Tim Burke has more on images of Africa:
Africa is the place where it’s ok to capaciously envision grand projects of various kinds with little concern for the specific humanity of specific African individuals or communities, where you treat them as generic, faceless objects to be saved, remade, to be waved about as totemic proof of your own goodness, not as people who may have histories, psychologies, aspirations, cultures, individual and collective complexities. And when such projects die their inevitable deaths, rather than looking hard at themselves, the grand dreamers always blame African intransigence and malfeasance.
… I don’t think you deal with that spillage by attacking imagination, but maybe you could help prevent it with an increased supply of knowledge about the real-world.
I’ll have to plead guilty for my piss poor knowledge of African histories. Do readers have any possible suggestions of where to start for a good, generalist introduction? Finding such books - at least good ones providing analytical frames in addition to the sweep of historical fact - is always more difficult than you’d think.
So I’d agree that Tim is right on the eclipse of History in our popular imagination of Africa (and in public policy). Still, as film scholar, I’d also wonder if the paucity of African film, television and popular media isn’t an overriding factor here. That paucity is of course one of production; film and even television are expensive to produce and exhibit, and in the extremely poor countries of Africa, national film industries are beleaguered to say the least. Compounding that, what films do get made and circulated in the U.S. are pigeonholed into an academic media market, - the videos in California Newsreel’s African library cost nearly 200 bucks a DVD. So general viewers have little chance, even if they had the inclination, to see a wide range of African films. I don’t think it’s accidental that the part of sub-Sarahan Africa I’m most knowledgeable about is French West Africa, thanks primarily to the work of Ousmane Sembene and filmmakers in Mali (Yeelen) and Burkina Faso (Wend Kunni). It’s not everything, but Goethe Institut-style cultural promotion might not be such a bad thing here.
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