Opinion
Africa Through Western Eyes – The World’s Dark Continent or Capitalism’s Shining Light?
The growing discourse on race added a further dimension to these debates, supposedly explaining ‘African backwardness’ and ‘savagery’ as biologically-predetermined characteristics. Social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer, and eugenicists, such as Francis Galton, exerted enormous influence and lent credibility to generalized xenophobia. That these works were extended exercises in sophistry and casuistry need hardly be mentioned.
Colonialism went even further; because of what they thought they knew about Africa – a land of fantastical beasts and cannibals, slaves, ‘backward races’ and so on – the colonial powers managed to convince themselves that they were subjugating Africans (and others) for their own good. European violence was going to stop the wars endemic to Africa, and their enlightened (over-)rule would be to the benefit of all (via Livingstone’s ideas of ‘Christianity, Civilization and Commerce’).
The independence era of the late 1950s and 1960s saw more positive stories about Africa enter Western discourses. The archives of British Pathé contain several clips of the Queen visiting her former colonies, with this one supposedly evidencing a bright future for Sierra Leone.
But coverage of the Nigerian Civil War began a trend in Western reporting that has lasted to the present. The Sun, a UK tabloid newspaper, called secessionist Biafra “The Land of No Hope”, accompanying the piece with photos of the starving and the dead. It is not hard to trace a fairly straight line connecting headlines like this and contemporary reporting that trots out clichés about the ‘Heart of Darkness’.
The good: emerging, rising, vindicating
But now, Africa is not only an ’emerging market’; it’s an ’emerging continent’. Again, why now?
It is partly because some people think the best way to repudiate the negative stereotypes of Africa is to pump out wholly ‘good news’. An account on Twitter called @AfricaGoodNews is a case in point. Its handler tweets links to positive reportage of Africa: such “Angola May Produce One Million Eggs a Day…” and “Doing Business in Fast-Growing Africa – Europe Edition…”.
