Replacing 'Africa' with Africa

The Guardian released a podcast the other week busting some myths about Africa. Before I get into anything though, I just want everyone to enjoy for a second the irony of the Guardian hosting an event focusing on how we should go beyond misleading images often peddled by the media in their hipster hangout café at Shoreditch Boxpark. If you're not from London, this article should give you the gist.

Anyway they hit up ‘Africa is corrupt,’ ‘Human rights don’t matter in Africa,’ ‘Africans are always in poverty,’ ‘Africa can’t do capitalism,’ ‘Aid is good for Africa,’ jaunting through the issues of colonialism, gay rights, the pernicious effects of aid, the links between poverty and corruption, to name a few. As one of the panel members commented, though, they didn’t have time to cover a number of other myths, so I’m going to give it a go here. I’m also going to replicate their format and try to fit multiple enormous issues into a hopelessly short space with inevitably inadequate consequences.

‘Africa rising’

If it's not declining...?

‘[O]ver the ten years to 2010, six of the world's ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa’. Annual GDP growth was 4.8% from 2002 to 2011. Nollywood. M-Pesa. HowwemadeitinAfrica. There’s even an IMF conference in Maputo this month called ‘Africa Rising’. Is Africa rising?

Now clearly many African countries have enjoyed strong economic growth in the last 10-15 years, leading to this binary switch in Economist titles from ‘the hopeless continent’ to 'Africa rising'. Aside from any the fact that such a simple narrative must be wrong, there are also a number of concrete, interrelated problems with this. One is that economic prosperity isn’t being shared; Afrobarometer shows that there is “widespread dissatisfaction with current economic conditions despite a decade of strong growth”. Project Syndicate points out that while the richest 10% of East Africans have an average income of $2100, comparable to Central America, the bottom 40% of East Africans have to get by on $225 a year, well under $1.25, the World Bank’s pretty meagre cutoff for extreme poverty, as well as suffering from all associated problems of poor services, child mortality, inadequate sanitation etc. Much of the wealth created also goes into oiling patronage networks, or flows back out of the continent – $1.4 trillion was lost between 1980 and 2009 according to a African Development Bank/Global Financial Integrity report.

Economists also argue that African economies haven’t achieved the basic transformation required to sustain and broaden growth. Today’s rich countries got there by building big tasty factories, which hasn’t really happened in Africa, where it’s mainly been extractive industries. Nigeria’s GDP rebasing (GDP growth of 90% overnight, not too shabby) has meant oil’s share of domestic product has dropped to 14.4%, but this only means that it’s leapfrogged the industrial part to a services-oriented model, and no-one ever got rich by selling call-credit. Ha Joon Chang: “…it is a fantasy to think that developing countries can skip industrialisation and build prosperity on the basis of service industries”. So ‘Africa rising’ myth slain, and much to ponder for African governments.

I was going to move on to 'Africa is dangerous' next, because it's one of my favourites to use to snark at people (because I have ever-so-slightly more knowledge than whoever asks the question). 'Uganda? Dangerous? Jeez mum, the war in the North ended like over five years ago'. SLASH, 'the Global Disease Burden finds that road accidents account for almost as many deaths as HIV/AIDS worldwide and Uganda has one of the world's worst rates so you're actually right mum but we'll keep quiet about that especially cause I'm planning a 20-hour coach ride from Nairobi to Mbarara this summer...'

But more valuable than taking down another straw man (which is what most of these are) is to point out the underlying craziness of trying to encapsulate a continent within one narrative. The problem isn't that we need to replace the misleading myths about Africa with others; we need to rid ourselves of them altogether, and also question who 'we' are. Suffice to say that most of these myths come from non-Africans imposing their vision and thereby deliberately suppressing the (often mundane) messiness of reality. I'd argue that at least some of it springs from a semi-colonial impulse to present Africa as exciting/novel/backward/mysterious/incomprehensible/different/pick-your-adjective. But Uganda is like Colombia is like the UK, in that they are just places with coca cola and trees and jealousy even if they are very different in other respects. When people in Europe/North America speak of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the same placid (but informed) indifference that characterises responses from Britons to the question, "What do you think about Belgium?," the world will be a better place.

If you want any more information on any of this, I suggest you read the news basically (not that Western media makes it that easy for you). All myths and misconceptions about Africa are disproved every day by the real world, which is available ready-digested via the following outlets (AllAfrica.com; Think Africa Press; African Arguments; Africaisacountry; BBC Africa Today podcast; Twitter and countless other sources)