Every so often Africa becomes the ‘trending’ thing. Take for instance the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by a posse of celebrities in 1984, and all the (RED) campaigns, the “make poverty history” wrist bands, etc. etc. the list goes on. If you were to ask people what parts of Africa these campaigns were targeting how many could have answered that the Band Aid song “Do They Know It’s Christmas” was originally written to raise funds for the 1984 famine in Ethiopia? But could you blame them?
As altruistic as these campaigns are, they have reduced Africa to a single mass of black people. I got on this thought process after watching Leslie Dodson in her TED talk ‘Don’t Misrepresent Africa’. Dodson discusses these popular culture images as rendering Africa into one big country. She says we often see “monolithic homogenous stories about the great country of Africa, but Africa is not a country, it’s a continent. Its 54 countries and thousands and thousands of languages.”
Earlier on Afroklectic, Gillean shared her personal experience of arguing with her primary school teacher that Africa was not a country. The year is 2011 yet there are people who still hold to this falsity.
Dodson goes on to ask the poignant question, “is this imagery productive or reductive?” What are your thoughts? Do these campaigns perpetuate the misconception that Africa is a single generic mass of people?
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