What Bono doesn’t say about Africa
Celebrities like to portray it as a basket case, but they ignore very real progress.
It's a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that's being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help.
That article articulates very well what I have been trying to tell the Americans since the first day I came to the US. I believe what is going to help dispel a lot of the negativity’s portrayed on American TVs is for African media houses to come together and start their own TV channel that highlights in an unbiased manner Africa’s strengths and weaknesses.
thanks David..funny thing i bought the la times during my layover at LAX today…i missed this article…
Don’t blame citizens of the USA for not understanding the real Africa when all the MEDIA (TV) ever shows here are advertisements of the poor little hungry children with flies buzzing ’round their faces and the percent of Africans dying of aids and needing more medical supplies! The educational special of poachers killing elephants for their tusks is due to air in December. They always depict this country of great culture in extreme need of HELP!
Who of us typical citizens in the U.S. would know that ‘African cotton growers want to compete fairly in Western markets?’…Well, we want them to! Do we write our congressmen? Did you?
Since we don’t know positively what Bono’s real motive is beside your suggestion of personal gain, are any of the donations of purchases doing any good to help the citizens of Africa?
It’s disheartening not to know what to believe.
Hope you don’t choke on your Rwandan gourmet coffee.
DK in USA
~
@ValleydelSol: Your comment suggests that you are ignorant to one quintessential component of immigrant culture: the remittance market.
While you’re asking people not to choke on their coffee study how many African people are actually working two jobs to support their family back home…….
I think the blame for the ignorance falls on our laps in not doing enough to educate our Western peers but that in no way absolves Westerners of responsibility.
If you took some time to study why WTO talks keep collapsing, you would see that fair trade is one of the defining issues of the Global South.
Heck just go to a typical educated African and ask them what’s more important, charity or fair trade and see their reaction.
Westerns have free access to information and chose it to justify being a global crusader who goes and creates charities in Africa rather than doing the high leverage thing of staying at home and changing the system that helped create the poverty, and helps maintain it, in the first place.
Dear Mwangi,
OMG No, no, no! Misconstrued comment!
That comment was to the writer of that article, William Easterly!
He ended his article saying:
Today, as I sip my Rwandan gourmet coffee and wear my Nigerian shirt here in New York, and as European men eat fresh Ghanaian pineapple for breakfast and bring Kenyan flowers home to their wives, I wonder what it will take for Western consumers to learn even more about the products of self-sufficient, hardworking, dignified Africans. Perhaps they should spend less time consuming Africa disaster stereotypes from television and Vanity Fair.
I’m very sorry I did not include the comment in quotes as above, originally).
There is no one trying to stop the media from showing exactly what he’s complaining about. He’d rather gloat and ‘wonder’ as he’s drinking coffee with his Nigerian shirt on because (why) He knows the truth and the rest of us are stupid because we give to organizations claiming to send our donations to Africa to help them?
Has he done anything to bring this to light with the media?
He doesn’t sound much like a professor to me.
Again, I apologize and hope you forgive me!
~
All is forgiven and accept my apology, it was tiny faux pas all round
I have lived in Africa and frankly it is the most raw and beautiful place I have ever been. The people there are a result of circumstances caused by colonialism. We have a responsibility to right the wrongs of the past. As human beings, we need to ensure that all people are given the opportunity to exist. We have been blessed with a birth right that has some how superceded other people’s right to exist and be a valued member of society. Some argue that they do not know a value of human life. I saw that; Africans threw themselves in front of my car to shoot us and take our money and car. That would make their life; it was survival of the fitess. But is it?? We have manipulated technolgy to deny the results of evolution. When do we realize that at some point there will be a consequence for our actions?