Western Racist reporting on Africa

Posted by By Akogun Akomolafe at 1 January, at 07 : 54 AM Print

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(from my archive. First published in The African Journal in 1999)

 

When, indeed, is the Western press going to stop its racist reporting on Africa?

So, it’s now 20 million Africans that are, according to their prejudiced statistics, going to perish from AIDS! Since when have these guys been bandying these pieces of nonsense? When are they going to tire of their own vomit-inducing racist stereotyping?

For years now, the racial jingoists they send to Africa masquerading as ‘journalists’ have been telling us that Africans are going to be done for within a few years. Yet, these same champions of ‘white supremacy’ are also telling us that the continent is over-populated. Are these guys so bigoted that they cannot even see the illogicality of their own arguments?

It is my belief that these racists are wishing that we Africans will just disappear from the face of the earth, and about the only thing they are doing is gathering useless figures to support their callous desires.

Now, these racial chauvinists have conjured up a mythical “Sub-Saharan Africa’ where, according to them, Africans are literally dropping down on the streets from AIDS. What these ideologists masquerading as scientists have failed to provide is proof of where and when their research was carried out. Is this anything but Public Opinion Poll mentality being substituted for scientific objectivity?

Does this mythical ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ include Ghana, a country I travel to quite regularly? Ghana, like any human society, has many problems, but come on guys; people in Ghana are not over-whelmed by AIDS?

Why these racial bigots are happily parroting these conjured-up figures, they never report statements like those made by David Diangamo, the Director of The Central Statistics Office in Lusaka, Zambia, “There has not been a national study conducted in this country to measure the extent of HIV-AIDS. We will not accept that any foreign representative in this country should tell us that 20% of the adult population is HIV-positive. They will fail to make a breakdown of this figure. Such statements are alarming the nation, let’s get to realities.” (New African, September 1999. p. 13).

Or is it a case of a white man knowing everything better?

You cannot teach a monkey a new dance is a wise saying where I came from. I am not attempting to educate any racist.

Have these apostles of racial prejudices ever stopped to ask themselves that if Africa is such a disaster area, why so many Dutch people are literally dying to live there? Why is the Dutch KLM transporting so many Dutch people to a continent where there is only famine, pestilence, wars and AIDS?

One is forced to ask whether it makes these guys feel better to see sufferings, or imagined one where none exists? Does the sight of wars and pestilence increase their appetites? Do they sleep better at night after chronicling disasters?

I say to you guys, bravo! Keep on your good work. Keep on drowning yourself in your primitive racist statistics. Keep on floating in your racist prejudices. ‘But verily, verily I say unto you: If slavery and colonialism did not wipe out Africa, be sure that none of your man-made diseases will do us in. No way, man!’

In 1994, I wrote a piece in the ‘de Volkskrant,’ I end this letter with the following quote from that article:

“A few years ago, your so-called scholars and scientists were predicting that Africa would be wiped out by the AIDS virus. Astronomical figures were conjured up to show how we are going to disappear. We are still here and that’s baffling you. You guys just don’t understand. For us, no pestilence; no blight could be more devastating than the slavery you imposed on our continent. No epidemic could drain us of one-hundred million of our strongest and brightest as you Europeans did. Europeans are the worst scourges ravaging Africa. This is the fact of the matter.”

 

About the Author  

Femi Akomolafe is a passionate Pan-Africanist. A columnist for the Accra-based Daily Dispatch newspaper and ModernGhana, and Correspondent for the New African magazine, Femi lives in both Europe and Africa and writes regularly on Africa-related issues for various newspapers and magazines.

Femi was the producer of the FOCUS ON AFRICANS TV Interview programme for the MultiTV Station.

He is also the Man and Machine Coordinator at Alaye Dot Biz Limited, a Kasoa-based Multimedia organization that specializes in Audio and Video Production. He loves to shoot and edit video documentaries.

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