Date: Sunday, July 20, 2003
From: Steve Sharra

[the following is my reaction to a feature article appearing in last
sunday's
(july 13) new york times magazine, on last year's hunger crisis in my
country
malawi. i sent it to the op-ed page; it probably won't be published]

see article at

Humanitarian aid yes, but also fuller, more inclusive contexts in portraying
Africa

Every time my American friends alert me to an article on Africa in a major
US
newspaper, they do so with the comment that all one reads about Africa is
grim, sad and tragic. As a Malawian studying in the United States,
frustration
over the way Africa is portrayed in the western media is almost cliché.

The just-ended trip to five African countries by President George W. Bush
triggered debates as to whether his concern for Africa was genuine, or
whether
it was a photo-op. Salih Booker, executive director for Africa Action
conceded
that at least the world was focusing on Africa and that in itself was a good
thing, while arguing that the whole trip, on the whole, didn't amount to
much.
Save for TV and newspaper shots of the president with his hosts and his
speeches, much of the media however was gripped by the debate over the White
House admission earlier in the week that the state of the union address
reference to Saddam Hussein seeking uranium in Niger, pronounced wrongly
half
the time, was inaccurate. The admission took the limelight away from Africa
and brought it back to the US as soon as the president landed on the African
continent.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine article on Malawi and the 'hunger crisis'
that ravaged the country last year, written by Barry Bearak made very sad
but
touching, compelling reading. In terms of the tradition-old portrayal of
Africa as a place of doom and gloom, there wasn't much new, but Bearak did
stoke a few embers of a different kind of perception that might actually
serve
the purpose Salih Booker pointed to.

Bearak's meticulous method to follow specific stories of families which
experienced death due to starvation gives his story a very personal,
up-close
portrait of the food shortages which made worldwide news. His fine writing
makes his feature a literary marvel, capturing with unusual proximity and
human feeling the unique hearts and spaces that make Malawi more than just
another god-forsaken, hunger-ridden figment of the difference-seeking
Euro-American imagination.

That the web version of the article has been accompanied by links to
organizations that are working in Malawi to alleviate the hunger problem,
for
more pledges of help, is another admirable thing about the publication of
this
item in the most powerful newspaper in the world.

Three things that Bearak mentions in his article however deserve the
scrutiny
of those of us who have come to believe that Africa is in need of massive
doses of not only the neo-liberal, developmentalist definition of
humanitarian
and financial aid, but even more important, of attitudes and portrayals
inclusive and broader enough to offer a fuller picture and context of a
continent that is both much like any other continent on earth as well as
different, in no inferior, despicable sense.

The way Bearak mentions the San Francisco street scene and Levi's 501 jeans
advertised on a T-shirt being worn by the woman who is his primary
respondent,
and her ignorance of what the lettering on the T-shirt means, strikes one as
an artifact of the Eurocentric expectation that requires everyone in the
world
to have heard of the famous EuroAmerican metropolises and their trademark
denim jeans.

Bearak describes the capital city, Lilongwe, as un-Malawian. One wonders
what
a 'Malawian' city ought to look like. He calls the decision by desperate
Malawian farmers to spread the fertilizers thinly over more areas and crops
than advised by the experts an attempt to 'outsmart science'. The two
husbands
married to the daughters of the primary respondent are philanderers,
sleeping
around and going for more wives once their economic status changes for the
better. Although this other item does not change much, Dr. Banda's
dictatorial
rule lasted 30, not 40 years.

My isolating these aspects of the otherwise brilliantly conceived and
generously described story of Malawi's hunger tragedy is a much-trodden path
in the realm of academic debates about the way Africa is presented in the
Western media. And the problem is much bigger than journalism and its
demands
for news, brevity and freshness of approach.

Taken together, these acts of commission and omission in writing about
African
spaces and peoples culminate into a depiction of the world from a
EuroAmerican
perspective in which difference is not only aberration and deficiency, but
self-constituting of the tragedies that befall places like Malawi.

People of Africa have been made to feel less than for not knowing about the
existence of places like San Francisco and Levi jeans. Cities in Africa are
described as being un-African because they resemble Western cities in their
architecture and cultural cosmos. The men are philanderers, that's why AIDS
is
decimating the continent. Measures of desperation that use experimentation
as
part of the thinking to find solutions to problems are considered attempts
to
'outsmart science,' as is the revelation that tying a cloth tightly around
the
waist fools the stomach and enables one to do work on an empty stomach.

All these portrayals entrench the belief that African societies have always
been like this, they have not changed for millennia. They reinforce the view
that the West has always been superior, giving us the modernity and the
postmodernity that must now be spread to the rest of the earth. Africa is
supposed to have one, unchanging, progress-less definition, a picture
implanted into Western minds starting in schools and popping up all over the
media. That's why the existence of cities in Africa is presented as
un-African. I recall being told by a high school teacher a year ago that she
once visited Morocco. "But that's not really Africa," she qualified her
statement. "That's more like Spain."

Taken out of the narratives are the competing views about the recentness of
EuroAmerican dominance in the world, the remarkable knowledge and
civilizations built by our predecessors in every part of the world passing
on
to us the heritage that has allowed this cornucopia. Resources from other
parts of the world, gold from Africa which flowed into Europe at the onset
of
the industrial age, human labor that fueled the textile industry, ivory,
rubber and several other products that together combined to create a
knowledge-based as well as material progress for the West, are not
considered
as aid from Africa, the Americas and Asia to the West.

As for the promiscuity, I had no idea, before I left Malawi and came to
study
here, how big the US porn industry was; how high infidelity, divorce and
re-divorce rates are in the United States. I spent the entire summer last
year
hearing and watching about children being abducted, sexually defiled and
then
murdered here in the US. If not pedophilia and child murder, it was one
corporate scandal after another, with ties to the political establishment
all
over the place.

Is it so inconceivable to suggest that media representations of Africa take
into consideration the historical contexts that are always buried and yet
have
had real consequences for the way the world has turned out today, both the
wealth created, and the misery engendered? That the way Africa is portrayed
be
presented without hiding the vices and decadence that should make Malawian
philanderers amateurs?

Some argue that talking about a past that is known more as myth than
historical fact, or asking that Africa be presented alongside the
degeneration
of the West as well is fiddling while Rome burns, the real task is to do
what
is necessary immediately to save lives. And I agree. However the question
need
not be whether to choose one over the other; for the choice is already made
in
the decision to write about Africa and not mention the hidden contexts. Talk
of a glorious past may be mythical, but dismissing even the premise for the
context to be made is part of the same decision over what myths to glorify
as
history and which ones to call myth and ignore.

The despondency that has gripped Malawi and other poverty-stricken and
AIDS-ridden countries in the world is resulting in massive numbers of people
giving up on the possibility of solutions in which they are otherwise an
important factor. In this mindset, salvation lies in packing up and leaving.
In fact I would argue that leaving to go elsewhere prosperous is a good
thing,
because it can potentially open up better chances that one will have access
to
the knowledge and perspectives made available by the abundance of wealth in
the West and its universities, which are not available to a similar extent
in
poor countries.

The knowledge and perspectives thus explored are an important part of
imagining new futures for Africa, by shedding new light on distortions about
how the world has come to be today. Even if that may not put food into
people's mouths and money into their pockets, as Professor Manthia Diawara
said on C-SPAN television a few weeks ago, it brings into focus those parts
of
people's identities, the absence of which kills both hope and lives.