The Africanisation of America

Three seemingly unrelated things happened to me last week, involving a dead Kenyan photographer, a self-reflective American State Department official with surplus funds, and Krusty the Klown. But when I looked at them closely, I realised that the universe was teaching me a mildly instructive lesson about how it’s possible to change large-scale public perceptions.

The first thing occurred at the African Media Leaders Conference in Dar Es Salaam. In one of the presentations, Salim Amin, the founder of Kenya’s A24 Media, talked about his famous father, Mohamed Amin. Amin Snr was a world-renowned photojournalist, who notably inspired the Live Aid and Band Aid concerts with his shocking images of the 1984 Ethiopia famine.

According to Salim (and I didn’t take notes, so Salim, forgive me for paraphrasing) one of the things his father was uncomfortable with was the relentlessly negative portrayal of Africa to which he was sometimes compelled to be a party. Salim’s A24 agency goes a long way to presenting more positive images and stories of Africa (and forgive me the shorthand of reducing our complex continent to the adumbration “Africa”.) Well, I say a long way — actually, it’s going to take a lot to counteract the legacy of the helicopter journalism of the First World.

Many of the delegates at the conference were scathing about foreign journalists who fly in, check into five star hotels, go out and get one lopsided story, have dinner and cigars, and scoot back to their distant homes the next day. But some of them were equally critical of African journalists who only visit rural areas when some fatcat politician is engaged in an electioneering trip, and otherwise never leave the big city. So it isn’t a simple us and them position — our own journalists can be as out of touch as any foreign newsperson. And sometimes, our own journalists are scum-sucking cockroaches scuttling in the messy overflow from the gravy train, and we have to turn to reputable foreign media to get any sort of credible information about corrupt governments.

The unvarnished fact, as any first year media studies student will obediently tell you, is that Africa is generally portrayed one-dimensionally as the continent of famine, poverty, wars and Julius Malema. It is all that, but it’s so much more. And the talented, passionate media people I met at the African Media Leaders Conference, from all over the continent, knew all the bad stories — unfortunately, sometimes intimately — but also the many good ones.

The second thing that happened, when back from Tanzania, was drinks with Dawn McCall of the US Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programmes. Every now and then, the people who tweet from the US Embassy in Pretoria (a case study, by the way, in how to use social media for political purposes, if anyone in the SA government would like a masterclass) invite a bunch of South African social media practitioners for drinks and off-the-record hot dogs.

In conversation, Ms McCall mentioned (and again I’m paraphrasing) how the US press was struggling to understand how they managed to turn an insignificant lunatic pastor in a small hick town in America into a worldwide media sensation.

Yep, the American media is befuddled. Why would the world think that all Americans are Qur’an-burning hirsute Christian lunatics just because almost every newspaper and television station in America carried images of Pastor Terry Jones mumbling about how the Qur’an is the devil’s handbook? “Goodness,” the American media is saying, in apparently honest confusion, “Why would the world judge us by one stereotyped image? We’re so much more complicated then this. I mean, Jones has only 30-odd people, three hand-embroidered bibles and a small sheep in his congregation. Why is the world focussing on just this one incident!”

Ah, the sweet, sweet irony. The suckers have Africanised themselves. And that’s especially true of the television stations, or at least the ones we can access from South Africa. Run one overwhelmingly obvious image for long enough — flies on an emaciated child, for example, or racist gobbledygook pouring from the mouth of a con-artist cult leader, and people will inevitably use that shortcut to think about large, complex constructs or issues. And because many media outlets are as lazy as their readers, we’re left with a journalism of stereotypes. Twitter with pictures and flash cards, if you will.

Of course, not all Americans are cut from the same Terry-cloth. Jones doesn’t synecdochically stand in for all Americans, although I suspect he’s a lot more representative than Americans would like to believe. I also suspect that Julius Malema (praise his name) is a lot more representative of the average South African than WE’D like to believe, but that’s another story.

And on to the third thing, which featured another evil sociopath, Krusty the Klown. I downloaded episode one of the new season of The Simpsons from iTunes, and was intrigued by a plot line which involved South Africa. Krusty is lured to the Hague, where he is tried for war crimes. Bart and Homer need to find some saving grace in Krusty’s past, and this turns out to be Krusty’s refusal to play Sun City in 1990. Three days after his refusal, Nelson Mandela is freed from prison. This congruence of events leads to Krusty being pardoned, and released.

The satire works on many levels, of course, but the appealing one to me is how critical the writers are about the perceived relationship between Western political acts and the triumph of the struggle against apartheid. For example, Krusty’s refusal to play Sun City is not a political statement, but a protest about the kind of potato chips in his dressing room.

Krusty makes his heroic statement (“I ain’t going to play Sun City”), and then turns to his band and says, “Vuvuzela me out of here”. The band swops their instruments for vuvuzelas, and the discordant sound of the World Cup serenades Krusty from the stage.

It’s reading rather too much into a cartoon, but it does seem as if South Africa has given the world a more positive way to think about Africa. Of course, many of we locals (but not all of us, by any means) know that South Africa is a country, rather than a continent, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

While we can’t stop lazy media from reducing complexities to stereotypes, we can at least give them an abbreviated lexicon from which to draw, and we can make sure that there are positive stereotypes as well as negative.

After all, one of the great strengths of the great colonising nations is that they’ve trained their own citizens to think in positive stereotypes. When the Dutch judge in The Hague tells Homer what region American dvds fall under, Homer starts chanting “USA, Region One! USA, Region One!” It’s an apt example of the power of positive stereotyping, as well as the idiocy of stereotyping at all.

But needs must. I’d rather be known as the country which created JM Coetzee, but hey, the vuvuzela is a close second. And while it’s kinda funny that the American media have managed to Africanise themselves, it would be nice if the lazy practitioners among them managed to learn a lesson from this.