By: Mohamed Sahr
Africa is the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent in the world after Asia in both cases. It covers 6% of the Earth’s total surface area and 20% of its land area. Africa accounts for about 18% of the world’s human population with 1.4 billion people. However, it remains the poorest and least developed region. Despite these exhibitions it shows, the Western world generally showcases a misleading argument or cutting edge on the Africa continent. With all the thoughts the Western continent carries about Africa, most of them have certain pictures of Africa that they hold to be real or true. These images are processed courtesy of the International media via television programs and documentaries, the movie industry, the internet as well as the print media vis-a-vis newspapers, magazines, journals and books.
Endemic violence, conflict and civil war. Many countries in Africa have experienced numerous forms of violence, counting from tribal clashes, armed conflicts, and civil wars to genocide among others. For instance, the Somali crisis, the government versus rebels in the Congo and Angola region, the Biafra war in Nigeria or the Rwanda genocide of 1994 that spurred the death of eight hundred thousand
(800,000) people in Rwanda by the Hutu majority. In 2001, during the Arab spring uprising which took place in the Middle East, the Western media had a high premium and automatically earned a headline or top story status amid that decisive moments. Minnesota State Institute of Education 2002 observed that while it may be difficult to achieve total objectivity in media reports, it is not a loss to many observers that such reports in the western media about war and conflict in Africa are often crisis-driven in such a way as to imply that Africans are naturally savage, war-like, violent and steeped in primordial tribal feuds. The perspective taken by the reporters, the kind of headlines, pictures, statistics and language that they use, all point out a picture portrayed to serve certain interests and agendas.
Political Instability and the coup cycle. Instead of violence and civil wars, Africa is depicted as a continent experiencing endemic political instability. James Michira 2002 in his essay admitted that where there are no such wars, there are corrupt dictatorships in control or coup after the coup as the only means of changing regimes. The Western Fourth Estate assumes that Africans cannot embrace democratic principles of governance. That is to say, they can only operate under the facade of dictatorial regimes, corrupt incompetent pharaohs or military rulers. A report published by the Minnesota State Institute of Education stated that for over thirty years, coups were practically the only means by which changes of government were achieved in Africa. It is against this backdrop that the Western media propagate their biases and subjective ways of reporting. They conveniently avoid talking about the role and the policy adopted in polarizing African communities that had lived as one for centuries. Patrick Marnham, a reporter for the Independent on Sunday wondered whether Africa can ever be governable. He claimed that there is no workable system of government in Africa.
Nonetheless, Africa and Aids are other perceptions that the Western media hold especially when portraying Africa to the world. In the previous two decades, Aids has hurt the social and economic development of the human race. The statistics provided by World Health Organization (WHO) and other humanitarian machines authenticate the fact that the bulk of the HIV and AIDS victims are in Africa. 30 million out of the 42 million HIV-positive people globally are reported to live in sub-Saharan Africa. On the aforesaid, the Western media have succeeded in projecting Aids as an African face. With sensationalized headlines and images of the infected population, the Western Fourth Estate seems to tell its audience that HIV and AIDS are the problems of Africa. BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, the Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Forbes, the Guardian and the New York Times, for instance, have attributed the rapid spread of this disease to changing sexual behaviour of Africans as well as backward cultural and religious traditions as taboo. As long as the gap between the rich West and the poor African countries continues to grow at a compelling height, AIDS, Ebola, malaria and a plethora of other diseases would remain wearing an African outward mask.
In conclusion, the portrayal of Africa in the Western media is by extension painting the wrong images of misrepresentation. On the other hand, misinformation about Africa has become a progressive industry in the West.
Whether the Western Fourth Estate tends to do this as a result of biased, unbalanced and subjective reporting, or as a pomposity of a new way of appreciating reality where few corporate heavyweights are creating a commercialized representation of Africa to maintain their ideological agendas. The fact remains, however, these images are not all that Africa is about and some of these images are not privy to Africa.