Written by Maddy Fry | 15 March 2011
Posted in Comment - Africa

One of my biggest regrets of the past few months is that I missed out on seeing the musical Fela!, an immensely popular tribute to the celebrated Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti, whose West End run came to an end in February. Surprisingly for a show about a figure unfamiliar to many theatre-goers in Britain and the US, it got rave reviews in most major newspapers. Yet rather depressingly, in-depth research and basic fact-checking were absent from many of the write-ups. A notable example is that of a journalist in the Independent who was forced to refer to a Wikipedia entry on the star as her main source – a poor show from a newspaper that prides itself on its Africa coverage.

The reason is simple; no-one knew who Fela Kuti was, despite his being a superstar on his home turf and one of the most successful international musicians to have emerged from Africa in the last 40 years. And no-one knew about Kuti because what might broadly be termed as ‘African culture’ rarely makes it into the Western media.

Thinking back, few of us could probably remember the last time we read something about Africa in the media that was not a story on war, famine or corruption. The recent protests in North Africa, despite being met with a resoundingly positive response across the UK’s media, are in many ways an exception to what has been a long history of consistently negative reportage about the continent in the press.

Obviously, this isn’t to say there’s no truth to the stories, or to claim that incidents such as the rampant homophobia in Uganda or the violence of the elections in Kenya should not be brought to the world’s attention. But the nature of the media obsession with bad news is not a short-term affair (Zimbabwe, for one thing, seems to have dropped off the radar), but also refuses to engage with stories that present the continent in anything other than Conrad-esque terms.

This ranges from how the relatively smooth running of the elections last year in Conakry or February’s secession movement in Sudan garnered little press attention, to how rarely music, film or literature from Africa is ever reviewed in the arts pages of any major newspaper.

Aside from the sentiments of fear, pity and judgement that come from the endless spate of Oxfam-inspired news reports, TV programmes on Africa paradoxically seek to instil a sense of awe. Africa is seen as somewhere ancient, biblical and mystical; a place defined by impenetrable jungles and canyons where explorers can find long-hidden treasures. Various programmes with un-nuanced titles, such as the BBC’s recent Lost Kingdoms of Africa and the 2008 Channel 4 show Lost Arc of the Covenant illustrate this well. Note the recurring use of the word ‘Lost’ – would many of the people residing there see their communities as ‘lost’ to them? A covert Western arrogance bleeds through such material, the implication being that anything not deriving from the West is decadent, exotic and ungraspable, ignoring the quantifiable and interesting real histories of many African countries. The BBC’s recent Welcome to Lagos series was a pleasing detour; yet it was no sign that Nollywood will trump Bollywood any time soon as the Western media’s import of choice from outside Europe or America.

Yes, war, disease and corruption are endemic in parts of Africa. But to deny people a side of their existence beyond the tragic and despotic is deeply damaging, as it robs them of their humanity in the eyes of those who rely solely on the media for knowledge of the outside world. The result is that to many, Africans are nothing but malnourished dark spectres, either bloodthirstily brandishing a machete or prostrated listlessly in front of a glaring sun, too weak to brush flies from their eyes. How has this happened to a continent that produced Chinua Achebe and Steve Biko, Ali Farka Toure and J.M. Coetzee? (And yes, points if you know who any of them are).

Alas, war sells, and Africa can certainly provide a lot of it. But digging a little deeper will show the continent can provide so much else as well. I find it bizarre that we have come to view the most diverse place on the planet as being the most simplistic.

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