This article was sitting in my backlog, so I thought I’d shoot it out there. I had read some interesting critiques of the Vanity Fair Africa issue that confirmed my suspicion that the goodwill gesture of celebrities to highlight problems in Africa was furthering the racist construct that Africans cannot speak for themselves (Boing Boing had some great links). Additionally, there is a problem of thinking about “Africa” as one monolithic concept when in truth it is a highly diverse continent that is rich with so many different cultures and perspectives.

What Bono doesn’t say about Africa – Los Angeles Times (this may require registration to view):

JUST WHEN IT SEEMED that Western images of Africa could not get any weirder, the July 2007 special Africa issue of Vanity Fair was published, complete with a feature article on “Madonna’s Malawi.” At the same time, the memoirs of an African child soldier are on sale at your local Starbucks, and celebrity activist Bob Geldof is touring Africa yet again, followed by TV cameras, to document that “War, Famine, Plague & Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they’re riding hard through the back roads of Africa.”

It’s a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that’s being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help.