Single-Story Dangers

[ Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire ]

Try a small experiment: close your eyes and think of Africa. Make note of the first five images that come to mind—whatever pops into your head— anything except for people- or place-names.

Seriously, do it. I’ll wait.

…

For most Westerners, the selected images come from a predictable range of concepts: wild animals and untamed nature, poverty, famine and war, disease, tribes of half-naked “primitives” living in the bush. These images inform virtually every public narrative about the continent—political, philosophical, ecological, historical, economic, even artistic. The featured image above (from the Irish Times) is pretty standard fare in this regard.

The problem is, as reality goes this is utter nonsense. Africa’s is a rapidly urbanizing population of 1.2 billion—roughly 50% of whom already dwell in cities. Subsistence farming is predominant, as are traditional dwellings, but you’ll never encounter spears and loincloths ever, unless you go looking for them in far-flung, remote regions. Ditto those celebrated wild animals, which hardly exist outside protected game reserves. And no, Ethiopia is not full of starving children in desperate need of Western-style, STEM-based education. There is not a war in Liberia or Sierra Leone; the prevalence of disease is wildly overstated; and so on–our list of false impressions is long.

This carefully crafted narrative of Africa is the only story most of us will ever be told. It’s a single narrative, a single story, a lie. It contains occasional morsels of decontextualized fact, but is essentially well-crafted propaganda used to justify all manner of ongoing exploitation by Us of Them.

And what, Jim, is your point?

Almost every day, those I encounter along the road ask about my mission here. That’s the word they use: “What’s your mission in Africa?” I still struggle for the right answer, but something like “to provide a firsthand corrective to the false narratives Westerners are spoon-fed about Africa.” I do this by introducing my readers to real Africans, day after day, because what we’re being taught is a bald-faced lie. The truth, rather, is a glorious thing: an anthology of lived-in stories–rife with generosity, kindness, ingenuity, fortitude, and the irrepressible joy of most everyone I meet. My hope is for my readers to envision something inspiring when they close their eyes and think of Africa; I want us all to see that any story which paints any people, anywhere, ever, as The Other is a false narrative, and we should be deeply suspicious of it.

And that, at long last, brings me to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and her TED talk, The Danger of the Single Story. Adichie is a Nigerian novelist, feminist, and general force of nature who illustrates the problems of having only a single narrative of, well, pretty much anything. Her ruminations remain one of the most popular TED talks of all time, and are well worth your time and attention.

As it pertains to my so-called mission, though, this quote demonstrates precisely what I’m getting at:

“[My American college roommate] had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.“

Of course this last thing [emphasized by me] is the precise intention of those who orchestrate such narratives; the stories that delimit The Matrix that is Western Society. No need to worry about those ISIS-loving Syrians or anti-Christian Iranians or communist North Koreans or terrorist-supporting Libyans or inhabitants of any of the other “shithole countries” in Africa and beyond. If they try defending themselves, their sovereignty, or simply their dignity? Screw ’em, they must be terrorists! Once the public believes these fictions (and they do), then we can intervene as we like–“for their own good” and for our so-called national interests. You get the picture.