How to Write about Africa

Vanderleun links to the most intersting articles. This one by Binyavanga Wainaina is worth a full read.

Excerpt: In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

And this is critical in writing about Africa:

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

For a perfct example of the kind of thing that Binyavanga Wainaina refers to, here's Oprah Winfrey in her arrival in Africa: 

The first time I set foot on African soil, I knew I had returned home. It was a powerful experience coming back to the land of bones. It felt like a return to myself.

A lot of African Americans live with the eternal question of "who am I really?" The answer resounded in my spirit with profound clarity the moments I saw an African child smile. Those were my eyes, my lips, my face. And when I first heard African children singing, I knew that not only was I home, but that I would come back to this land again and again. There is a bond that runs very deep between my primal self and the children of Africa. It is a relationship that exists beyond words and one that is reinforced every time I plant my feet in the land of my ancestors. The children of Africa are, to quote scripture, "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." Gordon Clark's work crystallizes this connection as he juxtaposes familiar faces and expressions against a barren and inhospitable landscape. Indeed what Clark accomplishes is to capture the essence of Africa's beautiful and amazing people set against a geography of challenge.

An African reporter reacts after reading this: 

We on the dark continent are familiar by now with the spectacle of the prostrate African American celebrity, kissing the soil from which they were spawned. "Don't put your lips there," we want to say. "I just saw a bergie wander away zipping up his pants and... oh, never mind." Because deep down we know that maybe we'll get a multimillion dollar school out of the connection, even if said connection was say, a good 7000km away in West Africa somewhere.

So I really thought that Oprah Winfrey was parodying those kind of sentiment in the foreword to South African photographer, Gordon Clark's book "Transitions".

"Ha ha ha!" I chortled with delight. "'There is a bond that runs very deep between my primal self and the children of Africa,'" I quoted. "This is good stuff."

But no, oh no. The Queen of chat and purveyor of pseudoscience medicinal quackery is as ever all the more terrifying because she's sincere. She really does take herself so seriously that she would dedicate 80% of the foreword to an amazing photographer's work with the most self-indulgent and vainglorious crap - and throw him a bone of congratulations at the end for "crystallizing" her connection. Er, actually the book is a treasure box of gorgeous images from across the continent - not a tribute to your confused sense of identity.