Caring about Africa

[yovargas]

I just read this essay on Africa and I thought it interesting. I'd love to see the responses to it:

Like most of you reading this, I know far more about the people and places of the Star Wars universe than of Africa. Even though Star Wars is a movie, and Africa is the second-largest continent on Earth and the birthplace of mankind, I spend roughly nada time thinking about the latter, while the former has shaped my life since I was four. I still remember the shock that went through the theater when Darth Vader emerged from the fog and strode onto the screen. And it's been years since a collective shudder like that hit the country over Africa-- no matter how bad the news gets.

Which got me thinking: We've been hearing a lot about Web 2.0, the new wave of user-friendly websites, such as Wikipedia and YouTube, where people can post and share their own content. You'd think that Web 2.0 would bring us more information about every corner of the world, including Africa. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Star Wars has a greater hold on the 'net. So I ran a casual experiment: Does Web 2.0 fuel more debate about pop culture than real life? Is it true that the internet can teach us more about an imaginary place than a real one?

Let's start with some rough numbers. In Wikipedia, the main article for Star Wars runs about 8,400 words; the one for Africa runs a close second, with 7,500 words. The numbers look better for Africa when you drill into specific countries. The entry for Zimbabwe is terse and sketchy, but so is the entry on Hoth; and while the desert planet of Tatooine gets about 2,500 words, Tunisia-- where those desert scenes from Star Wars were filmed-- scores twice that.

Both Star Wars and Africa have inspired video games, including massively multiplayer titles that can bring thousands of players into the same virtual world. Though it's had mixed success, Star Wars Galaxies has given thousands the chance to be cross-dressing Twi'lek weaponsmiths in a scale model of the Star Wars universe. Now Rapid Reality Games aims to do the same for Africa. Their upcoming title promises "hundreds of unique locations such as Egyptian tombs, Roman ruins guarded by the shades of fallen legionnaires, and even a mysterious desert city." Of course, it's only in pre-production, it just missed its public Beta date, and Rapid Reality's website is down. But hey, Rome wasn't modded in a day.

How much can you learn about the geography? You can find a wealth of information, if not detailed maps, about the planets in the far away galaxy of Star Wars. Obsessive fans scrounge up data about the landmarks and terrain of their favorite planets. In fact, with the planetarium program Celestia, you can stick the planet Coruscant or the Millennium Falcon right into the real-life night sky. Watching the Death Star circling Uranus is definitely funnier than using Google Earth to spy on some farms in South Africa.

On YouTube, searching for "star wars" pulls up a wealth of fan films, movie scenes, and that fat kid playing with his lightsaber. By contrast, the first clip about Africa is the music video for that Toto song. On the other hand, for still photographs, Africa does much better. The amateur pix posted to Flickr.com include over 250,000 images tagged under "Africa"-- and they are startingly beautiful: a yawning hippo halfway underwater, a fat, gnarled Baobab Tree. Meanwhile, a search for Star Wars pix will just get you nerds. Advantage, Africa.

But things really get interesting when we look at the blogs and pocasts. Now, it's true that Star Wars inspires hundreds of blogs and podcasts by fans comparing notes on the latest collectible toys. You can't find as many blogs or podcasts from Africa-- but the smattering of voices from across the continent are far more intense. In the "Paradise Lost" podcast, a white ex-pat from Zimbabwe interviews a man who's spent 31 years working for the National Railways. In South Africa, a 24-year-old rape victim who contracted HIV talks about her dream of becoming a photojournalist. A tourist's guide to Cape Town, South Africa recaps centuries of history in less than three minutes. And an aide worker in Uganda lets her frustration boil over after a hot day in a Sudanese refugee settlement.

Each of these voices added a little information and a lot of perspective: Putting them together was like scratching names and places onto a blank slate. I was starting to know what I didn't know.

/ / /

"My last three years living back in the U.S. really brought home to me just how unreal the rest of the world seems to most Americans." So blogged journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, in reference to the major U.S. newspapers who are cutting their foreign bureaus-- and leaving the task of reporting world news to the internet.

But is the internet up to the challenge? All in all, you can find more Star Wars fans and more sci-fi content on the internet than material on Africa. This is partly because sci-fi nerds in the Western world have better net access than most Africans. People also seem more drawn to the relative simplicity of pop culture than to the complexities of real life. Pop culture gives us a world we can understand, and problems we can solve. Or as Ethan Zuckerman told me, "If you're writing 'Buffy [the Vampire Slayer]' fan fic, you may not know the name of the third junior subvampire who showed up for one episode in season four. But someone does, and you can authoriatatively build the Buffy index on Wikipedia." By contrast, "We don't know authoriatatively who's in the Union of Islamic Courts. And we probably never will."

Zuckerman is a blogger, technologist, and research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center-- and an expert on the challenge of bringing technology to the developing world. On top of running BlogAfrica, Zuckerman co-founded Global Voices, a media site that gathers online news and opinion from the global blogosphere. With a staff of almost 20 editors and more than 100 contributors, it's a major resource for world news at a time when fewer and fewer American papers collect the stuff on their own.

Global Voices collects "bridge bloggers," or bloggers who can talk about their region to a worldwide audience-- which is a tremendous amount of work. I mean, picture trying to explain Hillary Clinton to a foreign reader in a single blog post. A great bridge blogger is hard to find, and the countries that need the most representation have the least access to the internet. And as Zuckerman cautions, "When you start getting a larger blogosphere, it makes more sense to talk to your neighbors. And you can see this in Iran, where the Persian language blogosphere doesn't bridge all that much. There are a lot of debates that you just aren't turned into unless you read Persian."

But the personal voice a blogger offers also helps the reader overcome a basic challenge-- what activist and technologist Joi Ito calls the "caring problem." People won't follow the news in a foreign land just because they think it's important; they keep tabs on it because they have emotional investment in watching what comes next.

The caring problem raises its head the more we talk about the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof prints increasingly vivid images of the suffering in that country, and writes up a laundry list of ways the White House-- and even us average Joes-- could do something about it. But I think the mood of the public was better summed up by the Times' Manohla Dargis, who wrote about why movies about Africa no longer jolt us out of our seat. The film may call for action, "but the black faces on the screen-- the babies with the swollen bellies and pipe-cleaner limbs, and the legless men crawling alongside them-- tend to tell a different story, one of hopelessness and despair that all too often feels as immutable as the earth."
Zuckerman names a few ways that people can get past the caring problem, and they center on building real relationships outside the U.S.-- whether by working abroad, or travelling for long stretches of time, or even marrying into another culture. As Zuckerman says, "I find myself wondering whether deeper change comes from creating a set of postnational citizens-- people who have friends and collaborators and colleagues all over the world." In other words, we care about countries when we care about their people and their stories. And instead of watching in flashes of outrage, we'd cultivate a lifelong urge to follow along.

So, in essence, the question is, why do we Westerners (I assume it's not just Americans) care so little about Africa (I do not sit on a high-horse - my knowledge and investment in this is also next to nothing)? How can we make people care? I've heard racism cited as the usual reason but that strikes me as overly simplistic.

[vison]

Much of the "caring" about Africa is a kind of "inverse racism", I think. They can't do it themselves!!! We must "help them".

I know it's not that simple, but there you are.

If you are interested in Africa, learn about Stephen Lewis, the Canadian who has done more to bring the AIDS crisis to the light than any other human being. You can't help but be moved by his words.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for posting that, yov. It is obviously is an important subject to me, but I have no real answers to the basic question. I'll think about is some more and probably post something later (after I play for an African dance class ).

[Túrin Turambar]

Our interest in a place tends to relate heavily to our exposure of it. Cuisine, film, music, sport or literature from Africa hasn’t especially caught on in the west, nor are there many African celebrities. African nations are also generally not very powerful or movers and shakers – they’re the subjects of rather than the instigators of international policy.

[Padme]

I agree with Vison on this about the inverse racism. But I also think we as the west (particullarly America) have nothing to gain from helping in Africa, no natural resources other than diamonds, so we (collective we) don't have any big money tied up in anything there, so its not worth it to us to do anything.

The line in Hotel Rwanda pretty much sums it up in my opinion...the one where the Canadian officer says its because they are Black and poor, no one cares. It sounds horrible and sad, but the more I read about Dafur and the other situations and how the US is doing next to diddly squat, the more I realize that is exactly it.

The current administration says we went into Iraq to save the people from an evil dictator, but the dictators in Africa have killed and tortured millions more, the only difference I can see is the west has nothing to gain in Africa finacially.

[Griffon64]

For the moment the west believes it has nothing to gain. When the west has polluted its rivers and fields to the point where they are no longer usable, Africa's soil may become something to exploit.

The problem may be that the west regards money more higher than human lives.

As for the "care" the west bestows on Africa, it tends to only helps Africa backwards, not forwards. The best "care" would probably be to open fair and free trade relations with Africa and thus provide nations with the means to lift themselves up. As for the debt many African nations have incurred, while I am not much in favour of just writing off those debts, many were apparently incurred under unfair terms, or were used by corrupt officials to enrich themselves. It is counterproductive to burden a nation trying to get to its feet with such debts. A mechanism to freeze these debts and later write them off contingent on the nation in question achieving certain goals ( which would be goals in its development and for its own good, not the west's ) may work better.

Anyway, a few quick, random thoughts. The interest this thread gets speaks for itself, too!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Grif, I thought that too.

[Primula Baggins]

I think there is a feeling of hopelessness for many of us, even when we do what we can through private aid agencies and political action. Not that the situation is hopeless, but that the "big guns" of government aid will never be brought in (at least under present policies) when there's no profit to be made, no strategic advantage to be gained, and while we're busy with the Iraq war—and, of course, as long as those who are suffering are mostly poor people with dark skins.

[vison]

What troubles me the most, I admit, is the kind of thing I called "inverse racism" in my earlier post. It isn't "inverse" at all, really. There is this perception of Africans as helpless and, yes, stupid. People who "need" to be taught HOW to do things. Who would, without our help, sink further and further into poverty and misery.

And yet, talking to and listening to, people from Canada and elsewhere who actually lived and worked in Africa, one gets a very different idea. Griffon nailed it, when she said "the west believes it has nothing to gain". That is partly, but not completely, true. "Western" interference in Africa is responsible for much of the present situation, and by "western" I include European and Asian meddling in the past and in the present.

I am not so naive as to think that if all Europeans left Africa the place would rebound into some native paradise. There was injustice and cruelty in Africa before Europeans ever went there: just as there was injustice and cruelty everywhere else in the world. It seems to be part of the human condition. But as long as imperialist governments overseas keep Africa and Africans as "client states", will things ever change? Where does Mugabe, for instance, buy his arms? Who buys the timber? Who reaps the profits?

Africa is a very big place, and every part of Africa has different assets, different problems. One of the absolute worst problems in Africa is the AIDS pandemic, and some of the rhetoric surrounding it, from both Africans and others, is appalling and almost beyond belief.

[Griffon64]

Don't even get me started on AIDS - I come from the country whose government believes the African potato, garlic and lemon juice cure AIDS, and whose president is sceptic about the link between HIV and AIDS, instead favouring the opinion that poverty may be the cause

The racism vison mentions may be part of the package. Of course, like she says, that is an easy perspective for an outsider to have. I come from Africa. Africa's native people are not stupid - they are humans just like us, and as intelligent as we are. If you want to see a level of resourcefulness and cleverness that you rarely see in the developed world anymore, go to Africa. It is a much different culture you will meet, but the people are as human as you and I.

Yes, some of the people of Africa do need to be taught where they do not have the technology we have. But that's being taught just like you'll taught any student calculus in school - teaching because the person don't have the knowledge yet, and is capable of aquiring it, not teaching because they are stupid

[yovargas]

Don't even get me started on AIDS - I come from the country whose government believes the African potato, garlic and lemon juice cure AIDS, and whose president is sceptic about the link between HIV and AIDS, instead favouring the opinion that poverty may be the cause

That's really, really sad.

[axordil]

There's a movie on the topic of how Western "aid" has made bad situations in Africa worse over the past 50 years out: Bamako. It's actually a drama, as opposed to a straight documentary or even a dramatization, which is probably a good thing in terms of reaching audiences. It looks pretty worthwhile.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Ax, that looks very, very interesting. I've not heard of it before. I'm definitely going to try to seek it out.

[Primula Baggins]

Some aid organizations are getting wiser. The Lutheran relief organization coordinates with local organizations so the money is used in the best way for each community, and their focus is on sustainable economic development in poor rural areas (fair trade, microgrants) and on human rights.

It's necessary to be careful in giving, but there are organizations, church-related and not, that are helping and are worth donating to.

[Cerin]

Do we know or care less about Africa than we do about the rest of the world (speaking about our populace in general)? I suspect ordinary Americans know very little about any other country's current political state, economy, cultural trends, etc., whatever continent it is part of. I know I myself am guilty of this type of ignorance. I think I would probably fail a pop quiz about current events, government and culture in almost any other country.

[axordil]

I am fond of Heifer International's model, which is why I keep giving them money every Christmas. They aren't exclusively African in scope, but they do work there.

One thing that does get me is the occasional assertion one sees that the corruption in African governments is to blame for the misery of the affected people--not because it's untrue, but because that corruption is there to serve the goals of those doing the corrupting first and foremost. That's true whether it started under colonial occupation or only with corporate exploitation.

[Primula Baggins]

Heifer International is a great organization. Our Sunday School does a read-a-thon every year to raise money, and the kids are always eager to see how many goats they've bought. It's also a nice gift for someone who has everything.

[Túrin Turambar]

Do we know or care less about Africa than we do about the rest of the world (speaking about our populace in general)?

I’ve been reading a bit lately, and I’m going to say yes.

Until fairly recently, I didn’t realize that the largest and bloodiest conflict since WWII was the Second Congo War, which took place between 1998 and 2003. In fact, I’d never heard of the Second Congo War at all, nor has it ever come up on the discussion boards I frequent.

Now, we’re talking about a war that involved ten countries and numerous other factions, lasted five years and killed 3.8 million people. Furthermore, it happened less than five years ago. I imagine we can all remember things from 1998 to 2003. To hold a quick straw poll, how many people here are familiar with the war? Did it get much coverage in the western media?

Compare that with, say, the conflicts happening around the same time in Yugoslavia (even before NATO got involved), the Middle East and East Timor. Until I stumbled on the wikipedia article on the Second Congo War, I’d never heard of it, and I lived through it.

More than anything, that reminded me of this thread.

I hate to be cynical, but maybe there's just an assumption that killing each other is what poor black people do

[yovargas]

I've never heard of it.

I hate to be cynical, but maybe there's just an assumption that killing each other is what poor black people do

What other reason could there be?

[axordil]

There could be vested interests who don't want people looking too closely at conflicts with corporate sponsorship, too.