Yes, I’m still writing papers at the moment – albeit I turn my last one in a week from today. Whew. But I woke up early this morning feeling worried about the topics I’m doing my work on. I don’t talk to people about my work because I generally assume that nobody is interested, but I feel comfortable talking a little bit about it in the blog format.
When I was telling people that I was going to study in Cape Town, South Africa, I received a wide range of responses. Most of them were congratulatory, but every so often, someone would say something about tribes, monkeys, mud huts, or that I’m going to end up “with a big black African man”. These latter responses would most often leave me feeling unfortunately enraged because it’s exactly these kinds of stereotypes of “Africa” that my work is based on.
I understand that Africa is linked with primitivism in American media and films, so much so, that we fail to recognize it sometimes. So to a certain extent, I know that I can’t get too angry with people if that’s all they know about Africa. But I do need people to open their minds and see that the images that are being fed to them have been grossly skewed or taken out of context. Furthermore, Africa is a giant continent filled with the world’s greatest variation of cultures – so there’s never just ONE image that suits it.
I think it should be said that when we speak poorly or joke about Africans living in mud huts, we are arrogantly saying that our American lifestyle is far superior and I urge this to be reassessed because that is only ONE point of view. We must not critique ways of living that we know nothing about.
Some words on colonialism and why we have these stereotypes in the first place:
Following the slave trade, there was another travesty of magnificent proportion in Africa called colonialism. Basically, at the end of the 1880’s, all of the European super-powers got together in Berlin and decided that Africa was a “cake”, and they were all going to have a slice. This is where the borders for the countries in Africa were made, because before the Europeans arrived, there were not “countries” in Africa. At this point, the industrial revolution had supplied Europe with guns, whereas, Africans did not have guns, so Africa was essentially theirs for the taking. What followed the invasion of Europeans on African soil, with all of its bloody battles, was the extraction of Africa’s natural riches like rubber, gold, diamonds, etc and the enslavement of Africans to do the extracting.
Okay, obviously, colonialism was way more complex than I am describing it, but you get the point. Africa was basically raped by a bunch of white men who had no regard for its inhabitants.
Being that it was a violent process to take over parts of Africa, European explorers, missionaries (because another aspect of the pillage was a divine mission to convert the savages), and anthropologists had to morally degrade African peoples to justify their blood spilling. They would send home letters and pictures of Africans that portrayed them as sub-human to win over the approval of European citizens. Of course, this did not work on all citizens, and there were some strong anti-colonial movements going on at this time, namely in England.
But this is my point, the subjugation of Africa and Africans by the West is steeped in many centuries of violence and exploitation. Images of Africans as primitive and backwards in the media back in the late 1800’s early 1900’s served to justify European expansion. Nowadays, these images serve to uphold the West as the “policeman of the world”. Crazy dictators are running free and people live in mud huts, but not to worry, because money from the West will “save” them from their own problems. Problems, might I add, that are the legacy of colonialism, and are often incited by the West’s money.
I am not hinting to an answer that will solve all of this, but I can say that it begins with Americans getting off the high-horse and stop arrogantly assuming that the way we live is the only correct way to live. Africa is a continent with billions of people and it is not right for us to reiterate tools of colonialism by morally degrading them.
I am not on a moral high ground for saying this, I just felt that some light needed to be shed on the subject because is happens so often, that we don’t even realize it is wrong.
