USA Africa Dialogue Series - Jina Moore on The White Correspondent’s Burden: "We Need to Tell the Africa Story Differently"

 

"In 1906, the readers of The New York Times opened their papers to a story about the Bronx Zoo's latest attraction: Ota Benga, a 22-year-old Mutwa from today's Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

"Ota Benga let some of the savage nature of the African forest come out yesterday," began the story, in which Benga is drenched with a hose in the zoo's monkey cage.

 

Today, the "savage nature" of Africa is still on display, in American headlines: "Uganda's rebels in murderous spree," "Congo a country of rape and ruin" "Africa's Forever Wars." Sometimes the savagery doesn't come from the "savages" themselves. It comes from poverty—"NIGERIA: Focus on the scourge of poverty"—or disease—"AIDS at 30: Killer has been tamed, but not conquered." Other times, all the savagery blends together: "Starving Babies, Raped Mommies, Famine in Africa—Do you care?"

 

All I can imagine from these headlines is that Africa—all 54 countries, all 11.7 million square miles of it—must be a very deadly place.

But I've lived there. It's not. Or rather, it can be, in certain places, at certain times. Far more often, and across most of the continent, it isn't. Not even in its most infamous "war-torn" countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Goma, part of a region the United Nations' special representative on sexual violence in conflict Margot Wallström two years ago dubbed "the rape capital of the world," I went to an impromptu hip-hop show, full of dancing Congolese. In Kinshasa, nearly a thousand miles away on the other side of the country, I met an oboist for the city's symphony orchestra."

 

Warning: Lengthy. If you are up to it, read it here.

 

- Jina Moore

 

The author says all the nice things slathered with cloying political correctness. Western liberal orthodoxy strikes again. The sins of the white man are heavily documented when it comes to the distortion of Africa's stories. Ignored are the sins of Africa's children offering poverty porn as "novels", exaggerating and in some cases falsifying Africa's condition for profit. In any case, we are having these conversations because the white man got off his butt and did something, wrote something down. All we do is complain and complaim and complain for profit. Remember Chinua Achebe's admonition in the parable: "Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter."

 

 

- Ikhide

 

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