WESTERN PROPAGANDA AND THE REST OF US Several years ago as a budding writer I thundered a protest letter to CNN over its description of Africa as a dark continent. CNN was doing coverage of the war in Sierra Leone at the time and had used the words “dark continent” to describe Africa. It was also a time the Bosnia Herzegovina conflict was raging but while the CNN referred to the Bosnian conflagration as a “conflict in Europe”, it referred to its Sierra Leone counterpart as a “war in the dark continent of Africa”. In anger, I reached for my pen and fired a fiery piece brimming with invectives to the headquarters of CNN. The ensuing piece, titled “CNN and The rest of us” remains to date, in my view, the most comprehensive attack on the cable network’s negative stereotyping of Africa. I let the CNN know in no uncertain words that its stereotyping of Africa as dark and backward was unacceptable. A copy of that protest letter was sent to The Guardian. It was a time Mack Zucherberg and his co-travellers had yet to conceive of social media. Well, I never knew if CNN received the piece, and if they did, whether they bothered to give it attention. Whether they received it or not, or gave it adequate attention or not, is inconsequential. I was just pissed that the somewhat over-dressed soft-skinned white broadcaster could be so arrogant and disrespectful to describe a people in such objectionable language – a case of adding insult to injury, or beating us and forbidding us to cry. Was it not these same people represented here by that white broadcaster that committed the most heinous crime against humanity on Africa by forcefully transporting her able-bodied human capital to strange plantation farms as slave labourers? Was it not these same white people who later pillaged and plundered Africa to develop their own countries? And this Mickey Mouse white boy had the effrontery not to be polite to us after benefiting from the impoverishment of my people by his people. Looking back now several years down the line, it does seem that Western powers have not in any way changed their perception of Africa as a continent where nothing good can come out of. This is in spite of evidence to the contrary, as Africans are everywhere around the globe making indelible marks in various fields of human endeavor. It is also safe to conclude that the western world is not in a hurry to wish that Africa gets out of her politico-economic doldrums. Every pretentious effort they make to help Africa in the form of loans, grants, aides and all that, is strewn with all sorts of booby traps that would ultimately ensure that Africa remains backward. Unfortunately enough African leaders foolishly play into their hands. And now they have come again with typifying Ebola virus as an African disease! Can you imagine these people with their insufferable insult? Why is it that everything that is good belongs to the white land, but when it is bad, it is Africa? Eh? Cockroach is good, ah it is European cockroach! Rat gets pointed nose, ah it is Scotland rat! Monkey gets long hair; ah it is from English zoo! Bird wears many beautiful colours, ah it is Danish bird. And if a solution to a particularly knotty problem; or if a simpler way of doing something comes from Africa (like the yam pounder which they actually stole from IITA Ibadan), ah it was invented by Japanese scientists from Harvard! No good thing, absolutely nothing good, comes from Africa in the eyes of these people. The dust raised by white scientists that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS, is an African disease has yet to settle, and they have come again with their assertion that Ebola is yet another African disease. Ebola virus, they say, is transmitted through contact with blood, sweat, urine and semen of infected persons, bats, and monkeys. Of course bats and monkeys abound in Africa more than any other continent, so it is convenient, even expedient, for them to claim origin of Ebola from Africa. But they forget, perhaps conveniently so, that if we watch in Animal Planet - a Western media by the way - is anything to go by, then Ebola disease could actually be traced to Europe or America. Pray, is it not white people we see on Animal Planet kissing and playing with animals? Some even eat the same food, and sleep in the same bed, with animals. Only God knows if some of them do not make love with animals. They even give animals fancy pet names. Come to think of it, there are even animal rights groups everywhere in Europe and America. This crazy love for animals was taken way too far by my former white boss and friend, when he bought a casket worth N150,000 to bury his dead dog. And he buried it at Ikoyi cemetery too! Today the tomb still shows the fancy name he gave to the dog. Before the dog died of illness, the man bought a whole Kia Cerato and employed a driver solely for the purpose of taking the dog to veterinary clinic. Surely, God must have been angry at the man’s sheer waste of African resources, for despite all this, the dog still died. And the man wept for weeks. Yes there is abundance of wild life in Africa but Africans do not come in such close contact with animals as do whites. African leaders must reject this unbridled negative western stereotyping of Africa. It is time to stop playing the mick docile and gullible continent. We have everything we need to be a great continent, and we can be, with committed and well-focused leadership. We should not wait for white people to do it for us. They have shown enough proof that they do not want us to develop that which is indigenous to us. If any more proof of this assertion is needed, the Bible is one. They came to our land with only the Bible, but by the time they were leaving they had taken our land, our way of life, our people and our resources. The result is that they are today developed and we remain under-developed several decades after their exit. Arise Africa!
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 17:58:05 +0000
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