Our 'Africa' Lenses
From the West, Big Labels but Little Context
By Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieMonday, November 13, 2006; Page A21 (Washington Post)

Growing up in Nsukka, a small university town in eastern Nigeria, I often
had
malaria. It was so commonplace that when you went to the medical center, a
nurse
would say, "Malaria has come again, hasn't it?" Because I know how easily
treatable malaria is, I was surprised to learn that thousands of people die
from
it each year. People like the relatives of David Banda, Madonna's adopted
son
from Malawi.
But of course most American media do not say "Malawi"; they just say
"Africa." I
realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever
Africa
came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter
whether
the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.
I reject this facile compression of a varied continent into a monolithic
country, but I have also come to accept that African nations do have much in
common with one another. Most have a history of European colonization. Most
also have a failure of leadership, a long line of presidents and prime
ministers
and heads of state all intent on the plunder of the state.
And so I was wearing my "African" lenses as I watched Madonna on television,
cautiously, earnestly explaining the media circus around her adoption. I did
not
think it my place to wonder what her motivation for adoption was. I did
cringe,
however, when she said that her greatest disappointment was that the media
frenzy would discourage people who wanted to do the same thing that she had
done: adopt an African child. She wanted people to go to Africa and see what
she
had seen; she wanted them, too, to adopt.
Later, watching David Banda's biological father speak about being grateful
that
she would give David a "better life," I could not help but look away. The
power
differential was so stark, so heartbreakingly sad; there was something about
it
that made Africa seem terribly dispensable.
Madonna will give David a better life, at least a materially better life:
better
food, housing, books. Whether this will make him a happier and normatively
better human being is open to debate. What really matters is not Madonna's
motivation or her supposed flouting of Malawian adoption laws (as though
non-celebrities would not also hasten adoption processes if they could).
Rather,
it is the underlying notion that she has helped Africa by adopting David
Banda,
that one helps Africa by adopting Africa's children.
It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking
agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them
to
objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from
the
American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any
context.
If I were not African, I would, after watching the coverage, think of Africa
as
a place of magnificent wild animals in which black Africans exist as tour
guides, or as a place of desperately poor people who kill or are killed by
one another for little or no reason.
I once watched CNN's Anderson Cooper, who is undoubtedly well-meaning,
interview
a Belgian (who, we were told, was a "Congo expert") about the conflict in
that
country, while Congolese people stood in the background and watched. Surely
there was a Congolese who was qualified to speak about Congo. Surely there
are
Congolese who are working just as hard as the foreigners and who don't fit
into
the category of either killer or killed. Surely the future for Africa should
be
one in which Africans are in a position to raise their own children.
Which brings me back to Madonna. I applauded her funding of orphanages in
Malawi. I wish, however, that instead of asking television viewers to go to
Africa and adopt, she had asked them to send a check to malaria-eradication
organizations. I wish she had added, after one of those thoughtfully
dramatic
pauses, that Africa cannot depend on aid alone, that aid is like salted
peanuts:
The more failed leaders got, the more they wanted. I wish she had said that
she was setting up an
organization to use donations as micro-credit and that this organization, by
the
way, would be run by locals rather than expatriate staff members who would
raise
rents out of the reach of the people they were supposed to be helping.
I wish she had pointed out, with suitable celebrity-style rage, that Western
countries need to stop appeasing and propping up hopeless African leaders,
that
Western banks must stop enabling and accepting stolen money from these
leaders,
that Western donors who insist on the free movement of capital across
borders
must also insist on the free movement of labor. I wish she had then shown,
with
graphs on the screen, how these things affect the father and relatives of
David
Banda.
Of course this isn't really about Madonna. It is about a formula that
well-meaning people have adopted in looking at Africa, a surface-only,
let's-ignore-the-real-reasons template that African experiences have all
been
forced to fit in order to be authentically "African." If I were not African,
I wonder
whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do
not
need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond.
I
wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of
leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. I wonder
whether I would know that Africa has class divisions, that wealthy Africans
who
have not stolen from their countries actually exist. I wonder whether I
would
know that corrupt African countries are also full of fiercely honest people
and
that violent conflicts are about resource control in an environment of
(sometimes artificial) scarcity.
Watching David Banda's father, I imagined a British David visiting him in
2021
and I wondered what they would talk about.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a novelist, is the author of "Half of a Yellow
Sun."