The Truth About Africa
- Stephanie Moka
- Jan 5, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 10, 2023
Africa is not all that the western media portrays it to be.
By Stephanie Moka
A Black man watching the news. (Source: Shutterstock)
Nana Jaji’s typical Sunday as a child began in her home in Accra, Ghana. Her mother prepared Waakye, her favourite dish, for breakfast, while the rest of the family gathered in the living room to watch the morning news.
Her reality was living in a two-story home in the heart of Ghana, a nice car with a personal family driver, and attending one of the most prestigious private schools in the country.
She sips on her glass of cold chocolate milk, sat on her L-shaped sofa, and watches as a white news anchor from America tells the same old story about her country and its people. That they are poor, criminals plagued with hunger, disease, and backwardness.
Jaji lives in Toronto now but is still followed by the effects of the western media’s misrepresentation of Africa.
“Being an object of compassion is not the same as being the subject of a story”
A study by The African Narrative found that Africa is referenced in a positive light on television only 14 percent of the time.
This negatively affects the way people view Africa and in turn affects Africans abroad daily.
What Africa does for you
This multi-ethnic continent makes significant contributions to the world and to your daily life. According to USN Public Diplomacy:
Africa provided the slave labor that developed the new world.
Coltan is a mineral used to make computer chips. It is a major resource that the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa supplies to the world.
Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and Nigeria account for 20% of the world’s petroleum needs.
African countries like Botswana, Ghana, and South Africa produce over 50% of the world’s diamonds and gold.
Most of the world’s cocoa and over 30% of coffee are produced in African countries.
Africa inspired the contemporary artworks of celebrated artists like Picasso
Computer chips are made from a mineral called “coltan” mainly produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Source: Stephanie Moka)
What you can do for Africa
“Being an object of compassion is not the same thing as being the subject of a story,” says East-African freelance journalist, Jina Moore. She believes that not only journalists but also viewers are a possible root of this issue and have a responsibility to offset it. She says:
Journalists need to get out of the mentality that “bad news sells.”
Together, journalists, readers, leaders, and viewers, need to “acknowledge something other than suffering as worthy of their attention."
Journalists must work with African content creators to help with better understanding of the complexity of Africa.
With hard work they must be willing to drop the narrative they already know about Africa and reimagine what the continent is truly like.
The spread of this one-sided view on Africa can be detrimental to lives like Jaji’s.
She laments about her struggle when trying to find a job in Toronto. Of course, this can be due to many varying factors, but Jaji believes it has something to do with her employer’s misconceptions about the country she comes from.
“It felt like they thought I didn’t belong there… I did get the job, but the process of getting it was just very cruel and difficult,” Jaji says.
The dehumanization of Africa is an issue of concern not only to Africans but to non-Africans that have had the opportunity to visit any one of the 54 countries of the continent.
Jaji is still baffled every time she turns on the television to watch the news about her country, but she turned this pain into passion.
She is now pursuing a degree in public relations. She wants to push for inclusivity through the brands she will work with. This is her way of making a change. What will yours be?
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