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Murphy, Thomas H. (ed.) / Wisconsin alumnus
Volume 77, Number 2 (Jan. 1976)
Wiley, David S.
The African connection, pp. 7-11
Page 11
of incredible ignorance and myth about Africa. The final area of tension between Americans and Africans is the stereotypes we hold about Africa. We are guilty of incredible ignorance and myth about Africa, even the most educated and sophisticated of us. This fall, a Nigerian professor of English literature who lives in a city of more than a million reported that he had been asked by a college-educated American hostess if the lions shown on a television film were similar in size to those he regu- larly sees in Nigeria. Nigerians never see lions; the average Ameri- can youngster has seen far more wildlife in the flesh than his or her African counterpart. Nevertheless, the American media continue to exaggerate Africa's exotic side. Through "Animal World," "Wild Kingdom," "Daktari," Disney specials, and countless B-movies, animalized Africa is rehearsed again and again before the American audience, to the exclusion of those parts of Africa which are mechanizing, indus- trializing and developing. The result is that while a few facts about this most rapidly urbanizing Of the world's continents gradually appear in classroom social studies texts, a new national survey shows that the average American young person at seventeen holds more stereotypes about Africa than at thirteen! To most of the new media generation of this world's richest educational system, Africa remains the Masai warrior, leaning on his spear, idyllically watching the cattle and the clouds: the Noble Savage lives. While the modal African terrain in fact resembles Wisconsin or Iowa, Africa lives in the minds of most Americans as the teeming and impenetrable jungles, through which Bogart's African Queen endlessly plods. The repeated bad jokes about the missionary and the cannibal, and the more sophisticated middle-school texts on the hunting-and-gathering "Bushmen" (they actually are the San peoples, called "Bushmen" by the South African whites who exter- minated many and drove the rest from their ancestral lands) add to the myth of the savagery, the primitiveness, the voodoo, the irrationality of African peoples. Indeed, Africa re- mains "Darkest Africa." When Africanists protest to the major televi- sion networks or to the printed media, we frequently are told that either "'it's simply a matter of human interest reporting" or "the program was just a story, a comedy which no one takes seriously." Such media images could be dis- regarded if factual reporting on Africa were more accurate and extensive, but it is not. The Washington Post, probably the most important news source of American political decision- makers, covers Africa's fifty-two nations and 700,000,000 people with one reporter, who, within a few days last spring, was ordered to cover the independence of Mozambique, the coup against the Emperor in Ethiopia, and the Ali-Frazer fight in Zaire! (As one Madison newspaper editor noted, there is more and better report- ing on Africa in one weekly air- mail tissue edition of the British Manchester Guardian than in all the American national press combined.) Those of us who know Africa and read the U. S. press' political reporting frequently find that stories are shallow, and stereotypical, over- emphasizing the importance of ethnicity and tribe, fixated on the bizarre and exotic, primarily depend- ent on white expatriates for infor- mation, and sometimes covertly allied with white-racialist interests. Africa is an attractive, friendly, and incredibly complex range of societies and cultures, from which we have much to learn. For long years, we did not understand that the major mode of cultural innova- tion and development in Africa usually was not one in which "'material culture" was primary. When we found no pyramids, no Appian Way, no grand temples, no Great Wall, and no gunpowder, we thought Africa was uncivilized. (Indeed, that is the continuing message of the South Africa Information Service in the stories it distributes in Europe and North America to justify white oligarchy.) But it is not uncivilized! Rather, some African societies innovated and developed in human relations, in building intri- cately interwoven civilizations, matrixed through kinship, lineage, polity, religion, and locality. This fixation with human inter-relationships frequently produced great concern for reduced hostility, inequality, and dissension in the societies. Impor- tant ceremonies are traditionally built around the restoration of friendship between men or women who had quarreled. Criminals usually are kept within the community for their punishments. Sometimes, even the injured party and the criminal are asked to exchange gifts to symbolize the restoration of the criminal to normal human relationships with his neighbor, the exclusion of alienation from the community, and the restoration of communal health. This understanding of crime more as an expression of the poor health of a community and less as a matter of evil individuals is a con- ception toward which Americans are slowly moving. The United States needs continuing access to Africa's minerals and commodities for our industry and quality of life. Africa needs American know-how and technology. Today we appropriate little economic assistance with which to keep up the American side of the exchange, and our alliances with minority white regimes are serving only our very short-term interests in these states which shortly will have African governments. (As the African proverb observes, "When you know who his friend is, you know who he is.") The result of this unequal exchange between Americans and Africans may be seen in the recrimi- nations which grow in the halls of the United Nations, in the growing estrangement between Americans and those to whom we owe so much. We can only hope that historians a century hence will look back on these few decades as a temporary period of short-sightedness. David Wiley has lived in Rhodesia, and conducts research in Zambia concerning education, health, and housing of urban populations. 11
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