But of course most American media do not say "Malawi"; they just say "Africa."
[...] Of course this isn't really about Madonna. It is about a formula that well-meaning people have adopted in looking at Africa, a surface-only, let's-ignore-the-real-reasons template that African experiences have all been forced to fit in order to be authentically "African." If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. I wonder whether I would know that Africa has class divisions, that wealthy Africans who have not stolen from their countries actually exist. I wonder whether I would know that corrupt African countries are also full of fiercely honest people and that violent conflicts are about resource control in an environment of (sometimes artificial) scarcity.Watching David Banda's father, I imagined a British David visiting him in 2021 and I wondered what they would talk about.
| That's how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Washington Post essay "Our 'African' Lenses" ends.
posted in articles on November 13, 2006 3:41 PM | t (0)
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