Image of Africa

Headline: Kayakers find horror in african jungle

So this video is a bit old but relevant to our discussions in a number of ways. The commercial yet again shows an Africa that is only wilderness and is empty of any local human life. The white man in the middle of the savanna is able to, in some sense, conquer the land and overcome all the obstacles posed by the wilderness in order to get to his coke. Even better, he has his eyes closed the whole time and becomes a victor in Africa (a modern day Tarzan) even in his sleep. Why would Coca-Cola choose to create an African environment for this commercial? How might the meaning have differed if the commercial evoked an American or European wilderness? What if the actor in the commercial was African? What could have Coca-Cola done to challenge existing stereotypes instead of reinforcing them?

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I ran across this picture in an image search for Save Darfur and was pretty disgusted. In my mind it points to some of the biggest flaws of aid work. It got me thinking about one of the fundraising events held by STAND on campus my sophomore year where they did jello shots for Darfur at paces. What do these types of images do to the cause itself? Are there people who really believe that this is legitimate activism? The way I see it, this type of engagement with African politics inherently de-politicizes it in the eyes of Western observers. I’d be curious to know what the rest of you think…

An article in this week’s New Yorker Magazine titled, “The Doomsday Strain: ” features a Stanford researcher, Nathan Wolfe who works for the Global Viral Forecasting.  His job is to track deadly diseases and prevent them from spreading to the rest of the world.  The article’s presents a trope of Africa as a source of disease and as a giant rainforest.  His research is composed of going into the wilderness and testing monkeys, chimpanzees, and, as he claims, in an age of technology and increased travel, diseases that originate in Cameroun could not spread easily a hundred years ago since “there were no motorcycles to carry the infected carcasses of slaughtered apes to markets in Yaoundé, and, for that matter, no airplanes to ship them to Paris or New York.” The discourse the author takes in a very neo-colonial one, and places blame on Africans for the world’s diseases.  The West would be immune if it were not for Africa.  In addition, there is no research conducted in North America as a source of deadly disease as is the case for Africans.  This also brings up notions of “the politics of blame”, in which diseases are discovered, categorized, and subsequently placed at originating in a certain place, so as to displace blame from one part of the world to another for having begun the disease.

I recently came across an article in The New York Times Magazine titled “D.I.Y Foreign Aid Revolution” about people who go into poor nations instead of, as the article suggests, having highly successful careers in the banking industry  or back in the United States. The young woman on the cover is wearing a sari and is surrounded by “native” children.  This is a reproduction of the “white woman in Africa” trope and further perpetuates this notion of the white woman as the source of “nurture” and “Care” in certain parts of the world.  She takes care of hungry, needy children, when their parents will not, or are absent.  According to the article, many are joining “a revolution, so far unnamed because it is just beginning. It’s all about what might be called Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid, because it starts with the proposition that it’s not only presidents and United Nations officials who chip away at global challenges. Passionate individuals with great ideas can do the same, especially in the age of the Internet and social media”.  This is not to say people have bad intentions when they go to “Africa” to carry out these projects, just that these projects are very one way, in which they know what’s best and a sense of agency is stripped of the local inhabitants.  

Last year in the style of Borat, Pauly Shore made the mockumentary Adopted in which he travels through South Africa in search of a child to adopt. Here is the summary of the film from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), written by Shore himself:

For hundreds of years, Africa has existed in a state of despair. Famine, civil wars and rampant disease have left the continent without hope, but for the efforts of Western do-gooders. At first, they arrived with food, bibles and the magic of penicillin; more recently they have hosted rock concerts and sent plane loads of grain. And in the last decade of the 20th century they arrived and took babies home with them. First there was Angelina, then Madonna, and now…Pauly Shore! The film builds its comedy foundation on the international interest in Celebrity Adoptions, and the debate that surrounds these transactions on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes politically incorrect and never scared to tread on manicured toes.

You can watch the trailer here. It contains more than a few negative stereotypes about Africans. I have not seen enough of the film to gauge how successful he is in critiquing the so called “trend” of celebrities adopting from foreign countries, but the description and the trailer are a lot to work with already. The about section of the film’s website is another element of interest in regards to the intent of the film.

Interestingly, the film’s only theatrical release was in South Africa. In the U.S. it recently became available on DVD if anyone is interested in buying a film written by, produced by, directed by, and starring Pauly Shore.

There are a sequence of advertisements for a lemon drink that were recently released in India that employ the trope of the “bushman” and his disconnection with modern society. The five short advertisements for a lemon drink called LMN manufactured by ParleAgro are distinctly condescending and racist in their tone, and they invoke a lot of the bundlings of Africans as primitive and backward that we have discussed.

The ads can be found here:

I didn’t read them as trying to be clever or ironic in any way. I get the feeling that they don’t even know that they’re being racist — which is definitely more harmful.

There is also an Australian commercial for KFC which is really awful. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojqMGlqYHPg

Advertisements definitely have to use tropes and image packages more than other media forms because of the message they have to produce in a short period of time. Relying on tropes makes it easy to get a message across. However, these examples are pretty shocking, and I’m positive that there are other, more positive, images that can be used to provide a similar message (which, at the end of the day, simply has to be “This product is appealing).

I was listening to my iPod and I came across the song “Africa Must Wake Up” by Nas and Damien Marley (Bob Marley’s son). It is off their recent album, Distant Relatives, which has a heavy African theme and centers on reconnecting the African diaspora with Africa, as well as promoting a positive image of Africa itself. The album has frequent calls for Pan-Africanism and the renewal of ties between communities in the United States and the Caribbean to African countries.

“Africa Must Wake Up” bemoans the treatment of Africa in Western society, noting that many ancient African societies have “histories too complex and rigid/ for some Western critics/ they want the whole subject diminished.” However, one line in particular stood out to me.

Nas opens the second verse by saying, “Who are we today/slums, disease and AIDS/ we need that all to fade/ we cannot be afraid.” While this is certainly an empowering message, it continues to traffic in the trope of Africa as hopeless. Rather than focusing on many of Africa’s growing economies (maybe not the coolest subject for a rap song, but this is not a standard album) or other positive points, Nas returns to the tired imagery of poverty and disease. He even marks these traits as consisting of Africa’s entire image, as it answers the broad question, “who are we today?” Unfortunately, he ignores the multifaceted nature of current African societies to instead fall back on old images. While the album as a whole is noteworthy for its overall rejection of commercial pressures and its consistent message of uplift, this was a disappointing moment from two of hip-hop’s more progressive thinkers.

The song can be heard here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-MS23J338