The Rape of the African Misfortune by the International Media.

Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter

Critics of the #someonetellcnn have pointed that the Kenyan reaction to that CNN reporting on the Machakos bus station grenade attack is a case of the pot calling charcoal black, that we were ill-natured and petulant. Were are not, we are objective, caring, compassionate, progressive and a dynamic people, but when an offending story is presented to us in the most stereotypical of ways, we should be excused to be touchy, feisty or act in anyway we deem fit to respond to an affront of that level.  

The story of Africa’s dispossession in the media and literature by the west is something that dates back to hundreds of years. Achebe in his book HOME AND EXILE cites the writing of an English ship captain John Lok in 1561. This is what Lok wrote about the people of West Africa;

‘a people of beastly living, without a God, laws, religion….whose women are common for they contract no matrimony, neither have respect to chastity…whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speech, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.”

Kenya’s Ory Okolloh gave a talk on ted global that I think echoes better the issue of the western reporting on Africa, she passionately says 

“Africa is a complex continent full of contradictions; we are not the only ones. We need a conference just devoted to telling the good stories about the continent. The role that the media plays in focusing just on the negative stuff; typical disaster stories disease, corruption and poverty.

 When we Focus on the disasters= we are ignoring the potential.

What is to be done? Africans we need to get better at telling our story. Blogging is one way of doing that. The Swahili Wikipedia for example with Swahili being spoken by about 50 million people only has 5 contributors, 4 are white males.... People please we can’t whine and complain the west is doing this…what are we doing? Why are we not generating our own content? It’s not enough to complain we need to act.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie, the award winning and sensational Nigerian writer from who I draw inspiration, best captured the issue of biased and prejudicing stories in a talk she gave on Ted global. The danger of a single story.

Chimamanda Aditchie

‘How impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story. …A SINGLE STORY OF AFRICA; A STORY of catastrophe, in this single story there was no possibility of Africa being similar to her in any way, no possibility of a feeling more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

I began to understand my roommates response to me, if I had not grown up in Nigeria, if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too, would think Africa was a place of beautiful landscape, 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…Show a people as one thing, as only one thing over and over again and that is what they became…Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person but make it the definitive story of that person….But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that form me, the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but they are incomplete, they make the one story the only story….Of course Africa is a continent full of catastrophe but there are other stories that are not about catastrophe and are very important to talk about them…The consequence of the single story is this; it robs people of dignity, it makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult, it emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.’

I have an experience from my own high school days, which brings out these sentiments. I went to a Catholic school in Marsabit district. We used to have a one-sided exchange program with schools run by the same organization of Christian brothers, so in 2006 we hosted four Caucasian students from St. Louis, Missouri for a couple of weeks, we were in the same level of education we made friends and once they went back to their country one of them wrote in their school magazine about his experience in Africa and my school. We had one of the copies sent to us in Marsabit and one statement really got us laughing, we did not fully understand the implications at the time. He wrote about Ugali in the most dispossessing of ways and in retrospect I really feel scorned by that innocent statement from an 18 year old white kid on his first trip to Africa, he wrote “….They ate corn flour cake, which tasted like rocks”. Ugali is a common meal in the whole of Africa, different regions have different names for it, and it is what we have grown up eating but saying it tasted like rocks? That’s same as saying they ate rocks?

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe argues that ‘there is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves, can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything…cruelty can be paraded in many disguises through the avenues of literature by all manner of dubious practitioners.…the strongest vote of confidence we can give our writers and their work- to put them on notice that we will go to their offering for wholesome pleasure and insight, and not for a rehash of old stereotypes which gained currency long ago in the slave trade and poisoned, perhaps forever, the wellsprings of our common humanity.’

We are wont to incriminate, point fingers and never take responsibility for our own misgivings, its time we reexamined our own roles, responsibilities and societies as Kenyans and as Africans. Why do we allow other people, while we remain oblivious, indifferent and unconcerned,  as these visitors who have no contextual and historical link to our societies, tell our stories? 

Take for example our own Kenyan hip hop star Bamboo’s video to the remix of Akon’s MAMA AFRICA song. Bamboo sounds quite a pan Africanist; good content, good lyrical flow about how Africa is great and how Africa has produced all the Blings on his neck but ironically the dude is donned in clothes that praise New York, the cap talks of another land. What are we to make of that? Simple but talks of our obsession with all that is western, how we value their educational institutions despite having own Universities that can offer the same level of education. 

Those in power over our narratives and those who think they are the masters over African tales, please purge yourselves and your media houses of the stereotypes that are making you sound so stereotypic, petty and mediocre. Africa’s renaissance needs a mental shift from on the side of media houses; both the foreign and the local, to better tell stories that inspire, stories that recognize, stories that pays tributes to our struggles and successes. 

The blogosphere replicates the single stories by western tourists who write biased articles of failure and misery. As an African when you come across such an article and you think the stories are not right, don’t hesitate to respond and correct where necessary.

The late Tom Mboya’s address to the meeting of the international press institute in Paris in May 1962, best summarizes what Africa needed then and needs now…

 

‘Africa today is something new. We are building a society that is pledged not to distort the cherished values of dignity and freedom, is committed to justice and effort and effective independence. This should be a story of compassion and construction, a story that has never yet appeared in print. For at any time you think this rates a column, and you’d like to come and cover it, we should place no restriction on where you’d like to see. We’d rather have your shrewd appraisal and be jolted at times by constructive ideas’ (source: Freedom and After. 1963).

We have challenges and problems but we also have stories of success and competence. Write on that too.

read  more

Binyavanga wainaina’s satirical article on how to write about Africa .

Okwaroh's injustice of the international media.