Behold Africa: The Untold story of motherland

Behold Africa- The untold story of the motherland

By Hosia Mviringi

“All these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story forms stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Of course Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo, depressing ones, such as the fact that 5000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not catastrophe, and it is very important, to talk about them.”

These are the words of one of Africa’s profound literary ambassadors, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Africa has an untold story that needs to be told by African writers, politicians, businessmen/ women, and journalists. The story is of beauty, success, triumphs, hopes, and hidden potential, and talent yet to be discovered. There is urgent need to reframe Africa and tell the positive stories of the continent in a way that kindles hope and encourages African people to stay and look forward to a brighter future.

The word ‘behold’ means to look upon something in amazement. It behoves one to invoke a sense of interest in closely analysing something. It inspires curiosity in a person to want to seek a detailed understanding of a subject.

When one looks at Africa in the perspective of the global media, they will be convinced that Africa is a jungle where human life cannot be sustained. Global media has since time immemorial painted Arica as a war torn continent where nothing good will and can never be realised. They have painted the continent as one big homogenous country which is torn apart with strife and famine.  

The global media characterise Africa as one big  country where military coups are the order of the day. They cannot tell the world that Africa consists of 54 independent states which are governed differently and are at different stages of democracy and technological advancement. Global media reports are, for reasons best known to the authors and media owners, blind to the fact that whereas there once was a big famine in Ethiopia some years back, the country holds huge potential both as one Africa’s oldest civilisations, having participated in some of the widely recorded Biblical events.

Ethiopia is still painted in the colours of that big famine and it is still being used as a template by big international charity organisations when seeking for donations. Yes there are still problems in that country as a civil war is still ragging spontaneously, but wars are not unique to Africa such that the continent can perennially and universally blackmailed and stigmatised. Surely the US war in Afghanistan, terrorist wars in Yemen and the current Russian war in Ukraine are much bigger wars than anything going on anywhere in Africa. 

Yet the continent is regrettably painted as a continent of barbaric who enjoy killing one another in Machete terrorist attacks. But in direct contrast to the bigger so-called civilised nations, Africa has no weapons of mass destruction. There are no nuclear weapons on the African continent. There are no destructive ballistic missiles in Africa.

A look into the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), CNN, Aljazeera, and many other leading news sites will leave one hopeless about Africa. One would not even dream of visiting Africa, a continent that is said to be still infested with curable diseases such as the Tsetse fly induced Sleeping sickness, Typhoid and Cholera. These news media channels shy away from reporting the beautiful Victoria Falls, the highly industrious Great Zimbabwe monuments, the beautiful wildlife in the Serengeti plains, Gonarezhou Trans-frontier Park and the Chobe-Victoria Falls Wildlife Park, and the high octane annual Kariba Tiger Fishing Tournaments.

When they talk of Africa as the bastion of HIV/AIDS infections they deliberately ignore the fact that Zimbabwe ranks highly with its preventive interventions which ranks the country highly in Africa in terms of reduction in new infections. The country has one of the highest records in terms of access to life-saving antiretroviral therapy. Global media cannot even mention how Africa triumphed over the scary Covid-19 pandemic mostly and especially with the case of Zimbabwe, without international financial support. The continent remains one with one of the lowest Covid-19 related deaths due to the astute management of the pandemic.

Global media is guilty of glorifying white oppression and dominance over black majority while deliberately frowning at and continuously vilifying such noble self-liberating programs as the land reform. These are some of the misdemeanours and misrepresentations of Africa by the global media that urgently and desperately cries out for correction and redress.

While global media obsesses with bashing Africa as the continent of poverty and despair, it deliberately ignores reporting the fact that Africa is the world’s source of raw materials with its largely unexploited mineral resources and fertile lands.

Africa can feed the whole world if the available agricultural land is put to its full potential. These are the stories that will attract institutional investors into the region’s agricultural sector so as to wean the continent from being a perennial food importer.  

The next generation technological revolution depend on African rare mineral reserves in such countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo whose only known international status is that of pariah nation whose only reputation is civil wars and military coups. No international media will tell the world that the Great Lakes is probably the single richest region in the world because of the diversity of critical minerals it possess. Yet African media remains silent when global media continues to distort the African story. The media regrettably focuses on the unfortunate foreign driven wars and not on the potential that the region harbours as a technological manufacturing hub for Africa.

This is the unfortunate case of the single story, yet it can be corrected.