The Narrative of Africa

Let’s take a minute to talk about something that has been punching me in the gut numerous times each day since the killings in Kenya.  As many of you following African politics know, this past week in Kenya four/five armed terrorists systematically separated the students of a Garissa University student body by religion, executing a total of 147 students who identified themselves as Christians.  As I scroll through my “newsfeed” of 45 ways to bake an onion, crucial camping life hacks, and cute puppies and kittens --I’m not throwing insults here; I do love me some cute puppies-- I am slapped with the lack of attention being given to the blatant brutality of others on the other side of our shrinking globe.  So my question is, why?  After all, I haven’t exactly posted the gruesome images of those nightmarish events, either.  But why haven’t I?

There are oodles of questions and suggestions we can offer up:

-Is it because the story touches on something so dark we don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole? 

-Is it because we see the victims coming from a place in which a lot of people unjustly die anyway?

-Is it because it feels too far away?

-Is it because we are talking about a continent that a number of us can easily ignore in our daily First World lives?

-Is it because we’d like to stay unpolitical or don’t want our nations involved in more efforts overseas?

-Is it because the victims seem so different from some of us? Racially? Religiously? Culturally?

-Is it because we don’t understand the perceived reasons for this injustice and therefore feel too ignorant to join the conversation?

-Is it because we choose whose deaths matter and whose don’t?

These are all interesting questions to juggle and conversations to have, but when we see the attention media pays to tragedies like 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo, we have to go deeper in our understanding of why these traumatic events that will change the face of Kenya forever have gone largely unnoticed by the First World.

I don’t have the answer.  In fact, like many of you, I admit I don’t even like touching the subject.  It’s painful.  And horrifying.  And scarier than ever to me when a group of people is against you not because of what you do, but simply because you exist. That’s the stuff Holocausts are made of. So trust me when I say that I’m processing some of the above questions, as well. 

But perhaps deeper in the heart of all of this is something I call The Narrative of Africa.  It may not at all be that so many of us, media included, don’t care.  But for us in the First World, what is the narrative we have assigned Africa?

 Is it dark?  Scary?  Dirty?  Unsafe?  Uncivilized?  Disease-ridden?  A violent zone of conflict?  Wild? Overwhelming?  In-accessible?  Uneducated?  Hopeless? 

We do have a choice in how we interpret places, what we know about them, and our pursuit of the cultures that find home within them. That is, if we open ourselves to them. 

It’s been interesting to gage reactions of those around me when they learn that I have just moved from Africa and Spain.  Nine times out of ten they will focus on the negatives of Africa before commenting on anything else.  Sometimes this takes the form of political commentary; at other times it involves ebola, famine, or other disease.  --The other one time out of ten is usually regarding elephants, but that is another story for another day!-- As anyone who has returned to the US after living in Africa knows, even the word “Africa” in one’s background gives a person instant street credit.  “Oh, they lived in Africa.  They must be (insert adjective here- most often: brave, interesting, or crazy)." And the funny thing is, that most of the people I speak to say that it is one of the places they’d most like to visit but are sure they will not ever go near.  Though an expensive plane ticket is often the off-the-cuff excuse for this opinion, when pressed further most people stammer on about things like immunizations… and not knowing where to go… or what they would eat… or not wanting to be sick… or how to do it safely… or, or, or, a number of other things that shines a light on their distorted personal narratives of Africa.  Nothing was as telling to me as when we had a set of enthusiastic renters for our Connecticut house suddenly fall through out of the blue at the last second because, when they had told their friends, everyone said that landlords living in Africa could only mean it was a scam. Ask me for twelve more examples; I've got them.  The word "Africa" elicits interesting personal narratives.

So here is my challenge to you.  If you, like me, are bothered by the lack of media attention given to the horrifying events of the past week, or to the 200 missing Nigerian girls, or to the museum attack in Tunisia, or to the Nairobi Westgate shootings, or to the 4 million political killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or to the alarming rates of sexual violence in South Africa, or to the violence that took place just today in Egypt’s Sinai, educate yourself.  Pick a place and shine some light.  For yourself and for others.  Care.

If we can one by one change the Narrative of Africa into a narrative of growth, development, creativity, hope, innovation, resource, and aspiration, THEN we make lost lives matter- independent of how the media pays attention.  When we change the Narrative of Africa to the bustling continent of hope, goodness, and ingenuity that it is, the easier time the world will have in seeing the connections of this challenged continent to other continents.  And even more importantly, the easier time the world will have in recognizing that African lives DO matter.

Take a moment to reflect upon your views of Africa, ways in which you could learn more, pieces of it that confuse or even scare you.  Let’s change the Narrative of Africa one person at a time. 

I'll start; you go next.