Opinion
Africa Through Western Eyes – The World’s Dark Continent or Capitalism’s Shining Light?
It is one facet of a larger rebranding project. Whilst some observers may approve, seeing them as necessary correctives to the boilerplate journalism mentioned above, others are already finding them clichéd and boring or downright misleading; a facile public relations exercise designed to encourage (mainly Western) investment. See the latest issue of Money Week if you want to be bombarded with statistics and given some ideas about where to put your dollars, pounds or euros. That there are resonances between some of this writing and 19th century imperialist propaganda may be cause for concern.
It is important to stress that however you assess the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative’s relative worth, its basis ‘in the real world’ should not be discounted because some of the statistics may be unreliable. We are seeing more and more ‘Africa Rising’ narratives because it is. And the changes are not confined to economic growth – large-scale political violence and war has also declined sharply over the past decade, for example. Things are indeed changing on the ground.
Nonetheless, it is demand for the stuff underneath it – Africa’s mineral and oil wealth – that is driving the economic growth behind all these ‘Africa Rising’ narratives. The economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), and especially China, have fuelled a commodities boom that has benefitted state coffers across the continent though questions remain over the actual extent (and the equities) of this boom.
But perhaps the central reason we are seeing all this ‘good news’ in Western media links back to the West’s own idea of itself and of Africa. Africans are now, ‘finally’, playing by the West’s rules; the supposedly redemptive power of capitalism coupled with the increasing adoption of liberal-democracy in Africa vindicates the Western Way. Moreover, feelings of decline in the West – stubbornly low economic growth (or collapse), the threat of social upheaval, the rise of China, and so on – have made all these ‘Africa Rising’ narratives all the more breathless. The Economist, Money Week, and the rest seem to see in Africa’s rise hope for the West’s recovery. Is Africa ‘Rising’, then, because the West needs it to?
Always something new?
Africa is the “continent of extremes”, according to well-informed sources like Taylors of Harrogate, which sells tea and coffee. In the West, Africa is portrayed either as the Heart of Darkness, with Africans suffering from that quartet of disease, poverty, famine and war, or as Rising, phoenix-like, the living and ‘vibrant’ repudiation of all those worrying signs that perhaps capitalism – as it currently conducted – may not suit our increasingly ‘globalized’ world.
The Manichaean quality of these narratives is difficult to escape; the (good) trio of liberalism, democracy and capitalism seems to be talking hold in Africa – but only if ‘we in the West’ can help Africa defeat the (bad) trio of traditionalism (‘tribalism’), authoritarianism, and ‘poor macroeconomic policy‘ (usually an oblique reference to China). These reductive binary oppositions are signs of overly simplistic thinking, infantilizing not only Africans but also the Westerners who read about them.
