allAfrica.com: Africa: Savage Beasts and Beastly Savages (Page 1 of 3)

From the stories of the African travels of Dr. Doolittle where the monkeys are more intelligent than the people to the modern myths of commercial advertising, Americans are exposed to images of Africa that are almost entirely negative.

Beyond shaping our impressions of a distant continent, says C. Payne Lucas, those images have domestic consequences. As director of Africare, an African-American-run development organization based in Washington, DC, Lucas tries to rouse public interest in African affairs. How can you expect young African-Americans to have any self respect, Lucas asks, when everything they hear about their ancestry and their heritage is negative?

Black community leaders, dating back at least half a century to Marcus Garvey, have tried to organize effective protests against a view that equates Africa with primitivism. And in recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have explored the roots of racial attitudes and the links between those attitudes and public policies.

Some of the studies have focused on the media, arguing that there is a persistent pattern that assumes African barbarity and that overlooks black sufferings or portrays them less vividly than those of whites.

Beverly Hawk, who now teaches at Maines Colby College, was at How-ard University when she analyzed U.S. newspaper reporting on Zimbabwe during the 1970s a time when coverage of the war in what was then Rhodesia was the main focus of American reporting on Africa.

Hawk found that in a war where 16-20 Africans died for every white person who was killed, only white deaths provoked empathetic descriptions. Major newspapers like the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Hawk says, routinely referred to the killings of whites as murders, massacres and slaughters. Evocative words such as atrocity, butchered and savage were used to describe attacks on whites, while accounts of black deaths were reported most often as anonymous numbers relayed by the Rhodesian governments information service. Of the major national newspapers, Hawk says, only the Christian Science Monitor chose not to carry emotional accounts of white deaths and funerals.

An example of the reporting of the period was the heavy press coverage of the shooting down of a civilian government airliner by Zimbabwe guerrillas in 1978, in which 48 people died.

Please Don't Kill Us was the title Newsweek gave to a two-page spread that detailed the downing of the plane, the subsequent shooting of several passengers and the terror of the survivors. Accompanying the story was a photograph of guerrilla leaders Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe now Zimbabwes president raising their glasses in a toast, as though celebrating the deaths. The photo was captioned We Shot It Down, with no acknowledgement that the picture pre-dated the crash.

By contrast, four months earlier, a South African raid on a Namibian refugee camp in Angola got barely a mention in the U.S. media, although more than 600 people, mostly women and children, were killed and buried in mass graves.

Such unconscious value judgements are deeply rooted, Africanist scholars say, in a distorted historic view of Africa and Africans.

From its earliest days as a republic, Americans saw Africa as a continent of wild beasts and savage people. The reading public was alternately fascinated and repelled by accounts like those of reporter Henry Morton Stanley. Sent by the New York Herald in 1866 to find the British missionary Dr. Livingstone, Stanley regaled audiences with front page accounts of his journeys. His later books about his African travels the most popular were Through the Dark Continent in 1879 and In Darkest Africa in 1890 shaped opinions in both Europe and North America.

Michael McCarthy in his book Dark Continent: Africa As Seen by Americans, says the explorers images of Africa were widely accepted by blacks as well as whites. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially, McCarthy says, a majority of black Americans subscribed either consciously or unconsciously to the dangerous and fallacious idea of African inferiority.

Yet the observations of the popular writers were often ill-informed and misleading. African societies appeared to Europeans to be stateless. Africans seemed to have no religions. Even their fields looked uncultivated. Scholars now know that many Afri-can cultures built powerful empires, that African theologies were complex and intricate, and that crop rows that looked jumbled or untended were often scientifically sound examples of productive intercropping or of shifting cultivation that let marginal tropical soils recover by lying fallow.

But the Africa seen by explorers was used to explain and justify the subordination of people of African descent. The case against black people in America, says McCarthy, was advanced by showing that their African ancestors had failed to develop a fully civilized way of life. If Africans could not do it in their homeland, then how could their progeny possibly do any better in America?

The inaugural issue of National Geographic magazine in 1889 featured an article by the geographic societys founder, Gardiner Hubbard, asserting that Africans had developed a degree of civilization only after coming into contact with Western culture. When that contact was cut, Hubbard wrote, Africans deteriorated into barbarism.

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