Africa Does Not Exist | Hacker News Reader

Africa Does Not Exist

rintrah.nl

28 pointsairhangerf1547 comments

Well, since this exists, I really doubt "hardly anyone in White House, or the British government was even aware this was going on":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

It does seem surprising that easily disprovable nonsense, as in discoverable after 30 seconds of searching, got 28 upvotes.

1 / 9 / 90 rule suggests that 90 people will see this -- and most of them will never read the article, read past the first paragraph, or search for anything to prove or disprove it.

throw a bunch of surface level BS out there and it will stick with more people than you'd think. even with the HN literati who don't think marketing works on them.

I read this before it 508'ed and now can't quote from it (so you will forgive a critique in abstentia), but I think this energy is misdirected.

The author is broadly correct about how much space Africa takes up in western "popular thought" - though I think they are totally wrong about how aware policy makers are of the goings on in other countries (they are very aware, but they focus on issues that are understood to be domestically relevant). But this isn't really about "Africa" in any specific way - most of this article is about the difference between "the map and the territory" of "western discussion of the world." More specifically discussion of world events in the united states.

People in the US exist inside an information bubble that warps our understanding of the rest of the world. Because we are wealthy and resource-rich our country and its goings on are shockingly well covered (and that coverage can generally be distributed in exchange for ads). We are at the center of a world-wide attention economy that knows that the most valuable information is the information that we know we already want. This creates perverse incentives where a comparatively easy way for any particular individual to make money is to produce information on any subject that closely aligns to the views & lifestyle of wealthy westerners - those westerners will tend to prefer your perspective to others that might be closer to reality but further from the average western perspective.

This is a hard problem! It's hard to measure and hard to judge. Our information feeds are now relentlessly customized to fit the understood desires of every individual person. Information feeds that aren't shaped in that way contain too much information for any human to make sense of. We desperately need algorithmic assistance in processing and understanding the flood of information from everywhere but every company that has deep investments in that area has done so with the goal of selling us toothpaste. We're in a tough spot - us and the people who are trapped in our economic wake.

I'm not sure this is quite on the mark. What makes the Gaza conflict more prominent to the US than what's happening in Africa? To some extent the US was less involved in Africa. Once it left the slave trade, its main involvement until the Cold War was with Liberia. But since the Cold War, the US has had varying levels of involvement in the continent. During the Cold War the US did some pretty nasty things in Angola. The US pledged aid to Ethiopia as a way to keep it from falling into the pocket of the Soviets. The US was involved with the South African government in both propping up apartheid during the Cold War and decades later trying to speed its dismantlement.

I think it's just that the Middle East has more wealth than Africa and that regional powers like Qatar and Israel can afford to cover news in the area with more speed and fidelity, which means that outlets like Al Jazeera can provoke other news outlets to react with their own takes. Africa just doesn't have as much money and just can't afford to diplomatically exist on a larger scale the way the Middle East can. Though I think this article does raise a huge risk that China can swoop in and count Africa easily given how little awareness the average Western voter has of African politics.

> What makes the Gaza conflict more prominent to the US than what's happening in Africa?

Lots of things! Israel is generally the largest recipient of foreign aid[1]. This is partially, but not exclusively, because Israel is considered important to various domestic groups for reasons that are outside of normal policy concerns[2]. For lots of reasons Israel (and the groups it abuses) are an important domestic political issue.

I don't think it follows regional wealth either. For instance - the Saudi involvement in the Yemeni civil war has been going on for a long time, is pretty objectionable, and is pretty hard to defend. Yet it's not covered very much because the fact of the Saudi-Yemeni conflict is awkward for the US. The US security apparatus thinks its important to be on good terms with Saudi Arabia for various reasons and so our information delivery apparatus warps the information it shows us to avoid making us think about it too much. Another way to think about it is that the news that is distributed most is at a local maxima of the intersection of "salience to US politics" and "capacity to make some money by sharing this news somehow." Gaza (and Israel) are, for various reasons, at the exact center of those two categories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/h...

> Lots of things! Israel is generally the largest recipient of foreign aid[1]. This is partially, but not exclusively, because Israel is considered important to various domestic groups for reasons that are outside of normal policy concerns[2]. For lots of reasons Israel (and the groups it abuses) are an important domestic political issue.

I didn't grow up in a particularly Jewish part of the US so I keep forgetting what a big deal Israel is to American Jews. You're right. There's lots of domestic groups in the US with ties to Israel and they're a huge political entity. I just didn't put two-and-two together.

> For instance - the Saudi involvement in the Yemeni civil war has been going on for a long time, is pretty objectionable, and is pretty hard to defend. Yet it's not covered very much because the fact of the Saudi-Yemeni conflict is awkward for the US. The US security apparatus thinks its important to be on good terms with Saudi Arabia for various reasons and so our information delivery apparatus warps the information it shows us to avoid making us think about it too much.

It is awkward, but the Khashoggi incident got plenty of airtime in the US despite it also being awkward for the US and despite the US only dealing with Turkey in terms of NATO. I'm still not convinced this is how the news apparatus works because I can think of many counterexamples like this. But I'm not going to deny that Israel is a huge issue in the US because of how deeply involved Israel is with American Jews.

I am aware of the conflict in the Ethiopia region. I have Ethiopian/Eritrean neighbors and friends. I remember the last time there was peace being happy for them. But I don't think there's any chance that the US government could successfully intervene in the conflicts there in such a way as to make a lasting peace more likely. It just doesn't have the capacity for that. We don't know the players and any thumb we put on the scale will just imbalance the whole thing.

In the Gaza War, the US has direct personal and financial ties to one of the main actors in the conflict. Now, if someone said, "The US should do more to influence Hamas," I would say that's not really possible because we have no connections or leverage over their behavior. They are connected to Iran and Qatar and their own people, but they don't really care what we think of them. But we have fairly decent leverage on the Netanyahu government. So when I advocate for the US to do things with relation to the Gaza War it is all about changing the behavior of the Israeli government, and not something else we don't really affect.

You're demanding the US government be far more heavy handed in a conflict that is fundamentally unimportant. And the losing side has a decades long track record of refusing good faith appeasement.

The US can do far more good by focusing it's efforts elsewhere.

Palestinian children are unimportant? The conflict is a humanitarian crisis. We are directly funding it and providing the munitions for Israel to kill civilians. We don’t even need to be heavy handed. We just need to pull the plug on support.

If by losing side you mean Israel, then yes I agree they have not acted in good faith for decades. Or do you think Israel killing 20k+ civilians, failing to achieve their military objectives, and Hamas being in a stronger position than ever is Israel winning?

What you are suggesting is that the US back Israel into a corner with the belief that that'll fix things. That's usually a bad idea which is why countries lead by reasonable people don't usually do that.

And you're delusional if you think Israel has lost wars. They won the civil war with the Arab Palestinians. Won 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Won the 1967 Seven day war and Won the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In comparison the PLO and Hamas have lost every war they started with the Palestinians Arabs you pretend to care about being worse off each time.

Usually someone in the position of the Palestinian Arabs should just take the offer of appeasement and move on.

the '49 War happened the way it did because of the British Jewish Brigade was trained and fought in WW2 and a solid corps of them served as the backbone of the Haganah/Palmach. 5000 Palestinan Jews received British training and gear, many veterans of that unit carried British weapons into the 49 war.

they won the Six Day War (six, not seven), because they received several credible intelligence tip-offs from the US, UK, and other sources related to the huge build-up of Arab forces. they launched an attack and completely caught the Arab militaries off guard before they could launch their own offensive -- which, again, wouldn't have happened without foreign help.

they won the Yom Kippur War because the US military stripped it's divisions on Europe and sent all of the ammo and gear to Israel. In response, the Arab world kicked off the oil embargo, which kicked of a couple decades of economic malaise, basically until the dot-com boom of the 90s.

the IDF punches above its weight, of that I have no doubt, but they only keep winning due to foreign help.

You're working hard to make the Israeli wins illegitimate in order to justify atrocities against Israeli citizens and demands for a do over where genocide is perpetrated against the citizens of Israel.

I'm not down with atrocities or genocide. And then one can ask who's war is this. And the answer is always it's the Middle Eastern Arab countries, the PLO and Hamas's war not the Israeli's.

So your arguments don't sway me.

You are down with atrocities and genocide if you support Israel. They just killed over 20k civilians and displaced many thousands more. They killed their own people on the 7th. They killed their own hostages by bombing them without care. That’s the acts of a monstrous regime.

Also it’s amusing that you say we can’t pressure Israel by pulling support, and then make other posts about how the west needs to keep pressure on Russia until they give up.

So of course arguments don’t sway you, you have nothing to sway. You blindly support without a real thought in your head. Well, other than a hatred of Arabs and Russians.

Whats going on in Gaza is what normal people disinterested people call war. And that war was started by the government of Gaza. Who's responsible, Hamas.

You should really take a hard look at the people you see as champions. Because the reality is they're the ones that are preventing any resolution. Because normal people see them as extremely unsympathetic. And their perfected solution, terrorism and war crimes have no effect except to make the Palestinians problems worse. And your support for that means you are personally part of the problem.

Way to ignore everything I said and come back with empty rhetoric. Your unconditional support of a murderous regime is the problem, pal.

It doesn’t matter if the conflict is important. It matters if there’s a chance of having a positive impact on the outcome. There’s no chance of that for Ethiopia. There’s at least a small possibility of that for Israel because America is tightly connected to key players and has a lot of leverage.

> I’m a guy who spends far too much time, keeping up to date about everything. If something’s happening somewhere, I know about it.

I know this isn't the point of TFA the author had used a better source for their news like the Wikipedia current events portal [1] they would not have missed the war. See the page for the months leading up to the November 2022 ceasefire like September, 2022 [2] for example and there is plenty of coverage of the Tigray War and a well maintained list of ongoing conflicts. The page covered the spillover of the surrounding civil wars too and it's a very quick read once a week or however frequently you want to keep up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/Septembe...

History is written by the victors^W media controllers.

It is bigger than Africa. Things happens everywhere all the time, some may be much worse than this happening in Ethiopia, but until some of the right groups point the spotlight in a particular point, with a particular reading of it, and maybe a way to win something about it, the global culture will be unaware of it happening. And even if someone not directly involved read something about it, it will vanish as soon as try to compete for attention with the big noisemakers.

There are things that happen in a sudden moment and somewhat ends, a plane crash, an accident in a mine, whatever, that moves the needle for a second and then vanished. But for long standing tragedies, we’ll, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia so there is no merit worrying about it.

I'm suspicious of the author's repeated use of the phrase:

> Low IQ low status white males

Other than this, and the numerous factual inaccuracies, the article makes a valid point. I know how to get information on Central Europe, on North America, on Central America, on East Asia. If I want to learn about what's going on in Guinea, I have to start looking at English Creole sources. But – excluding Egypt and South Africa – I have no idea how to even find out about what's going on in the rest of Africa, unless it happens to be covered by Wikipedia. Which, btw, the Ethiopian civil conflict is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_civil_conflict_(2018...

The guardian and Le Monde covered it.

Also there was a lot of press around the Niles dam, and a conspiracy theory about Tigray rebels founded by Egypt and Cia.

Anybody have ties to the continent in some form or another? It could be work or something like that.

Ultimately, we care about is salient and relevant to us. Abstraction don't usually have strong feeling attached to it.

I am connected to Asia simply because my family was from there and that America fought in Vietnam, changing the lives of millions.

So people in America have lot and lot of opinions about the war fought there.

What did America do in Africa? Somalia. That warranted a whole movie. What else? I heard there was some fighting in West Africa against terrorism. America sell some tanks to the Egyptians.

I mean, a bunch of us here are sitting on the continent right now.

Do you remember that decades long Cold war?

That toe to toe superpower standoff that saw 2,000+ atomic weapons, many that dwarfed the Japanese explosions, detonated in airburst and underground "tests"?

That saw the construction and stockpiling of thousands more nuclear weapons?

    During any given year of the Cold War, between 20 percent and 50 percent of the Western world's uranium came from African nations: Congo, Niger, South Africa, Gabon, Madagascar, and Namibia.

Officially, of course, at the time, the USofA wasn't there in Afica, nor was the USSR much. The French and others were about as proxies and there was an awful lot of coups, dictatorships, unstable governments etc that were all being heavily nudged by the Cold War super powers.

So what did America and Russia do in Africa? Pretty much screwed it up for decades to keep the uranium flowly regardless of how many attempts at self determined government they each had to topple, how many warlords they had to fund, etc.

https://theconversation.com/how-a-rich-uranium-mine-thrust-t...

barely scratches the surface, it's an abyss of barely told history that is only recently coming to light.

Unfortunately for Western media (and therefore populations) the "world" is kind of represented by this meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/995/317/b3f...

It's not just Africa, but a lot more that doesn't exist.

A really nice video was recently released that gives a good overview of the history of what’s going on in Ethiopia, and why the region is rolling toward another war: Why Ethiopia is Preparing to Invade Eritrea Next https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-hABbIseGk

> I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m pretty sure hardly anyone in the White House, or the British government was even aware this was going on.

of course they know. they just don’t care. otherwise it would look different.

‘Twas ever thus. A quip made about London Times global news coverage from the Empire days: “MAJOR EARTHQUAKE IN PERU: Not Many People Killed”.

It had required a whole newsstand of papers and magazines to get a proper perspective on global news in the modern era. Fortunately nowadays we can compile such a multifaceted perspective from various online news sites and news aggregators. Takes work…thus most folks like their news curated, leading to blind spots in coverage. There is no such thing as any channel/news site delivering The News, only Some News.

>Africans don’t even get that. They are just completely and utterly ignored. Nothing that happens in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic, in Congo, in Ethiopia, in Mali, means anything to anyone who doesn’t live there. They don’t even get their existence acknowledged.

This is perfectly OK. Attention is the problem. The more you are left to your own devices, the better chance you have to script your own success rather than be forced to become a pale imitation of someone else who doesn't even understand their own success.

This is idiotic. This conflict was all over the news, for months, after it started. In mainstream news sources. If you didn’t hear about this, you have a media diet problem.

Maybe your news. I totally missed this, and I subscribe to a bunch of newspapers. The economist, as annoying as they are do have great African coverage so maybe I should have kept them around.

Are you a native English speaker or some other language, perchance?

Newspaper?

CNN, BBC, sky, guardian covered it.

I probably heard about it from hacker news.

Add every (big) German news website and newspapers of course. Probably the same in other countries. Yes, long standing conflicts only get mentioned when they "flare" up.

How much did we hear about Israel/Palestine in the last two years before Oct 7? Not too much. Same with this conflict and the myriad of others. Most of them get mentioned when they start and only when something really important happens. If people want to know more, they need to go to a specialized publication, not just read the "most important" section of the news and be done.

I’m a native english speaker. The conflict was extensively covered on public radio, Democracy Now and the BBC World Service.

If The United States and Europe intervene in Africa, they are colonizers who are looking to grow their empire.

If The United States and Europe send aid to Africa, they are dumping cheap excess food and destroying local farmers.

If white men from the US and Europe dig wells in Africa, they get backlash because they are white men.

And now, I suppose if you don't focus on Africa you are also a problem.

Exactly - there is no way to win. America is vilified whether it is interventionist and also when it is isolationist. They shouldn't believe like the world's police, but also they have to stop all conflicts everywhere.

I feel like author probably hadn't heard of Camp Lemonnier [0], and/or might not be aware how close Djibouti is to Ethiopia.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Lemonnier

https://web.archive.org/web/20231130203137/https://www.rintr...

I appreciate the rant. Don’t 100% agree with it but respect the passion behind it.

I only vaguely knew about this from seeing Somalis talking about it online.

I'm not convinced this is an Africa thing as much as an Ethiopian thing. There are just simply not a lot of western interests in Ethiopia and thus not as much news coverage. Ethiopia flirted with communism for almost 20 years and was an ally of the Soviet Union and has always been a bit closed off to the west. In fact Russia is still flexing it's influence in Ethiopia today:

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-russia-ethiopia-rethi...

Kenya is another African country that is feared to be on the verge of a civil war, and the violence in Kenya is often covered in the news in the US and Europe. The UK had a long history in Kenya and the US has pretty strong diplomatic ties with Kenya and so news in Kenya tends to get covered in the US and Europe more.

Somehow, I get the feeling that the author couldn't care less about any of these conflicts and tragedies, and is only using them to lament the fact that his community cares about other conflicts and tragedies and he would be perfectly happy if the news and the people he mingles with only care about whatever happens in his perfect little Dutch town.

It's completely fine for people to have selective attention when it comes to causes they care about. There might also be many reasons why some people feel invigorated or called to action by certain human conflicts but not others.

Frankly, the article is disgusting and quite likely written by a Nazi.

The author's worldview is definitely bigoted to some degree, but this doesn't match the kinds of thing I've seen from American or British Nazi-wannabies. (Or TESCREAL adherents, my next closest match.) Perhaps it's a flavour of neoreactionary I'm not familiar with?

It is a common argument fielded by people of questionable morals, typically by fake nationalists like the AfD and the Dutch counterpart (which the author of the article praised in an earlier blog post). I have heard it being used in various contexts but pretty much always, "why are we wasting time and effort caring about these brown (!!!) people, there are other unfortunate people having tragedies there, there, and there!"

> I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m pretty sure hardly anyone in the White House, or the British government was even aware this was going on.

But what should they do, exactly? Whenever "the West" decides to interfere, they are accused of imperialism, genocide and so on. It's really, really difficult to understand what exactly to do in such a situation.

If so much of that foreign aid wasn't being confiscated by warlords, there would be more aid. But to westerners, warlords are evil and cause problems, and don't want to be seen supporting them.

Definitely agree on the suspicious silence on the Tigray war. Not even the Uighurs get as much airtime as Israel vs Gaza does.

Because THIS GUY never heard about the Tigray war, "leftists" are worse than white supremacists?

How does shit like this even make it to HN top 30?

"...most sub-Saharan Africans are just pretty normal people. They’re not leftists, they don’t hate white people, many of them are Christians."

Sounds to me like the author is a low IQ white guy...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com