Lets talk about harmful representations of Africa

In 2006, Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a tongue-in-cheek 'guide' on how to write about Africa, highlighting racist and colonial depictions of Africa that have been perpetuated in Western discourses. As a white European person, I aim to reflect on this article to consider how I can prevent my writing from reproducing harmful stereotypes as part of a wider goal of decolonising knowledge production about sub-Saharan Africa. 

A homogenized 'Africa' 

Western discourses about Africa have favoured symbolic representation and generic imagery, including the essentialization of Africa as a homogenous entity, Wainaina claims. Africa is far from this, containing 54 different countries and 1.2 billion people, being home to thousands of different ethnic groups and languages and containing nine out of fourteen terrestrial biomes globally (Olson, et al. 2001). 

Africa's ethnic diversity overlaid by country borders

Western constructions of Africa have also often reflected the fetishization and exoticisation of African people as primitive and undeveloped with language such as "tribal" and "warriors". These representations have had harmful repercussions for sub-Saharan countries, dating back to its history of colonialism. Indigenous communities like the Masaii were forcibly dispossessed of land under the guise of wilderness conservation of the Ambolesi National Park whilst simultaneously romanticising them as part of the "wilderness", for example (Neumann, 1995). 

In the postcolonial era, a sense of pessimism towards Africa has been entrenched in Western media coverage. Africa has been portrayed as having endemic "savagery", "suffering" and “inferiority” which is juxtaposed with descriptions of its breath-taking natural beauty in a particularly paradoxical fashion. The emergence of ‘Afro-optimism’ in media representations of Africa, recasting Africa as a metaphor for “modernity, economic attractiveness and progress” remains ideologically constrained (Nothias, 2014). It simply paints Africa as open for business, or exploitation, through the “neoliberal restructuring of identities and social relations in the service of global capital” (Aiello, 2012:72). Outside of media coverage, the general trope of the "Starving African" waiting for the "benevolence of the West" evokes notions of the White Saviour Industrial Complex, a term coined by Teju Cole in 2012  intended to capture the problematic response of Americans to the video-based campaign “Kony 2012”.

 

In 2020, the pitfalls of sentimentality in the West's responses to perceived injustices in Africa hangs against a global backdrop of a phenomenon known as performative allyship, where nonmarginalized groups profess support and solidarity in unhelpful or harmful ways. It’s been flagged within responses to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, where social media posts have been criticised for virtue signalling lacking in meaningful action and obscuring information about protests being released in real-time online.

The elements of performative allyship 

White savourism has also heavily underpinned the narrative of the need for external forces to "rescue" Africa from food and water insecurity, whilst leaving out of the conversation the roles of colonialism and neo-colonialism in creating these conditions (Smith, 2012). We can see this in countless examples of food and water aid, where charity institutions like Comic Relief have sent white celebrities for African charity appeals in a phenomenon known as “poverty porn”. In their more overtly sinister history, aid efforts have had unintended consequences. The aid response to the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine was diverted under Mengistu’s regime into military purposes and the forcible relocation of people by luring them with aid-funded feeding camps. 

What can we take from this, overall? Many Western representations of sub-Saharan Africa are still shaped by colonial and racist ideas, white savourism and exoticism, especially relating to the issues of water, food and development. Even though this has shifted into ‘Afro-optimism’, it remains problematic for simply recasting Africa within a dominant discourse of globalized neoliberalism and aestheticization. As academic writers, we need to work to exclude the system of “linguistic, semiotic and symbolic references” that descriptions of sub-Saharan Africa have been reduced to (Nothias, 2018).