How the West covers Africa and how we, African elites, need to expose these stereotypes
I argued
last week that there is a double standard among institutions – both
public and private – in the western world when dealing with an African
country like Rwanda or a European country like Belgium. For example,
mere allegations by Rwandan dissidents in the UK and Sweden to the
police that their government has sent a hit squad to kill one of them
are enough for police to take action and publicise the threat or expel a
diplomat. However, if similar allegations were made against the
government of Belgium, British or Swedish police would give Belgium the
benefit of the doubt, investigate the matter and establish some credible
basis before taking any action. The question is why the double
standards when it comes to Africa?
Let us place Rwanda’s “public relations problem” (as American journalist working in Kigali put it a February 24th – March 1st article in The Independent)
in the wider context of Western standards of dealing with Africa and
its peoples. As a concept, Africa exists at two levels: as a
geographical entity and as a people. As geography, Africa includes a
northern region that is largely Arabic ethnically and Muslim by
religion. In Western mass media, scholarship and diplomacy, the Arabic
north is reported upon, studied and related to as part of the Middle
East. Hence, when western media, governments and scholars talk of
Africa, they mean Sub Sahara (or black) Africa.
In dealing
with Arabs, the most dominant construct is religion – they are treated
as Muslims first, Arabs second. In dealing with Sub Sahara Africa, the
dominant construct is race; we are all “black”. This “Africa” is also an
intellectual construct – there are images and symbols that people
associate with Africa promoted through Western scholarship, religion,
mass media, popular culture and language. For example, stories about
Africa during the pre-colonial period were filled with bizarre tales of
cannibalism, human sacrifice, savagery and other insane imaginations.
Consequently, any mention of Africa or its people evoked feelings of
sub-humans only useful as slaves. This construction was not pointless.
It sought to justify one of the worst tragedies in human history – the
Trans-Atlantic trade in slaves from Africa to the Americas.
As the
colonial period began, a modified picture of Africa and its people took
shape. Africans were no longer sub-humans to be enslaved. They were
backward people in need of civilization. “The African,” said Gen. Ian
Smuts, former Prime Minister of South Africa while giving the Rhodes
Memorial Lecture at Oxford in 1929, “has largely remained a child type,
with a child psychology and outlook. A childlike human cannot be a bad
human…” Then Albert Schweitzer like many colonial overlords said: “The
Negro is a child and with children, nothing can be done without
authority.”
In one of
his most thoughtful writings, Karl Marx argued that the way people
organise themselves to solve their basic economic challenges – how to
clothe, house and feed themselves – requires a “superstructure” of
non-economic activity and thought; it will be bound together by laws (or
traditional customs in societies without states), supervised by
government, inspired by religion and justified by philosophy. In the
same way, attempts by the West to dominate Africa at each of the epochs
have needed intellectual justification tailor-made to a particular
system of social control.
Thus,
slavery required a particular intellectual picture of Africa – to use
human beings as one would a horse. Capitalism and improved technology on
the other hand, rendered slavery inefficient. This created a necessity
for free labor from coercive conditions. Therefore, the philosophy of
colonialism about Africans had to be different from the philosophy of
slavery – the African as a perpetual child only able to work under the
whip of colonial authority. This philosophy justified and legitimised
the structure of the colonial state to its home constituencies and to
the colonised.
As
colonialism ended, overt racism became repugnant having been discredited
by Adolf Hitler and his NAZI allies who took it to the European
mainland. The claim that Hitler began genocides disregards history. The
German psychopathic dictator was following in a long European tradition
of mass slaughter of native peoples by European conquerors in Latin and
North America and Africa. But to return to Africa, although overt racism
began to decline at the end of colonial rule, the imagery of studying
and reporting on Africa was not transformed, it only changed manner of
presentation. Overtly racial expressions were dropped. In their place,
however, particular stereotypes have been introduced that have sustained
the construction of Africa and Africans as some incompetent humans in
need of external emancipation – by the white man.
For
example, Western media today tend to focus on poverty, misery, despair,
corruption, state rapacity, violent conflicts, ritual murders, hunger,
famine, cruel and brutal leaders etc. Western scholarship follows in the
footsteps of the media, to provide intellectual explanations. Then
Western human rights organisations campaign for particular interventions
to solve the problem – the recent YouTube video calling upon the United
States to capture Uganda’s rebel leader, Joseph Kony, being a good
example. All this “pressure” makes western diplomacy (sometimes, as in
Libya recently, military intervention) necessary to induce or force
governments in Africa to behave in particular ways. Such projects
require local allies. Slavery and colonialism required local chiefs as
collaborators. Today, the West funds local “civil society”.
Of course
Western scholarship, journalism, the human rights and humanitarian
movements and diplomacy do not invent disasters in Africa. Rather it is
the way they focus and angle this particular aspect of our reality that I
find questionable. Indeed, it is the almost complete exclusion of our
other realities that consciously or subconsciously sustains these
stereotypes. Thus, although explicitly racial arguments about Africa are
rare today and when made are scorned upon, the campaigns to end
poverty, promote human rights, democracy, feed the hungry, try African
leaders at the International Criminal Court (ICC) etc are part and
parcel of a construct that seeks to present Africa and Africans as
incapable of self-government.
Thus,
today, there are phrases, words and expressions that allow many people
not to mention race in discussing perceived failures in Africa. But they
are still able to present arguments about our perceived inherent
inferiority. The point is that it is no longer necessary to talk about
race. This is because talking about poverty, misery, hunger, brutal
governments etc conveys the same message of Africans being backward,
brutal, incompetent, incapable and hence in need of external
intervention. Different factions in the West may disagree on the nature
of intervention – some may call for military force, others diplomacy
etc. – but intervene they must.
Anyone
reading this article thus far would be tempted to conclude that we as
Africans need to establish our own media, think tanks, universities etc
through which we can generate knowledge about ourselves and tell our
story without such stereotypes and prejudices. Actually that is the
solution. But the problem is much more complex than that. If that
solution is to work, the complexity of how we are intellectually
constructed has to be understood. As economics Nobel laureate Robert
Solow said, just because the tyre is flat does not mean that the hole is
at the bottom. The fact that Western journalists report negatively
about Africa does not necessarily mean that African journalists and mass
media owned by Africans would report about the continent differently.
On the contrary, they could even be worse.
In my
experience, I find that we African elites perpetuate these negative
prejudices and stereotypes. With Rwanda, for example, the most
outlandish stereotyping is done by its own journalists supported by
like-minded allies in the regional press. A Western journalist may seek
some little evidence in spite of the low professional standards required
by her news organisation when reporting on Africa. This is because of
her training and the standards – even if low – required of her by her
employer. She is also likely to check her back for likely accusations of
racism and hence tamper her statements with some qualifiers and
reservations. The African journalist is restrained by neither.
Steve Biko
said that the greatest weapon in the hand of an oppressor is never his
armies – these are secondary. It is the mind of the oppressed. The
overlord uses control of communication channels (mass media, think
tanks, universities, books, education curricula, religion, philosophy
etc) to create a particular world view – what Antonio Gramci called
hegemony. This is a mind-frame or belief system of what is normal,
regular and right – as opposed to the abnormal, irregular and wrong. In
other words, the production of knowledge is an important instrument of
social control.
We African
intellectuals and elites know about ourselves largely (not entirely)
through the writings of non-Africans. So we go to Stanford and Harvard,
Oxford and Cambridge to be taught who we are, what we are, what we
think, what we want, what we do, how we do it etc. Most books and
research work about us is produced by someone other than ourselves. We
participate in its consumption, not its production. The biases,
prejudices and stereotypes generated may not be driven by deliberate
racial intent. However, research into cognitive bias shows that both
conscious and sub-conscious biases lead to prejudiced views and actions
even when the individual does not want to do so.
I think
most western scholars on Africa are anti-racist and seek to be as race
neutral as possible. However, they come with particular biases – most of
them sub-conscious – based on their education, culture, history,
beliefs etc. These generate cognitive schemas or thought structures that
influence what we notice and how the things we notice get interpreted
by our minds. Studies show that such schemas operate not only as part of
conscious, rational deliberations but also automatically i.e. without
conscious awareness of intent.
For
example, in the United States, the mass media is awash with news of
criminal activity on a daily basis. In most cases, the criminal is
always a black male. In Michael Moore’s documentary, Bowling for Columbine,
there is a play of actual television news reports sounding like a
broken record in the way they repeat this description of a criminal
suspect. Research studies into this cognitive bias show that after
decades of media reports, it has sunk in the social consciousness of the
Americans, including black people, that a criminal suspect is always a
black male.
There was a
study in America involving a video game where participants were asked
to shoot as quickly as possible at a target they suspected was armed.
Each target would be of either a white or black person. As the results
showed, participants were more likely to mistake a black target as armed
even when he was actually unarmed and more likely to mistake the white
target as unarmed when he was actually armed. Black participants in the
video game were also as likely as white participants to shoot at unarmed
black targets as opposed to armed white targets. These results showed a
pattern of discrimination based on subconscious thought processes, not
conscious deliberations – meaning that over the years, a common “wisdom”
has penetrated the social consciousness of Americans that a black man
is a criminal.
The point
is that the knowledge created by western scholarship and mass media that
is imparted to us shapes our self-perception. For example, there are
many things our governments do as part of democratic deal-making that we
claim are signs of failure of our democratic process. Yet these very
same actions are seen in western democracies as costs of democratic
compromise. Indeed, African elites are quick to see the specks in our
societies and remain blind to the logs in western ones.
For
example, elites in Africa may condemn Rwanda and Uganda occupation of DR
Congo – a country with an absentee state just across the border. But
they see nothing wrong with America and NATO occupation of Afghanistan
some 10,000 miles away for over a decade. A few killings by an African
army get so much coverage compared to hundreds of death at the hands of
American and NATO aerial bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We are
therefore active participants in processes that encourage and reproduce
stereotypes against us.
Therefore,
the challenge for Africa is not merely to create our own mass media
houses, universities and think tanks and staff them with people of our
skin color. The primary challenge is to develop self-awareness – to
understand the world we live in and challenge the images of who we are
that have been constructed. There are many non-Africans in Western
institutions who would see our point of view and advance it in their own
media. But it is important that we actively define who we are and
develop images, symbols, and schemas that reflect this self-perception.
Only then can we expect others to respect us.
Immediately
after independence in the 1960s, there was an attempt to do this. What
happened? I will return to this question next week.
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