Late last week, The Telegraph published an article by Louise Linton, “How my dream gap year in Africa turned into a nightmare,” where she wrote about her year volunteering in Zambia after high school and before college; the article promotes her newly released book, In Congo’s Shadow. Immediately, on social media, as detailed by BuzzFeed, criticisms arose about both the truthfulness of her account and her white-savior tone, which stereotyped Zambians and Africa in general.
Other news outlets followed up. Karen Attiah for The Washington Post wrote: “Africans all over the continent and in the diaspora are helping their own communities and telling their own stories. … The erasure of the voices and experiences of Africans in stories about Africa, and the constant positioning in media narratives of Africans as background props for do-gooder Westerners, creates fertile ground for lazy thinking, writing and policymaking about Africa.”
Tobias Denskus for NPR’s Goats and Soda blog rounded up several thoughts from Zambian writers and journalists who responded with outrage on social media, with one saying, “[Africans] are still grossly misrepresented on platforms like television, in books, in articles, in movies where we cannot directly or immediately respond … The advent of social media has changed all that because now we have an independent platform on which most of us can respond freely and almost immediately.”
And two BuzzFeed writers, Gena-mour Barrett and Hannah Jewell, flipped the premise of the original article with their parody: “How My Dream Gap Year in Europe Turned Into a Nightmare.” Set in Cornwall, England, just after Brexit, the fictional narrator “found special comfort in my bond with Poppy, a 6-year-old English girl with a really bad sunburn.”