Life
My Africa is NOT Hungry!
By Chiamaka O.
My Africa is not hungry. My Africa is just a giant that has failed to take giant strides. Africa as a continent has probably suffered more than any other continent on the planet, in the hands of the press.
The press has inundated us with images of hungry and suffering children. These are the pictures that best describe what the rest of world thinks of Africa, or at least that is what television has made us believe. You see, you never truly realize that you are a black person, until you move to a predominantly ‘white’ country. And that was my predicament.
Growing up in Nigeria, with fairly comfortable parents, my life was pretty fine. I got all my basic necessities and probably a little more, if I batted my eyelashes long enough at my father.
However, I was not oblivious to the suffering of the poor and the needy, or so I thought. I saw the occasional beggar on the street and a fair amount of homeless people. But in my head, Africa was doing pretty well for itself.
This lasted, until I moved to England. Then I noticed that in between TV shows, there were always commercials, appealing for donations to “hungry African children” somewhere. All over the United Kingdom as a whole, there was always someone or some organization appealing for help for Africa.
The final stroke that broke the camel’s back, was when I watched the documentary “This is Lagos”, aired by the BBC. The documentary, made it a point of duty, to show all the worst parts of Lagos, and somehow missed all the more civil looking parts of it. On their way to the slums of Lagos, did they not see Victoria Island? Did they not see Lekki? Whether this was a coincidence or not, we will never know.
But all these made me see a side of Africa I had never seen before. A hungry, helpless, desolate place, looking up to the mercy of developed countries for its daily bread. It reduced Africa to the mere status of a jungle, and made people like me almost, ashamed to be called Africans.
