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June 9, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
07:45
Heart of Stereotypes
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Africans don't want your stinky t-shirts and other mythbusters.
Okay, so are you saying that Africa doesn't need aid?
Let's play a game of word association.
I'll say a word and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind.
I do actually know what word association is, but okay, let's do it.
This sounds like fun.
Ready?
Africa.
Black people.
Did you think of any of these words?
Uh, no, no, I thought of black people probably because I'm listening to one talk.
If so, you're probably not alone.
In fact, if Western news media is to be believed, there's not much else going on on the continent except for death, destruction, and disease.
Did you forget that you also listed safaris and the Lion King?
This is hardly surprising.
It's simply how the news works.
If it bleeds, it leaves, and arguably, Africa is no different from anywhere else.
Yep, seems fair enough to me.
The problem is not that the news is full of negative stereotypes about Africa.
Reporting on current events is not stereotyping.
If there is a genocide in Rwanda, if there is a mass raping in the Congo, if there is a famine in Zimbabwe, these things are not stereotypes.
They are things that have happened in Africa.
But that our narrative has only marginally improved since John Locke wrote about encountering Beasts with No Houses in 1561.
Oh, what an adorable meme.
I tell you what, though, it was better the first time I heard it, which for me was in a 2009 TED talk.
And since we're talking about it, I wonder why you left out John Locke's other statement about people in Africa.
You know, the part where he says that they are people without heads, having mouth and eyes in their breasts.
I mean, maybe, just maybe, John Locke's narrative of Africa is complete hogwash and everybody knows it, which is why nobody but you and your ilk are perpetuating it.
And the stereotypes are everywhere.
Of course they are.
They're fucking stereotypes.
Take Nigerian author Chimamandan Gozi Adiche, who has talked about being criticised by a professor for creating characters that were not authentically African.
Yeah, so that professor had some stereotypical notions that he was wrong to force onto his student.
And it seems literature's single story of Africa comes bound with a single book cover.
As Columbia PhD student Simon Stevens discovered, if you write a story that has anything to do with the continent, no matter where it's set and no matter what it's about, your book will get the acacia chi treatment.
Oh, I don't know.
Not all of them do.
The fashion industry also loves an African stereotype.
For Louis Vuitton, Africa is all lion cubs, giraffes, and, wait for it, acacia trees at sunset.
Okay, I'm happy to agree that these are stereotypes, and in a lot of cases they're lazy, but they are also very appealing images of Africa, and they are also things that are by and large uniquely African.
As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, so creative directors have it figured out.
If Native Americans run with wolves, then us Africans love legging it after leopards.
Just look at Naomi Go.
Okay, to start with that's a cheetah.
Alright, that's not a leopard.
Naomi Campbell does appear to be dressed in leopard skin though, or at least probably some faux leopard skin print.
But the thing is, this appears to have been a specific photo shoot.
It says his supermodel Naomi Campbell journeys to Africa in safari-inspired stunners.
This was probably just an attempt to have a nice-looking photo shoot with a very attractive model in a different and exotic foreign country.
There are countless other examples.
The African in Hollywood films is the warlord, the slave, the child soldier, the object of sexual desire, or the extra playing a foreign dignitary.
Okay, Eddie Murphy was the star of coming to America, alright?
That's beside the point.
The point here is that's not exactly a narrow range of things you could be playing.
But yes, we could say that yes, maybe Hollywood does need to improve the scope of its characters.
But you know what?
This is down to lazy writing.
How do I know he's African?
Why, his dashiki, of course.
Well, if you'd watched the film, you'd probably know because the first quarter of the film is devoted to his coming to America.
But yes, it's a cross the Africans just have to bear.
Just don't look for us in sci-fi.
There are no Africans in the future.
Whoa!
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Are you fucking kidding me?
You intellectually dishonest motherfucker.
You even had Star Wars and Star Trek on there.
For fuck's sake, I can't fucking believe you would have the gall to do that.
I'm just gonna let this long list of black characters from science fiction flash by.
Unfucking believable.
Talk about cherry-picking.
And the aid industry is notoriously bad at perpetuating the stereotype of a chaotic continent where unspeakable things happen.
Well, believe it or not, if they portray it as a place that is rather peaceable and has everything under control, people are less inclined to donate their money.
I guess if your heart is in the right place, you don't have to care much about development with dignity.
Oh, great.
I'm sure that you're going to get loads and loads of donations when you show everyone that Africa is actually a really well-developed place with a high human development index that doesn't really need their help.
After all, the Band-Aid boys do ask a pertinent question.
Do they know it's Christmas time?
Yes, they do.
Except for half of Africa, which doesn't.
Still, the narrative is slowly changing, and one reason that's happening is the internet.
Yeah, you heard right.
Africans enjoy Facebook stalking their school friends just as much as anyone.
Is that a fact?
But more importantly, they're using the web to reach the world with their own stories, or at least go online to call out lazy, damaging stereotypes.
What, like the lazy stereotype that there are no black people in science fiction?
I want to get a million shirts donated to the people of Africa.
They all need shirts.
Okay, it may not have been the world's most brilliant idea, but does the thought not count for anything anymore?
With falling data costs and increasingly cheap smartphones, thanks China.
Wow, was that not some sort of lazy stereotype?
The Taiwanese make a lot of those phones too, you know.
Expect Africans to be joining the global conversation online.
Mobile phone subscription is predicted to rise from 635 million to 930 million by the end of 2019.
African digital publishers might not be taking over the world yet, but when Kanye West signed Nigerian singer Debanj to his record label in 2011, it was clear that Afrobeat definitely has.
Signing one artist is taking over the world.
Is your coupe de cale better than hers?
No.
Sometimes what you hear about Africa will be negative.
Other times it'll be positive.
Yeah, and that's what people's fucking stereotypes are.
As you showed earlier on in this video, when you asked us what word association we think of with Africa, half of it was good, half of it was bad.
But what do you expect from a land that spans 30.2 million square kilometers, is home to more than a billion people from some 2,000 distinct ethnic groups who speak just as many languages.
Listen, Africa doesn't need saving.
Great.
Okay, glad to hear it.
All she needs is for people to hear this and simply be open to whatever comes next.
Okay, great.
I think that we can all agree that that is a perfectly reasonable thing to request.
Just when you say Africa, we will just clear our minds and not expect any kind of stereotypical thing to happen.
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