Who Are Africa's Friends?: On Images of Africa

In a recent interview, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, CEO of the NEPAD, made this comment about images of Africa:
 The problem is that many Africans spend too much of their time repeating what the Western media says about the continent and about us. It will take some time to ward off this colonial way of thinking. Obviously, when you watch the way Africa is treated on a major news channel like CNN, the feeling is that Africa is plagued by misery and ruled by inept and corrupt leaders who hardly give any thought to the greater public interest.

Many among us Africans tend to repeat what CNN and others have to say without taking a step back and reflecting about what we just heard. We seem to wallow in a kind of self-disparagement. Nowhere else is such an attitude so widespread than on our continent.

Unfortunately, this self-disparaging attitude does have a negative impact. We cannot afford to keep on offering our children a negative image of Africa. We need to put things into perspective. A country like Rwanda has made significant progress while reducing its reliance on foreign aid.

By mobilizing its own resources, Cape Verde has succeeded in becoming a middle-income country. Judging from the design and implementation of its new constitution, Kenya is now making significant progress in terms of governance. Botswana refuses to appeal for foreign aid, with many other countries following its example.

Mr. Mayaki's concerns are well founded given the historical badmouthing of the continent. We must be careful not to repeat derogatory and dated descriptions born of the historical marginalization of the continent. True, some African countries have made some movement toward ameliorating the lives of their peoples. However. we must also remember that even this movement is yet to make African countries, or even the continent as a whole, to have significant sway in the global political economy. By and large, many African countries are still disproportionately dependent on foreign aid - ask Malawi and Uganda. Famines still disproportionately affect Africans. There is still widespread bad governance in the continent so that one can count on one hand, out of the over fifty countries in the continent, the leaders who are seeking the well-being of their peoples. Cameroon, Chad, Central Africa Republic, DRC, Burkina Faso, Burundi, etc., are places where life is a daily struggle for most.

Now, when we point out these things it is not because we are imitating CNN or any other Western media. These are things that one finds on the ground in these countries. These are not constructions or lies even though they may sometimes be exaggerated. Thus, Africa's friends are not those who say that things are going great when they are actually not. Those who paint rosy pictures of Africa are, in fact, not Africa's friends. They are those who tend to see small progress in Africa as a giant step, limiting people's perspectives to the minimum rather than calling for extravagant imagination. It is true that things are getting better but life is still quite abysmal from most people. African and African American elites should stop making themselves feel better by painting pictures of small improvements as if they were giant steps. Doing so is, in fact, derogatory because it associates African progress with the marginal.

Mr. Mayaki even mentioned that the Peer Review Mechanism outlined in NEPAD is the envy of the West. It would have been such if it worked. That mechanism exists only in name and has made no contribution to African life. The African Union itself, under which NEPAD exists, is not helpful to Africa. It is a shield under which African dictators are protected. African ruling elite are so mired in the very subjugation of their peoples that they have no credibility railing against colonialism for they themselves manifest the same attitude toward their people as the colonialists did. Rather than portraying those who critique the snail and sometimes inconsequential steps that African leaders are making as enemies of the continent, Africa's real enemies are the ruling elites who peddle pictures of giant strides even as their people continue to wallow in all forms of hardship.