How to Write about Africa (2019)
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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.
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.
[EDIT]: I removed one line that probably set some teeth on edge. Upon reflection, it's not necessary to the narrative.
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.
For that matter, India gained independence in 1947; Singapore in 1959. Africa was colonized into the 1970s.
So is that the reason governments in African countries are unstable? Castrated rubber farmers?
The only authoritarian countries that overcome that hurdle are those lucky to get benevolent dictators who go undertake genuine reform to decentralize power.
Similarly, assassinating George Washington and the founding fathers would've affected the trajectory of the US and it would seem silly to ask why...
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.
Which ones would those be? If you could name a couple, I'd be willing to research and point out interference in the past 2 generations, if any.
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 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 imperfect amateur 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, but that begs the question-what makes diversity a bad thing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lebanon comes to mind, as a similar nation.
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.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785964
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#Decolonisation_...
I know exactly what the essay was describing.
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.
Have a great day.
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
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
When pressed, the writers will often claim they were just "sharing their 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.
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.
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.
What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek?
I’d like to read that.
Would you also like to read "How to write about America", or "How to write about Europe"?
You can still write about vast heterogenous places (or continents) - and give accurate information about the conditions there, without the cliches.
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."
this thread goes on for a while: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1326988782600663047.html
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.
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.
It's disappointing that neither piece has been taken seriously.
I get it. Under most circumstances, “Africa” is a hopeless descriptor. Second in ignorance only to “Asia”.
Though I haven’t noticed its broad use in journalism as much as in common speech.
i didn't see any references, which articles and books are you referring to?
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.
But maybe they're really trying to say their visual information about Africa comes entirely from the Lion King poster.
By my late teens I had worked out that setting sun was indicative of a certain kind of book.
It would be nice to hear about some other things, but there does not seem to be much available.
Edit: since I am not allowed to reply to further comments by HN, I paste my reply to the most recent comment below:
"Really? Yes all those things exist, also on other continents, but we are talking about how representative they are of Africa in general."
That seems rather simplistic. There are things that are specific to Africa. Female mutilation only exist in my country because it was imported from places like Africa, for example. And we also don't have free roaming Elephants anywhere on my continent. Also no hunger epidemics.
"Much of what exactly?"
Stories describing a version of Africa that the author of the article would approve of.
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?
Yes elephants roam in parts of Africa, usually in national parks. I fail to see how that’s a bad thing. But also, how that implies that any wiring about Africa is incomplete without alluding to that fact.
> there does not seem to be much available
Much of what exactly? If you mean positive stories about Africa, there are plenty that can be told. Those stories do not sell newspapers internationally though.
However, the article was not even talking about writing positively about Africa, which in itself is patronizing. It was about writing _accurately_ about Africa.
For examplE, right now internet access is expensive across many countries in Africa. This is a challenge to budding entrepreneurs and ordinary people. An article about that would be representative of the concern of many actual Africans.
Edits: To respond to edits above
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."
Everybody is free to write such an article.
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?
You are now more aware of red flags in writing related to this topic. The rest requires work, there is no shortcut to understanding a continent.
This post is just a critique of intellectual laziness.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/22/binyavanga-wai...
I've also found two TED Talks about Africa that I found informative, both from TEDGlobal 2007. See [2] and [3].
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24687.Don_t_Let_s_Go_to_...
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/george_ayittey_africa_s_cheetahs_v...
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mwenda_aid_for_africa_no_th...
“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]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opinion/africa-fiction-no...
> Originally published in Granta 92, 2005
14 years makes for an interesting difference in context.
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.
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.
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.
Declaring mental illness in the face of exposed bigotry is a classic tactic, meant to discredit legitimate and reasoned grievance.
I would ask you to rethink your agreement, for your own sake.
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.
[0]: https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/an-unusual-dutch-easter-...
Talk to them and write about them as if they were any "normal" person. How about this weather? How's your day going? How about those 49ers?
It's the same for writing, except that this won't get you published.
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.
> If you dont like Google you should create your own Google.
> If you dont like Peppa the Pig, tough luck, create your own.
It's also not even true anymore. Most of the things you listed you can get for free or almost nothing these days.
In threads like this, you should then also be able to point out the really good books that failed because they couldn't find a publisher? Where are they?
Arguable a DIY search engine is impossible on the scale of google because, aside from CPU power and storage, goog gets privileged indexing access.
Everything else seems reasonable to DIY.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
And where is the great come back that people are supposedly revulsed by?
I really don't know what point you are trying to make or what your goals are.
Last I heard China is buying up Africa anyway, maybe you'll be more happy with that future.
Maybe just concentrate on feeling less like a victim, and you'll realize your toe is actually finde.
I've been watching you make all sorts of nonsensical arguments in the discussion about TFA, and I wonder what your motivations are?
My goal is simply to counter bad logic and harmful ideologies.
The mis/disinformation is distributed across most English media when enough interests are aligned.
>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.
"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.
100% true and I qualified that statement. Re-read it perhaps.
I meant post independence, which is the definition of neo-colonisation.
Let us say post-"independence" (political)
Anyway, we from the ex-colonies have a clear understanding of "neo-colonisation"