Ariana Naomi’s Single Story

The problem with stereotypes and misrepresentations is not that they are usually untrue; it is that they are often incomplete. When people feel stereotyped, it is up to them to fight the labels and insults that feed the stereotype. The other problem is the person doing the misrepresentation. We were warned long ago by Chinua Achebe that until the lion elects to be the storyteller, all the tales in the forest will glorify the hunter. To check misreporting and own the plot of the events and instances that form popular narratives, we were told to write our own stories.

Dangers of Single Story
This is what celebrated Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, calls the danger of the single story. It is dangerous because, often, we have very little chance to correct or counter any false narratives. This is how a single story about a people is created: “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become”. Once in a while, we get the chance to correct some of these inaccuracies about our stories, and how they have been reported.

Ghana got one of those moments last week when our media rose to challenge the single story of an American student who visited Ghana and produced a terrifyingly incredible tale of threats to her life, extortion and mistreatment. Her ordeal portrayed our police as negotiable pawns in a country where security is expensive.

Ariana Naomi McKay, a second year law student of Georgetown University, posted a video on the internet in which she narrates how she was kidnapped by masked men she identified as Ghana police, who stopped her uber taxi, robbed and forced her to withdraw cash from the ATM. The police had covered the license plates of their vehicle and concealed their badges. They also took away her phone and camera.

Africa Rising
She warns foreigners to beware when visiting Ghana, revealing that her uber driver confirmed the incident as a usual occurrence in Ghana. It is reported that the Ghana Police swiftly commenced investigations and contacted the lady for details about the location of the incident, and to verify other claims, but she has refused to help with investigations and also blocked the police on her whatsapp line. It is speculated that Ariana, who is of Nigerian descent, may have recorded the video as a stunt or for her content library. She has since deleted the video from her instagram, but her digital footprints may have travelled farther in the clouds.

The danger is already served; millions around the world may have already consumed Ariana’s single story about Ghana as a hostile destination for tourists, investors, and diplomats, potentially endangering our dignity and respect. Nearly a week after her story went viral, Ariana’s ‘Ghana experience’ continues to engage curious minds in the blogosphere and datasphere, and other digital platforms.

In my whatsapp group, a platform for journalists, writers and climate change advocates in Canada, we slugged it out, discussing the implications of Ariana’s story in the context of ‘Africa Rising’, the new ambitious marketing platform where Africa has been projected as the new frontier emphasizing cultural shifts and overcoming systemic problems to harvest new development opportunities. We worried what Ariana’s video meant for travel, security, and information management for anybody visiting Ghana for the first time. They are already well sold to Ariana’s story.

On the platform, a Zimbabwean lawyer referenced Rudyard Kipling’s famous quote, “half devil, half child’ to describe Ariana, when suspicions became rife that she may have recorded the video to garner views, likes, and chase the clouds. If Naomi had told this story in the 1800s, we would have believed her account as believable, just as we believed John Locke’s 1561 report when he visited West Africa. Locke, a London merchant, wrote: “They are beasts who have no houses…they are also people without heads, having their mouths and eyes in their breasts”.

Detty December
The African story has been told differently by different writers who chose to report what they wanted to see, not how the events unfolded. Their version becomes a cast iron case, and that is what history remembers. The accounts of the early missionaries to Africa became the blueprint for anybody reading or writing about Africa, until Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Peter Abrahams and Wa Thiong’o stepped in.

Several centuries after Locke’s report, Africa still evokes images of poverty and catastrophe in some people. Chimamanda worries that even in the information age, a Virgin flight announcer talked about their “charity work in India, Africa and other countries.” Even where Africans are seen as people from different countries, the reception is a patronizing, well-meaning pity, where, in Chimamanda’s words, “there is no possibility of a connection as human equals”. Do Africans have toilets? What do they eat? Do they brush their teeth? Do they sleep on trees?

These formed the axis of the single story of the people behind the Berlin Conference of 1844, which led to the Scramble for Africa. Today, do Africans mean well for Africa? Have we done much to change their single story? While Ariana’s real motivations remain unclear, it is suspected that her video was a smear attempt against Ghana’s Detty December sensation, an initiative that celebrates our arts, culture, and fashion, to boost tourism and stimulate reconnection with the diaspora. Ariana sought to make Detty December Dettier. Africans cannot scramble for Africa within Africa. What about changing Detty December to Ghana December?

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
Tissues Of The Issues
[email protected]

Ottawa, Canada