Of course it can be done, but I wouldn't trust someone who needs a primer on the subject to do it well. Taking large, complex subjects and condensing them in a few chapters is probably one of the greatest challenges a writer can face.
US: "140 US legislators, part of elite, far-white, presidential Republican Guard, reportedly plotting to reject tribal elders' choice of opposition leader, Joe Biden, as country's next ruler, which may lead to further ethnic bloodletting in the unstable covid-ravaged nation."
Europe: "Firms across sub-Scandinavian Europe are refusing to deliver to addresses in reclusive island kingdom of Britain citing concerns over possible tribal violence as ongoing implementation of AU-brokered Brexit peace agreement raises ethnic tensions in the oil-rich nation."
Yep. British political journalist Stephen Bush made a point of using that style of writing to update us on events in the US in his newsletter.
If we were to use the sort of clichés people actually use about the US and the UK in regular writing, it'd be a fun article to read (and include quite a few stereotypes that are a long way wide of the mark) but probably a touch less patronising than some of the Africa clichés and stereotypes.
On one hand it's a review of Bernard-Henri Lévy's French travelogue "American Vertigo." On the other hand it's a take down of all the cliches of all these American travelogues that visit the same places and say the same things.
Here's a telling bit from the beginning.
> You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.
What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek?
The author was Binyavanga Wainaina, who won the Caine Prize for African Writing, so perhaps the list of other winning stories would be a good place to start.
I thought I knew virtually nothing about Africa. After reading this funny take I realized I actually know quite a bit of weirdly crafted bizarre misinformation about Africa. Not that you could sum up a continent of a billion people in a book/one place, but he did a great job of collecting a lot of popularized tropes. “Real Africans” probably cringe when they see the referenced articles & books this author references.
I occasionally do Street View trips in random spots in Africa to get a sense of the place. Wish there was some kind of driving game powered by that data.
I play Geoguessr every day (there's a daily challenge of 5 rounds), so it's a good way to see some of Africa. There's not a lot of Africa on streetview/geoguessr, at least not relative to the size of the continent.
Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa/Eswatini/Lesotho have good coverage. Egypt and Tunisia have a little.
Anyway, you get a pretty good sampling of what those countries are like, from the small distant villages to the huge megalopolises.
It's also worth following some African tech people on twitter. Nigeria in particular seems to have a lot of developers and tech entrepreneurs on Twitter.
I first noticed this in college that every novel about Africa had an acacia tree at sunset on the cover. And even if they don't have the tree often novels will have a sunset theme as if the jacket designer is trying to say "nothing to see here".
But maybe they're really trying to say their visual information about Africa comes entirely from the Lion King poster.
I loved The Power of One as an early teen. And yes, it was absolutely chock-full of everything in this article, plus the hero is a white savior, and it featured a huge setting sun with an acacia tree on its cover.
By my late teens I had worked out that setting sun was indicative of a certain kind of book.
"Yes FGM exists in many places in Africa. It also exists in many places in Asia. So what? Regular mass shootings are a peculiarly American thing. Does that there is nothing else to discuss about the US?"
I don't think you make a good point here. Should female genital mutilation in Africa not be discussed, just because it also happens in some places in Asia? Should mass shootings in America not be discussed?
"But also, how that implies that any wiring about Africa is incomplete without alluding to that fact."
But it also is not incorrect to allude to the fact, as there are indeed Elephants in Africa.
" It was about writing _accurately_ about Africa."
There is female genital mutilation in Africa and those other things, so writing about it is not inaccurate.
"An article about that would be representative of the concern of many actual Africans."
I don’t think you understand the point at issue here. You can communicate things that are true, and still be misleading.
For example, if a preponderance of articles about Africa are about something that does not really affect the life of the vast majority of Africans, it gives a misleading impression of how life in Africa is actually like.
That you miss this basic understanding is baffling. A trope or cliche is not false. It is precisely a trope and cliche because, although true, it is misleading overall.
That’s why I have the example of the mass shootings, the point of which you seems to have missed. If all writing about America is framed within the mass shootings, that would be a very one-dimensional view of the US indeed. Writers who perpetuate a fixation on narrow and naive cliches do a lot of damage because the stories that need to be told are being displaced by what is meaningless
Another example is what TFA mentions: if almost all books about Africa have this ridiculous image of an acacia tree on the cover (although there are indeed acacia trees in Africa), it means they don’t actually educate about the varied landscapes and cityscapes of Africa.
If you want to educate about varied landscapes, do it. But don't complain about the lack of mentioning of varied landscapes in an article about female genital mutilation (which according to the WHO affects 200 million women, so it is not that exotic to write about https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/female-geni... ).
Unfortunately what TFA ultimately did is let me learn more about the stereotypes in Africa, but nothing about its varied landscapes. If you want to educate about varied landscapes, just educate about varied landscapes.
I actually still don't know what I should be looking at to see the "real" Africa now, after so many discussions. I only get that there are issues that for some reasons I should not be looking at.
Like school shootings in the US. Should I worry about that when I consider sending my kids to school in the US, or not?
While I agree with the idea of the article, this sort of writing style always makes me feel like the author should be discussing this with a therapist instead of focusing and working on it.
Not that they aren't correct here, but the "let me put a list of wrong opinions I disagree with that people could hold and get mad about it" theme never felt mentally healthy to me. I catch myself doing this all the time however.
I feel like we didn't learn a lot about the TFA author in this comment, but more about a pet concern of yours?
The author critiques the cliches, misinformation, wrong ideas, and romantization journalists use when writing about Africa.
These are not merely some "opinions they disagree with", these are wrong and lazy writing, and it's a bad public service (they are getting millions of people the wrong ideas about a place). It surely deserves to be critiqued.
You are absolutely correct that it does deserve to be critiqued, and it is important to do so.
What makes me feel weird about the style however is there aren't any example of this, so if a reader does not know the field well of the common tropes, it feels like the author is just throwing together opinions people could possess (let's say opinions on how to write an Article about Africa), and then promote anger over how such people could exist.
Normally I'm put off by cynical writing styles like this, but this time I enjoyed it. I think it was well done. I also liked that the viewpoint wasn't predictable or at least one with which I'm already very familiar--for example, I'm very familiar with the anti-Western tropes and I'm familiar with pro-Western tropes but this article was refreshingly critical of anti-West Westerners who purport to care about Africa--that's novel to me, anyway.
I remember reading this in high school. It's actually from 2005. More recently, a journalist suggested a moratorium on the use of the word "Africa" in reporting; the country, and region of the country, should be used instead.
It's disappointing that neither piece has been taken seriously.
I would say that journalism is just as bad, if not worse, because instead of making passing comments, they will present a whole-a*s story without indicating where in Africa the events occurred.
That's bullshit - everybody can read and write what they like. Nobody is forced to read a "neo-colonialist" book, and that is the difference to colonialism, which was forced upon people.
If people are unhappy with existing books, they should simply create better books.
And even if they are cliche, I suspect the issues mentioned in the article also do exists. Kids with genital mutilation, starving people, elephants being hunted to extinction and so on, they also exist in Africa.
So everybody should also be allowed to write what they want. Of course you are also allowed to call it "neo-colonialism". Whatever.
Because this a very naive (intended or not) view of the book publishing industry. Yes! everybody can write a book, at least in theory, but that is just 5% of the task. How about distribution, editing, advertising, shelf space in the bookstores, reviews, etc. A book who cannot reach potential readers may as well not exist.
Your argument sounds like "if the men harass women why can not the women harass the men."
To be fair women do harass men, only because the law is written in favour of women.
We are talking about power assymetry and continuing hold on institutions like universities, media and bureaucracy.
I am not finger pointing but people should be aware that these are just a continuing colonial mindset.
Unlike the Nazi party which was disbanded at the end of ww2, a lot of colonialists and colonial institutions like the church got rewarded with vast deposits and land holdings.
Everybody can write a book, so there is no power asymmetry in that regard. There are powerful media outlets with agendas, but nobody is forced to watch their stuff, either.
And as for your harassment example, the analogy is more like "men are being harassed because all books are only about men harassing women". The complaint is "Africa is being harassed because all books are only about things that are bad in Africa".
The issues exist in Africa, so it should be possible to write about them.
I have written in favour of the post.
I have written in favour of the people accused in the post, because it is the ecosystem and not their personal character.
My post being downvoted proves precisely the point, people get triggered by the mention of neo-colonialism.
People on both sides both the colonised and colonisers are programmed to protect the colonisers by all means.
People go to Africa to see wildlife is because they have hunted down every bear, bison and wolf in their own homeland. So you can be the wolf preaching vegetarianism to the sheep.
People get triggered by unsubstantiated bullshit claims.
To frame the modern world in terms of "colonizers" is misleading bullshit.
As for wildlife, what do you want, the right to drive your wildlife to extinction, too? Really? And you would prefer if no tourists come to Africa? Are you sure those are good ideas?
Who is forcing you to tolerate tourists to see African wildlife? Will the "colonizers" come with tanks and airplanes to force the "colonized" to open up their parks for tourists, if people in Africa should decide to shut them down?
In reality, with the lost income from tourism, people would probably resort to eating the wildlife until it is gone, like in other parts of the world. And then you'd be left with nothing.
This a far cry from the constant guilt laid on the shoulders of Germans.
The Germans paid a heavy price but the treasury of the colonies held in British banks went on to pay the pensions of the colonisers.
> As for wildlife, what do you want, the right to drive your wildlife to extinction, too?
If that is how you understood it, you probably need to improve your reading and critical thinking skills.
What I meant is that Europeans whose national boundaries are marked by language, religious denomination, and have (very recent) history of wiping out both wildlife and civilisations should stop being preachy.
"the treasury of the colonies held in British banks went on to pay the pensions of the colonisers."
A lot of things went in in the past. Didn't humans evolve in Afrika? So I guess the ancestors of todays Africans somehow drove my ancestors away, presumably by stealing their land. Am I owed reparations by Africa now?
"What I meant is that Europeans whose national boundaries are marked by language, religious denomination, and have (very recent) history of wiping out both wildlife and civilisations should stop being preachy."
They are preachy about not killing off your wildlife, so if you say they shouldn't preach about that, it follows logically that you think killing off the wildlife should be OK.
And sorry, but everybody is free to preach about whatever they want. You are free not to listen.
I am not talking about reparations. No one is looking for charity or concessions from Europeans anyway.
I do not think very many people hold a grudge either. You are just firing all over the place.
My statement is simple, Europeans are used to seeing their colonies as a poorer and miserable mirror image of themselves.
As much as a white evangelist see their recent converts, as a white man's burden.
Except for political independence, colonial institutions and traditions remain the same on both sides. Whether it is the BBC, the labour party, the royalty or the universities their mindset remains in the colonial Era.
There is a clear repulsion to intellectual independence or the ex-colonies developing independent institutions. This revulsion is similar to the one a white evangelist feels when native traditions or religions make a come back and he/she is loosing his/her flock.
What does the distance of media from Africa have to do with how Africans would feel about it? Are you unaware that a huge number of Africans listen to and watch the BBC?
I've been watching you make all sorts of nonsensical arguments in the discussion about TFA, and I wonder what your motivations are?
The discussion was about ongoing colonization. Any Africans listening to BBC do so voluntarily, so they are not being colonized and also not hit on the toe. Or rather, if it hurts them, why are they listening?
My goal is simply to counter bad logic and harmful ideologies.
The criminals in your respective western country use fake stories to manufacture consent then mass murder and ruin the lives of innocent people around the world on a regular basis.
How are you confused about this? Arguing in bad faith?
All wars come with propaganda, from all sides. Iraq was questionable, Syria appears to be mostly a civil war with some foreign powers meddling. I don't think you can reasonably assume that all would be well in those regions without foreign interference.
Only a small specific group of people on this planet have stolen enough and are perversely incentivized to engage in forever wars. Both sidesing this issue is silly.
>I don't think you can reasonably assume that all would be well in those regions without foreign interference.
1-2 million innocent civilians would be alive and millions of refugees would be home. Objectively better than the current state.
Humans have always warred, your claim of "only a small specific group" is completely false.
"1-2 million innocent civilians would be alive and millions of refugees would be home."
How do you know there would have been no war without foreign interference? And people are being murdered and displaced by their fellow countrymen, not simply by foreign powers.
>Only a small specific group of people on this planet have stolen enough and are perversely incentivized to engage in forever wars. Both sidesing this issue is silly.
100% true and I qualified that statement. Re-read it perhaps.
I was born there. I spent the first eleven years of my life there. I'm white, and got sick of all the "You don't look like you came from Africa!" jokes, at about age twelve.
And no, I've never been in South Africa. I hear that it's beautiful.
The people I knew were awesome, but there's a lot of serious cultural trauma, in many of the varied peoples of Africa. Some of it was caused/exacerbated by colonialism, and some of it is far older than The Great White Hunter.
Even so, the energy and enthusiasm of the African people is inspiring as hell. It's important to note that there are vast cultural and societal differences between various African nations and tribes.
Come to think of it...the same can be said about Americans. Put a New York pizza joint owner from Brooklyn, next to a Louisiana shrimper, and tell me they're the same.
Africa has enormous natural resources. Unfortunately, access to these resources has been one of the things that colonialism messed up. They can't own the stuff that comes up out of the ground.
Unstable governments have been an endemic problem (See "colonialism," above). Poverty is an issue, but it isn't necessarily worse than in many other places on earth (but it is pretty damn bad, if you are used to the US version of "poverty"). Poverty does tend to breed the kinds of people that turn into nightmare dictators, though.
A lot of the issues that people think "only happen in Africa" also happen in other parts of the world. What happened in the Balkans was every bit as bad as some of the awful tribal conflicts that we've seen from Africa.
I desperately want Africa to come into its own. That will take a heck of a lot of things that I'm not qualified to prescribe.
>Unstable governments have been an endemic problem (See "colonialism," above).
That implies other causes (which you yourself mentioned above) are minor by comparison. Surely this was true in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. But now, 50-60 years later, that explanation alone just doesn't cut it. A lot of places were colonized outside of Africa too, often much more brutally than many parts of Africa (whose colonial legacy is as heterogenous as other things you mention), and are on average doing better (hence the ugly 'poor man Africa' caricature this piece lampoons so well). And yet the onset, length or brutality of colonization doesn't seem to coincide well with stability or quality of governance. Heck, Ethiopia almost got away with not being colonized at all.
Like yourself, I don't know what to prescribe. I do know that it should be Africans themselves doing the prescribing.
Blooming unstable governments on colonialism requires more evidence than is offered. Most people in the Indian subcontinent, where I’m from, perceive British colonialism as positive with respect to government, institutions, and rule of law. Former colonies like Hong Kong and Singapore have developed into thriving civilizations.
I’m asking for evidence that colonialism caused African governments to be unstable. If Africa hasn’t been colonized, what would the continent be full of countries with stable governments today?
I don't know, but I can't help but notice that your examples of colonies considered long-term beneficial are all British, and, obviously, Africa was not colonized exclusively by the British. It wasn't the British who, in the 20th century, chopped off the hands and castrated rubber farmers who couldn't make their quotas.
For that matter, India gained independence in 1947; Singapore in 1959. Africa was colonized into the 1970s.
I know you're being snarky, but the answer is yes. Once a country establishes a norm that the authority is never to be questioned (under pain of castration), subsequent governments will follow the same path and no one will question it - rather, no one can question it and live to tell the tale. It is not uncommon for colonial laws to be preserved for use against political enemies, so now it's not rubber farmers getting castrated, but journalists who show "traitorous behavior" or an opposition leader that "insults the president".
The only authoritarian countries that overcome that hurdle are those lucky to get benevolent dictators who go undertake genuine reform to decentralize power.
Sad this basic history is not known by the taxpayers that actually fund it... If a democratically elected African leader isnt willing to play ball, he is assassinated, usually by ex-colonial powers (Patrice Lumumba and dozens of others come to mind). So even if the locals want something better, mercenaries will be sent in to deliver the opposite.
Similarly, assassinating George Washington and the founding fathers would've affected the trajectory of the US and it would seem silly to ask why...
Lumumba's assassination took place 60 years ago. One would think that's ample time to at least partially recover from its aftermath, since assassinations during civil strife are hardly unique to the Congo, especially as a new state. While Belgians took part in the assassination, it wasn't like it took place in a peaceful country, out of the blue. There was a power struggle over who will be the Congo's strongman, and Lumumba/pro-Soviets lost. So in this case, different groups of locals wanted different kinds of betters, or at least what they thought would be better.
While it's certainly true that a number of new African states fell victim to the twists and turns of the Cold War (both sides having partook quite liberally), your theory fails to explain what happened to the states where there was little to no interference.
The Congo is actually a perfect example of having relatively soft colonial rule (the Belgian state took over from the king in 1910s and gradually made the colonial rule a lot less brutal than the horror of the Congo Free State) being replaced way too suddenly with... something. Since there was nothing that could pass for a semi-coherent national elite to speak of, even compared to most other African colonies, it's no wonder the Congo fell into conflict almost immediately. It would be rather odd if that didn't happen, Cold War or no Cold war.
>your theory fails to explain what happened to the states where there was little to no interference.
I'm excited to hear about these African countries that had complete autonomy, please name some.
>While Belgians took part in the assassination, it wasn't like it took place in a peaceful country, out of the blue.
One must have an extremely warped world view to be able to look at Belgium and Congo on a world map and handwave away the assassination of a popular leader due to his antiexploitative economic views.
Some here buy the nonsense that most westerners are in Africa doing charity, I can tell... The reality is Africa is the largest net creditor to western nations and Africans have been FORCED to send charity TO Europe and the US for a few centuries now.
>your theory fails to explain what happened to the states where there was little to no interference.
I'm excited to hear about these African countries that had complete autonomy, please name some.
>While Belgians took part in the assassination, it wasn't like it took place in a peaceful country, out of the blue.
One must have an extremely warped world view to be able to look at Belgium and Congo on a world map and handwave away the assassination of a popular leader due to his antiexploitative economic views.
Some here buy the false narrative that most westerners are in Africa doing charity, I can tell... The reality is Africa is the largest net creditor to western nations and Africans have been forced to send charity TO Europe and the US for a few centuries now. Almost every foreign-funded assassination is tied to resource theft, your framing seems to ignore that Elephant in the Room on purpose.
I am also from the Indian subcontinent. A lot of this derives from the fact that the British uprooted a bunch of existing monarchies, replaced them with Governmental institutions run according to Anglo-Saxon norms, and then left rather suddenly in 1947 saying “You run it” to a set of countries with geographical and population size comparable to Europe; with equivalent if not more linguistic and cultural diversity.
I think colonialism gets blamed because it's the closest external thing in time that can be blamed. Counterexamples like Singapore get bandied around, but the difference between a state the size of Singapore and something like India or Bangladesh is staggering enough to make the comparison essentially useless.
It is an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the consequences would have been of a more gradual transition away from British rule in the Indian subcontinent. My imperfectly historical study makes me think it would have been a net positive, but potentially would have led to partition into at least 5-6 different independent states before they did leave for good.
> You have a fair point that African countries have more diversity than Singapore
I don't say anything about African countries in my comment, that must be from upthread.
But I would think that most African countries are also at a scale different from Singapore's; enough to just make Singaporean solutions unworkable. This does not mean that it's a bad thing, just different. If one were to press the point, I'd say that scaling anything up is just harder – this applies to nation states just as it does to websites.
> India and Bangladesh were colonies as well, but they are quite a bit more functional than your typical African country.
I am not entirely sure this is true if you consider the rural parts. Rural India (with 65% of the population) has more in common with most African countries than it does with anywhere in the West. A large part of this is due to the fact that the British never had any interest in settling there in large numbers; and consequently never invested significant efforts into building infrastructure for the rural parts. They preferred to strike deals with existing power structures that allowed them to profiteer off the land. I could reasonably see African countries having similar problems given their relatively low population density in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I remember reading the memoirs of an ICS official (Asok Mitra, not the Marxist economist but the chief census commissioner) around the time of Partition that claimed British leaving was worse for the rural areas at that time because at least they inspected and made sure public services were working.
Even Lee Kwan Yee the Singaporean PM said that he was grateful that if Sg was colonized, it was the British instead of the French or Belgians for instance. The British established institutions and provided a smooth transition… compared to the French or Belgian colonies.
In the main country I lived in, that gave me that PoV (Uganda), colonialism was very much at the root of the problems, there. When the British pulled out, they left a vacuum behind, which was filled by the most brutal strongman (Obote), who was then deposed by an even more brutal strongman (Amin). Amin also brought baggage from tribal conflicts that may have predated the British.
There's also the need for infrastructure to have an environment to grow.
Infrastructure is a lot more than roads and rails; it's also constitutions, laws, education systems, and what I term "social infrastructure."
When you have a succession of warlords and looters, infrastructure never has a chance to layer, so it's entirely possible to remain in crisis for decades.
But also, in my experience, the internecine tribal conflict was deep-rooted, and virulent. The colonial powers, in some cases, exacerbated that, and in others, suppressed it.
Much like Tito, in Yugoslavia. He never fixed the Balkan problem; just held it down. When he died, the tribes went right back to where they started.
>Infrastructure is a lot more than roads and rails; it's also constitutions, laws, education systems, and what I term "social infrastructure."
Colonial powers created infrastructure (physical and social) that fitted their form of government, i.e. a colony controlled from the outside, and then just left. Although colonialism itself is the "original sin", the sudden abdication of all responsibility is almost worse, at least in the case of relatively mildly oppressive colonial systems. But it is what the locals wanted in the 1960s, by all accounts. In fact, they worked to scuttle efforts to have more gradual transitions, because they wanted independence now. Very understandable but very naive.
Here's a great archival BBC documentary[0] from 1972 about the collapse of social infrastructure in action - the expulsion of south Asians from Uganda under Amin. It's instructive to see how enthusiastically the interviewed native Ugandans support this policy, in retrospect clearly more disastrous for them than for people they uprooted and expelled. Not blaming or judging them, just find it quite sad for all involved.
I remember that clearly. The asian Ugandans (they were born and bred natives), controlled a lot of stuff. It's fairly easy to see why the resentment festered.
The problem was that they controlled a lot of stuff.
When Amin threw them out, he gave their holdings to his cronies, who immediately started to loot them.
The national infrastructure collapsed, almost overnight.
I have no idea if it has fully recovered. When I lived there, Uganda was actually a relatively cosmopolitan country.
> Although colonialism itself is the "original sin", the sudden abdication of all responsibility is almost worse, at least in the case of relatively mildly oppressive colonial systems.
As another person born in a former British colony (often referred to as the The Jewel in the Crown), I essentially have the same conclusion in a different subthread. [1]
> But it is what the locals wanted in the 1960s, by all accounts. In fact, they worked to scuttle efforts to have more gradual transitions, because they wanted independence now.
This is true, but the impression I get [2] is that the British were also more than happy to have an abrupt transition, because it was becoming rapidly economically infeasible for them to bear the costs of maintaining the Empire after 1945.
As an African, born and bred who "looks like I came from Africa", I really really hate it when a European person writes about Africa. They tend to end up writing things like the energy and enthusiasm of the African people is inspiring as hell with no clue whatsoever how immensely condescending and patronizing that comes across. Let me transliterate that so you have a little bit of an idea: the energy and enthusiasm of European people is inspiring as hell. I know the poster is probably well meaning yet the post comes off ironically in exactly what the essay is describing - as if the poster didn't read that before saying their piece about "Africa"
Most of the kids I played with, are probably dead. They almost certainly died horribly. Maybe some of them became child soldiers, and killed and raped. I could have gone on about how I had to treat PTSD, from my experiences over there, but I didn't think that would be helpful.
But I really appreciate your "putting me in my place." I guess I needed it.
I've often found, in my experience, that initiating a relationship on a confrontational basis, is not a particularly good idea.
> Most of the kids I played with, are probably dead. They almost certainly died horribly. Maybe some of them became child soldiers, and killed and raped.
I’m also African and currently live in Ghana, and I fail to see how this is representative of the experiences of African children in general.
I do think the comment you’re replying to went a bit overboard, but I fail to see how your comment is proper rebuttal to it, which is disappointing because I was interested in how you would address his substantive point
I lived in Uganda. It was quite representative of the situation there, at the time (1973).
And...that's exactly why I didn't mention it in the first post.
I am talking about my own life, here, and the experiences that I had, and the points of view that I developed, as a result of the experiences in my life.
I'm not particularly thrilled about being told that my experiences and my life is somehow "invalid."
I wasn't speaking for anyone else. I have had family that were heavily involved in a lot of fairly fundamental African development work, anti-corruption (and anti-communist) stuff, and had to leave two countries, because of horrendous wars (Nigeria, in 1966, and Uganda, in 1973).
These were my experiences, and my words. Feel free to share your own thoughts and experiences.
Maybe their experience wasn’t representative of Ghana, but it was representative of recent history in Rwanda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Mali, Angola, Eritrea, Somali, Uganda, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. Maybe we shouldn’t pile on to people for sharing their life experiences.
Note that even if those countries had brutal wars, in most cases those were quite a while ago. The average child in most of those countries, currently, does not have to worry about being a child soldier.
Otherwise, then are we to lace every piece of writing about Germany with references to child soldiers simply because the Nazis used them 75 years ago?
And it wasn’t even that long ago that we had the war in the Balkans, as brutal as any in Africa, yet people don’t write about Europe as if everything should be seen through the lens of that war, do they?
I agree that Africa is a huge continent, and one person’s experience in one country at one time may differ enormously from others’, yours included. I disagree with your assertion that user scabarott made anything resembling a “substantive point” in his reply, which ignored everything ChrisMashallNY said in their comment about growing up in Africa and seemed to malign them purely on the basis of their European ancestry. You appear to be piling on based on the same sentiment. If I missed the substantive point, could you please explain it to us?
If we're being completely fair here, not only did scabarott leave ChrisMashallNY's points unaddressed, but you and ChrisMashallNY seem to leave scabarott's points unaddressed. To me, it seems that entire exchange is largely emotion based lashing out. Yes, these comments make a few points on both sides here and there, but nothing really worth taking the time to address given what appear from the outside to be ingrained and intransigent attitudes toward other viewpoints among all the participating commenters.
I just shared my own experience, enthusiasm, and PoV. I wasn't in this for a fight (and I'm still not).
Of course, this being teh Internets tubes, we can't allow anything to be stated, without being weighed, valued, and judged (wanting, of course).
Don't like what I say? Ignore it. I do that, all the time. The world won't be a better place, because I want to pick a fight with someone. I try to make the world a better place, if possible. I definitely don't want to make it darker, and sincerely regret it, if I have. I won't get into a back-and-forth with someone that simply wants to use me as a foil for their own issues.
I sincerely try to be a force for good, in my Internet transactions. I am a reformed troll. I was a nasty troll, and I have a fair bit of atonement...
"Most of the kids I played with, are probably dead. They almost certainly died horribly. Maybe some of them became child soldiers, and killed and raped. I could have gone on about how I had to treat PTSD, from my experiences over there"
Lol. I actually wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Now I don't believe you at all. And you have no idea what the essay is talking about - your post and reply could have been the entire inspiration for it.
Take it from me my friend, you know next to nothing about Africa and Africans, or how most Africans live. Your entire comment is representative of the kind of people who think they do.
A little sharp but I think you're onto something. It feels like those writers want to be even-handed when describing Africa: talk about the ills and then extend goodwill. The problem is that, because they don't know what they're talking about, they have to resort to platitudes. Easy, naive words which to reveal more about them than their audience. The writer says "I know you" with emphasis on the "know" is rejected by the audience who says "You don't know us" with emphasis on the "you".
When pressed, the writers will often claim they were just "sharing their individual experience". But experience alone is only one part of knowledge; certainly not enough to support their original sweeping claims. I think that's why credible writers will carefully caveat their words; they want a real connection with other people, not a fake connection that only serves the self.
Well said. In general there's no winning on boards like this. Most people here are ignorant of most of Africa and Africans in general, but that doesn't stop them from pontificating and being condescending know-it-alls
My wife and I are heading to Africa in a week. This will be our fifth visit. We've been to 18 African countries. This time we are going (back) to South Africa, Kenya, and Tanzania. Absolutely love it there, but I try to remain mindful of the fact that it is often easier to love a place as a tourist than as a resident.
Uganda is probably one of the most beautiful places on earth. Its political situation is still quite unstable, but the climate, landscape, and wildlife are second to none.
Heres a reminder of Gel-Mann amnesia, Im seeing alot of speculative comments on colonialism in a broad sense in Africa. Which is fine, but the nuance is that there were many different colonizers, they left all at different times, and their influence is very much still being used to maintain resource rights and extraction. Without a small bit of history and perspective you might assume the dictators are a direct result of their respective people's poor choices. The cold war wasnt easy on Africa. People are still desperate for changes that aren't serving the status quo.
Did anyone do their degree in comparitive politics of Africa?
Political Science is hard because everyone has such a strong bias and a lot to say about it. Dont forget your grains of salt.
We used to have a popular children song that contained the line "A child below the equator will often become a beggar". The intention was good, the song was recorded to help poor African people, which in my mind were always starving and had flies on their face.
I'm glad they changed that sentence and that sparked a lot of awareness but it's crazy how you can just grow up and think this is normal, in retrospect. As a child I was really like "How can you not feel those flies!". Crazy right?
I still wonder if they know it's Christmas time over there, since it never snows there (yeah, facepalm every year around Christmas indeed)...
Yes, Christmas, that party that I thought was normal, but hey, it turns out that the religion my culture is largely based on is pretty unique in acknowledging Jesus as THE prophet and there were multiple and we're fighting over this. Crazy. And we ate matzes around easter [0], and that is a tradition from the jews (who ate them fleeing from Egypt to the promised land), and with whom we share half our sacred texts, but they wanted Jesus dead in the end and apparently the promised land already had some inhabitants I learned later. I dropped it all btw, the religion and I really hope a lot of prejudice as well, although I wont pretend I'm free of it.
I can recommend a book written by Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. See [1]. It's a touching autobiographical account of growing up in Rhodesia during a tumultuous time.
I've also found two TED Talks about Africa that I found informative, both from TEDGlobal 2007. See [2] and [3].
It’s ironic to run across this article from 2005 after just reading an op-ed in the NYT by Jeanne-Marie Jackson. There she shows with plenty of examples that,
“Everyone is saying it: 2021 was the year for African literature. Writers from the continent scooped the Nobel, Booker, Goncourt and Camões prizes. And these honors — arguably the highest-sheen literary awards in the world — do not make up even half the list. The Neustadt, or “American Nobel,” and International Booker Prizes went to Senegalese writers, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to a Zimbabwean one.” [0]
What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek?
I’d like to read that.
reply