It is time Africans take responsibility for how their continent is portrayed, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.
Writing in his weekly newsletter on the African National Congress website, Mbeki said every day the African and global media publish articles about Africa, based on events that take place on the continent.
”In time, these stories begin to define who and what we are. In due course, as we come to believe the resultant image of ourselves, we also begin to act the part.”
For some years now, Africa has been engaged in a sustained effort to change the lives of its people for the better.
The July 30 democratic elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo is an example both of the good news emanating from Africa and what the continent is doing to redefine itself.
Mbeki quoted at length from news articles, both local and foreign, raising the issue of consistent and seemingly compulsive negative reporting about Africa.
One such article in June 2005 by writer Chris Thomson stated that five years into a new century, when things had changed in several of the continent’s 53 independent nations, the Western media seemed still to be depicting Africa in a predominantly negative way.
”So what to do about the problem? If there’s one thing on which most African commentators agree, it’s that Africans must take responsibility themselves for how their continent is portrayed,” Thomson wrote.
Thomson went on to report that former African heads of state met in a presidential roundtable at Boston University in May 2005.
Having discussed the negative Western reporting on Africa, they resolved that African countries and institutions should draw up a set of strategies to counter the negative media portrayal of Africa.
This included developing alternative mediums through which to tell Africa’s story, a multimedia campaign to counter Africa’s negative image in the Western press and a strategy for engaging major media outlets to encourage more fair and balanced coverage of the continent.
Mbeki said: ”Perhaps the time had come that, as Chris Thomson said, we, as Africans, take responsibility for how our continent is portrayed.” — Sapa