The Destruction Of Africa's Image

Algiers, capital city of Algeria, North Africa.

One can safely say that Africa is the continent that most people would associate with mass starvation, diseases, and the lack of infrastructures. It is so common to see images of skinny, hungry, dying African children in the western media, to the point that it has become common belief that Africa is the continent of death. Yes, they make it sound like in the land of the pharaohs no one has had a smile on his or her face for a thousand years. The picture they have been trying to depict is simple; it is only to make the case that Africa is the land of savages that had to be colonized by the Europeans in order to be civilized, so in an attempt to justify the shame of colonization and excuse the brutality of it, year after year, decade after decade, and now in a new millennium, the negative light shined and continues to shine as the light of choice in which the image of Africa was to be and is to be projected. Do not get me wrong, for I am not trying to make the case that the negative images of Africa that are in the mainstream media are not images of Africa . I am just trying to say that they are not the complete image of Africa. No, they couldn't be the complete image of Africa. The image of the land where Lalibela carved his churches out of volcanic rocks, the land of those who built the great Zimbabwe, the pyramids, the obelisks and the sphinxes is more complex than a war in Sudan or a famine in Niger.

If I am not mistaking, it was on Wednesday January 11 2006 that a friend paid me a nightly visit. I was a little busy when she came, so after I told her to have a seat; I went back to my computer desk where I was doing some design work on a website, then a picture on my computer monitor, of a city with high rises caught her eyes; she was quick to assume that it was New York City, but it was not. The picture she had just seen was of an East African city; it was a picture of Nairobi, Kenya, yet it is the kind of image that most people in the western world would not expect out of an African country because it is simply the kind that defies their common belief about Africa. The picture that I am referring to was not a representation of Africa that she, an American born, American raised had been exposed to for most of her life. It was not a picture of a small African village with hungry, sick, orphans waiting to die just like their disease stricken parents. No it was not a picture of a tribal war depicting ethnic cleansing. It was instead a picture of a city with modern infrastructures. A picture that was mistaken for one of New York City and millions like it can be taken in dozens of African cities.

It is as if the western Medias have been conspiring to show Africa in the negative light. It is as if they have agreed to disregard any positive images or news out of Africa, so they can concentrate all their energy on the negative ones. The question then becomes “Why would they do such a thing?” There can be many answers to this question, but a historically oriented answer could be an imperial, arguably racist one; an argument aimed at making the case that the colonization of Africa was necessary for the good of humanity as a whole. To believe that argument is to believe that the populations of Africa were uncivilized before civilization was given to them by the Europeans colonizers through an imperialistic system designed to dominate them politically and exploit them economically with injustice, inequality and brutality. That argument alone would be an insult to humanity as a whole because it would be on one hand to suggest that the transfer of commodities, techniques, and technologies could not have been done between Europe and Africa without the shame of colonization, and on the other hand it would be denying mankind thousands of years of civilization in Africa just as if Egypt, Nubia, Sheba, Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, and Carthage, just to name a few, never existed. Colonization is inexcusable, but in an attempt to excuse and defend imperialism, leaders and policy makers of the West went out of their way to drag the image of Africa in the dirt, so the negative propaganda is still being propagated, perhaps at a subconscious level in some cases....

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