Africans, Tell Your Stories Yourselves!

On January 3 2015, Boko haram attacked Baga, Borno State, killing scores of people. Amnesty International described Baga attack, as the terror group’s “deadliest massacre”. Few days after, Islamist militants attacked a French satirical weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo, killing 17 in the process. The attention of the mainstream media were majorly on France, with a terror of supposedly higher magnitude almost ignored in Nigeria.

Adding the words of Simon Allison …”our outrages and solidarity over the Paris massacre is also a symbol of how we as Africans neglect African’s own tragedies, and prioritize western lives over our own”. “It was also gathered that the top 25 US mainstream media ran twenty sentences that mentioned ‘Baga’ while the same news outlets ran 1,100 sentences mentioning Charlie Hebdo”. I wouldn’t want to be drawn into the argument of the factors that might have necessitated the media dominance of one terror activity over the other. Rather, this is an example of the western media under coverage of African.

Africa is defined by the media as a tragic continent. Some news outlets have used phrases like; “the hopeless continent”, “the dark continent”, “the begging continent”, etc, to describe Africa. Words and phrases like corruption, beggars, helpless, dying, diseased, dark, third world, poverty, primitive, famine, oppression, violence, war, conflict, dirty water, evil, underdeveloped, third world, developing, etc are prominent once the story is on Africa. Indeed, “images of Africa are deeply troubling psychologically and emotionally”. This image of Africa presented in the mainstream media is what Chimamanda Adichie called a “single story”. African stories are one sided.

The vices in any society (e.g. poverty, hunger, corruption) are consequences of cause and effect situations. The media mostly focus on the effect with a total negligence of the cause. There cannot be an effect without a cause. These stories of Africa have been overpopulated and re-emphasized repeatedly that it is now boring. What if, instead of the media reporting corruption in Africa, they reported why corruption in Africa? We hear of corruption without hearing the start-ups, the large businesses, economical advancements, innovations pioneered and ran by Africans.

What if, instead of reporting Africa as poor continent, we focused on why Africa is poor? What if instead of the media reporting crimes committed by Blacks, they focus on the why Blacks commit crimes? Focusing on the ‘whys’ in my opinion will be more beneficial to the society than polluting the news with stereotypes. Local media is not excluded in this propaganda journalism.

Why is the media silent about the level of environmental degradation that is ongoing in most African nations, as a result of the ruthless extraction and exploitation of its vast natural resources by the west?

It is true some young Africans commit crimes but there are still many young Africans who are determined to succeed against all odds. Like the lady, of about 26 years, I met yesterday. She produced a musical album, however, according to her, the music wouldn’t sell because of the lack of publicity it got. Yet, she charted musical instruments, and went street by street performing her songs on the streets.

This attracted some onlookers who patronised her. This is a story of determination. The society is not supportive but the African youths are not relenting. To every bad news reported about Africa in the media, there is a corresponding good news. There are inadequate stories of African entrepreneurs who are aggressive to success and are often staggered by harsh business environments, and by larger institutions from the west in the media.

There is a general media prejudice in the way Africa stories are reported. Africa stories are inclined to be bad news. Everything that happens inside Africa cannot be bad news, else how do we Africans live and survive? “If you don’t like the way a story is told, tell your own.” Africa is not yet a paradise, neither is it a hell. There are poor as well as wealthy people in Africa. So, it is wrong, very wrong to make the story of the poor the story of Africa.

Who is to be blamed for under coverage and stereotypic image of Africa in the media?

Western media? Aljazeera? BBC? CNN? Fox news?

No. It is you the African child that refused to tell your stories. Of what use is a writer that never writes? Africa stories are our stories, the stories of our lives, our struggles, our challenges, our successes and our dreams. If you don’t tell your stories another person will tell it in a way that suits the storyteller. It is pathetic that most African experts are from the West. I believe that when the people who experienced a story, tells the stories themselves, it becomes more authentic.

How we tell our stories matters a lot. It is ironical that most African writers have adopted the propagandas about African. In the last general elections in Nigeria, the height of media propaganda was alarming. Quoting Henri Le Riche; “propaganda involves throwing half lies, lies and half-truths at the general public in order to let them side against those they try to break down”. Africa is seen as a country because of the lack of stories coming from Africans. What if we had an innovative reality TV like big brother Africa, where Africans innovators motivate others with their stories, where young Africans can learn our culture and history? The truth exist between the propagandists and the victims, between the stories told by the propagandist and that of the victims.

There is never one side to a coin. When the hunter and the lion respectively narrates their conquests, the words of Chimamanda Adichie will materialize; “… when we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise”.

Africa stories are under told. Our media are underdeveloped and thus underperform. Most African stories get limited publicity from the African media. Outside coverage, lack of professionalism and innovation accounts why the best documentaries on Africa are done by the west media, and why Africans will prefer to watch European football leagues than African football leagues. There are a lot of negative images of Africa, let balance the stories with the positive images. Indeed, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”…..Chinua Achebe

Social media offers us the opportunity denied by the mainstream media to tell our many stories, unedited, uncensored. “The advent of Social media and telecommunication changed media landscape in Africa”. The cure for African misrepresentation and under coverage, is for all of us to become journalists without ridiculing or compromising the essentials of the profession. Citizen journalism is the answer. Catherine O’Donnell, in writing about Arab spring said, “in the 21^st century, the revolution may be not be televised-but it likely will be tweeted, blogged, texted and organized on Facebook”.

If social media can be used to overthrow the Presidents of Tunisia, and Egypt then it can heal the wound of single story of Africa. Africa is not a single story of one country, Africa is the stories of over one billion people, living in 54 nations, with challenges and successes.