everything we've ever been taught about identity. Us vs Them has been around for as long as there were atleast two seperate villiages of people. Cultural, Ethnic, and reigonal identites by their very nature set up an "Us, and the rest of them" mentality. Nevermind the exponentially powerful effect on spreading that divide that religion then exerts, especially proselytizing, aggressively monotheistic ones. I saw a bumper sticker, next to a "Got Jesus" one the other day that said "Tolerance is for those who lack conviction." That's the kind of nonsense you're up against. A world where we could all see our intrinsic humanity over our silly label based identities would be fantastic...probaly in both senses of the word. Forces that have been at work on human societies for MILLENIA would have to be fought back, and people would need to travel almost endlessly to actually get direct exposure to other peoples and societies so as to avoid the dehumanizing characterization and stereotyping that eventually leads to identity based conflicts. Also every culture in the world is fully human, as you've asserted, however this doesn't mean that some aren't violent, oppresive, destructive, predatory or unsustainable. Slavery, genocide, ritual mutilation, and war are also all products of "fully human" cultures.

The only real way I could see large portions of the world uniting under a understanding of our shared humanity is ritualized, and guided hallucinogen use. You're probably chuckling to yourself right now, but I'm dead serious. In cultures where such things are still practiced, the most common description of the participants experience is that of experiencing their own actions through the eyes, or as someone else, or otherwise gaining an apparently subjective viewpoint on their own actions and beliefs. This is an enormously potent bit of experience, and the resulting wisdom of the shared existence of all things is something that Western culture is almost completely devoid of, and is actually ideologically almost diametrically opposed to the whole concept of the culture of "Me." Unfortunately the puritanical beliefs of our ancetors, mixed with the possible suppresion by organized religious authorities early on has robbed "western" civilization and any decendent of Judaism of a cultural context for such experiences. Think about it. Christianity hasn't approved of mysticism and direct religious experience basically since it's codification 1700 years ago. Instead it changed it's focus to describing relgious experience, rather than encouraging, or even condoning the participants to actually attempt to enter into a state of directly felt religious ecstasy. Because those who have seen over the wall know that all the labels are false, and all the vestments are just burlap sacks. I will cut myself off here, because that's bascially the subject of an entire dissertation.

Carry on.