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How to Write about Africa (2019)
- bsanr2 5y agoI remember reading this in high school. It's actually from 2005. More recently, a journalist suggested a moratorium on the use of the word "Africa" in reporting; the country, and region of the country, should be used instead. It's disappointing that neither piece has been taken seriously.
- gherkinnn 5y ago> a journalist suggested a moratorium on the use of the word "Africa" in reporting I get it. Under most circumstances, “Africa” is a hopeless descriptor. Second in ignorance only to “Asia”. Though I haven’t noticed its broad use in journalism as much as in common speech.
- bsanr2 5y agoI would say that journalism is just as bad, if not worse, because instead of making passing comments, they will present a whole-a*s story without indicating where in Africa the events occurred.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wombatmobile 5y agoTFA is a comprehensive compendium of cliche tropes, skilfully crafted. What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek? I’d like to read that.
- qsort 5y agoThe question itself is pointless, that's kind of the point of the article (thus the answer is tongue in cheek -- brilliant). Would you also like to read "How to write about America", or "How to write about Europe"?
- coldtea 5y agoYes, I would. And several people have done it succesfully. You can still write about vast heterogenous places (or continents) - and give accurate information about the conditions there, without the cliches.
- qsort 5y agoOf course it can be done, but I wouldn't trust someone who needs a primer on the subject to do it well. Taking large, complex subjects and condensing them in a few chapters is probably one of the greatest challenges a writer can face.
- watwut 5y agoI would like to read those. Could be fun.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoUS: "140 US legislators, part of elite, far-white, presidential Republican Guard, reportedly plotting to reject tribal elders' choice of opposition leader, Joe Biden, as country's next ruler, which may lead to further ethnic bloodletting in the unstable covid-ravaged nation." Europe: "Firms across sub-Scandinavian Europe are refusing to deliver to addresses in reclusive island kingdom of Britain citing concerns over possible tribal violence as ongoing implementation of AU-brokered Brexit peace agreement raises ethnic tensions in the oil-rich nation." this thread goes on for a while: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1326988782600663047.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1326988782600663047.html
- g8oz 5y agoThis is gold.
- notahacker 5y agoYep. British political journalist Stephen Bush made a point of using that style of writing to update us on events in the US in his newsletter. If we were to use the sort of clichés people actually use about the US and the UK in regular writing, it'd be a fun article to read (and include quite a few stereotypes that are a long way wide of the mark) but probably a touch less patronising than some of the Africa clichés and stereotypes.
- rhplus 5y agoWhat could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek? The author was Binyavanga Wainaina, who won the Caine Prize for African Writing, so perhaps the list of other winning stories would be a good place to start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caine_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caine_Prize
- beckman466 5y agodamn, just read that the author has passed away. rip Binyavanga. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/22/binyavanga-wainaina-kenyan-author-and-gay-rights-activist-dies-aged-48 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/22/binyavanga-wai...
- wand3r 5y agoI thought I knew virtually nothing about Africa. After reading this funny take I realized I actually know quite a bit of weirdly crafted bizarre misinformation about Africa. Not that you could sum up a continent of a billion people in a book/one place, but he did a great job of collecting a lot of popularized tropes. “Real Africans” probably cringe when they see the referenced articles & books this author references.
- beckman466 5y ago> “Real Africans” probably cringe when they see the referenced articles & books this author references. i didn't see any references, which articles and books are you referring to?
- foobarian 5y agoI occasionally do Street View trips in random spots in Africa to get a sense of the place. Wish there was some kind of driving game powered by that data.
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoI play Geoguessr every day (there's a daily challenge of 5 rounds), so it's a good way to see some of Africa. There's not a lot of Africa on streetview/geoguessr, at least not relative to the size of the continent. Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa/Eswatini/Lesotho have good coverage. Egypt and Tunisia have a little. Anyway, you get a pretty good sampling of what those countries are like, from the small distant villages to the huge megalopolises. It's also worth following some African tech people on twitter. Nigeria in particular seems to have a lot of developers and tech entrepreneurs on Twitter.
- Sporktacular 5y agoThis is awesome
- palijer 5y agoWhile I agree with the idea of the article, this sort of writing style always makes me feel like the author should be discussing this with a therapist instead of focusing and working on it. Not that they aren't correct here, but the "let me put a list of wrong opinions I disagree with that people could hold and get mad about it" theme never felt mentally healthy to me. I catch myself doing this all the time however.
- coldtea 5y agoI feel like we didn't learn a lot about the TFA author in this comment, but more about a pet concern of yours? The author critiques the cliches, misinformation, wrong ideas, and romantization journalists use when writing about Africa. These are not merely some "opinions they disagree with", these are wrong and lazy writing, and it's a bad public service (they are getting millions of people the wrong ideas about a place). It surely deserves to be critiqued.
- palijer 5y agoYou are absolutely correct that it does deserve to be critiqued, and it is important to do so. What makes me feel weird about the style however is there aren't any example of this, so if a reader does not know the field well of the common tropes, it feels like the author is just throwing together opinions people could possess (let's say opinions on how to write an Article about Africa), and then promote anger over how such people could exist.
- bsanr2 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26383977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26383977 Declaring mental illness in the face of exposed bigotry is a classic tactic, meant to discredit legitimate and reasoned grievance.
- workaccount21 5y agoHe's talking about the writing style, and I tend to agree.
- naruvimama 5y agoThis is sophisticated part of Neo-colonialism and is not just restricted to Africa but to many other former colonies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0QyfrFqHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0QyfrFqHA
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoThat's bullshit - everybody can read and write what they like. Nobody is forced to read a "neo-colonialist" book, and that is the difference to colonialism, which was forced upon people. If people are unhappy with existing books, they should simply create better books. And even if they are cliche, I suspect the issues mentioned in the article also do exists. Kids with genital mutilation, starving people, elephants being hunted to extinction and so on, they also exist in Africa. So everybody should also be allowed to write what they want. Of course you are also allowed to call it "neo-colonialism". Whatever.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago> If people are unhappy with existing books, they should simply create better books. > If you dont like Google you should create your own Google. > If you dont like Peppa the Pig, tough luck, create your own.
- Chris2048 5y agoWhen there is a platform, or critical infra as an obstruction then this is unreasonable. Arguable a DIY search engine is impossible on the scale of google because, aside from CPU power and storage, goog gets privileged indexing access. Everything else seems reasonable to DIY.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoWho else should do it for you? It seems strange that of all the people creating books, none seem to create them to the satisfaction of activists?
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- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI was born there. I spent the first eleven years of my life there. I'm white, and got sick of all the "You don't look like you came from Africa!" jokes, at about age twelve. And no, I've never been in South Africa. I hear that it's beautiful. The people I knew were awesome, but there's a lot of serious cultural trauma, in many of the varied peoples of Africa. Some of it was caused/exacerbated by colonialism, and some of it is far older than The Great White Hunter. It's important to note that there are vast cultural and societal differences between various African nations and tribes. Come to think of it...the same can be said about Americans. Put a New York pizza joint owner from Brooklyn, next to a Louisiana shrimper, and tell me they're the same. Africa has enormous natural resources. Unfortunately, access to these resources has been one of the things that colonialism messed up. They can't own the stuff that comes up out of the ground. Unstable governments have been an endemic problem (See "colonialism," above). Poverty is an issue, but it isn't necessarily worse than in many other places on earth (but it is pretty damn bad, if you are used to the US version of "poverty"). Poverty does tend to breed the kinds of people that turn into nightmare dictators, though. A lot of the issues that people think "only happen in Africa" also happen in other parts of the world. What happened in the Balkans was every bit as bad as some of the awful tribal conflicts that we've seen from Africa. I desperately want Africa to come into its own. That will take a heck of a lot of things that I'm not qualified to prescribe. [EDIT]: I removed one line that probably set some teeth on edge. Upon reflection, it's not necessary to the narrative.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago>Unstable governments have been an endemic problem (See "colonialism," above). That implies other causes (which you yourself mentioned above) are minor by comparison. Surely this was true in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. But now, 50-60 years later, that explanation alone just doesn't cut it. A lot of places were colonized outside of Africa too, often much more brutally than many parts of Africa (whose colonial legacy is as heterogenous as other things you mention), and are on average doing better (hence the ugly 'poor man Africa' caricature this piece lampoons so well). And yet the onset, length or brutality of colonization doesn't seem to coincide well with stability or quality of governance. Heck, Ethiopia almost got away with not being colonized at all. Like yourself, I don't know what to prescribe. I do know that it should be Africans themselves doing the prescribing.
- teekert 5y agoWe used to have a popular children song that contained the line "A child below the equator will often become a beggar". The intention was good, the song was recorded to help poor African people, which in my mind were always starving and had flies on their face. I'm glad they changed that sentence and that sparked a lot of awareness but it's crazy how you can just grow up and think this is normal, in retrospect. As a child I was really like "How can you not feel those flies!". Crazy right? I still wonder if they know it's Christmas time over there, since it never snows there (yeah, facepalm every year around Christmas indeed)... Yes, Christmas, that party that I thought was normal, but hey, it turns out that the religion my culture is largely based on is pretty unique in acknowledging Jesus as THE prophet and there were multiple and we're fighting over this. Crazy. And we ate matzes around easter [0], and that is a tradition from the jews (who ate them fleeing from Egypt to the promised land), and with whom we share half our sacred texts, but they wanted Jesus dead in the end and apparently the promised land already had some inhabitants I learned later. I dropped it all btw, the religion and I really hope a lot of prejudice as well, although I wont pretend I'm free of it. [0]: https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/an-unusual-dutch-easter-tradition-matzes/ https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/an-unusual-dutch-easter-...
- frutiger 5y agoMods: according to the article this is actually from 2005.
- pmdulaney 5y agoOne organization that posts regularly to HN would seem to stipulate that one should always use "Afrika" in lieu of "Africa".
- todd8 5y agoI can recommend a book written by Alexandra Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. See [1]. It's a touching autobiographical account of growing up in Rhodesia during a tumultuous time. I've also found two TED Talks about Africa that I found informative, both from TEDGlobal 2007. See [2] and [3]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24687.Don_t_Let_s_Go_to_the_Dogs_Tonight#other_reviews https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24687.Don_t_Let_s_Go_to_... [2] https://www.ted.com/talks/george_ayittey_africa_s_cheetahs_versus_hippos?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare https://www.ted.com/talks/george_ayittey_africa_s_cheetahs_v... [3] https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mwenda_aid_for_africa_no_thanks?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mwenda_aid_for_africa_no_th...
- hahskske 5y agoThis was written in jest. Was it not?
- AlbertCory 5y agoThe most honest thing you can do about Africans, or homeless people, or problem children, or any other "subject" people, is: Talk to them and write about them as if they were any "normal" person. How about this weather? How's your day going? How about those 49ers? It's the same for writing, except that this won't get you published.
- hangsi 5y agoIt seems like the original text is from 2005, and 2019 is just the date of reproduction online, no? > Originally published in Granta 92, 2005 14 years makes for an interesting difference in context.
- vo2maxer 5y agoIt’s ironic to run across this article from 2005 after just reading an op-ed in the NYT by Jeanne-Marie Jackson where she shows with plenty of examples that, “Everyone is saying it: 2021 was the year for African literature. Writers from the continent scooped the Nobel, Booker, Goncourt and Camões prizes. And these honors — arguably the highest-sheen literary awards in the world — do not make up even half the list. The Neustadt, or “American Nobel,” and International Booker Prizes went to Senegalese writers, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to a Zimbabwean one.” [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opinion/africa-fiction-nobel-booker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/opinion/africa-fiction-no...
- Kalanos 5y agoLeo: "This is Africa"