In our ongoing series, “Track Changes,” we link to online content that we have found to be problematic in its assumptions, framing, or language and provide a question or thought(s) provoked by each piece. We ask how portrayals and representations need to be not only rephrased, but also reframed and rethought.
This is ours for this week. We invite our readers to contribute other articles and posts that could benefit from a critical eye.
“Africa Needs Change, Not Aid”
(Angelina K. Morrison for Peace FM)
Most of what we read from “the west” portrays Africa and Africans in ways similar to this article; i.e. in need of saving from the outside. We criticize those portrayals as not accounting for the legacies of colonialism and the ongoing immoral exploitation of resources/land grabs, etc., by companies, states (domestic and former colonizers), etc., that are easily exploitable, in turn, by rebel groups and governments, and lead to conflicts and poverty. One of the counter-narratives in Africa is the one portrayed in this piece: Africans should quit blaming others, quit putting their hands out, and fix their own problems, which are almost exclusively caused by their own governments. But, in our view, this is only partially helpful. Yes to the quit putting their hands out to donors, and yes to the calling their own governments to account, but no to reproducing two tropes: 1) that Africa is only about poverty and need, and 2) that African leaders are solely responsible, without any attention to either the external (i.e. “western”) colonial and neocolonial economic and military/political processes that have sometimes put them into power, sometimes kept them there, and often maintain them despite the “west’s” occasional slaps of the hand.
We need to wake up as a continent and address our problems head on without basically relying on external intervention.