Africa News Service (Durham)
1 December 1990
(Page 2 of 2)
Even the abolitionist art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped erase the diverse, often posi-tive, earlier perceptions of blacks, says art historian Hugh Honour in the latest of the Menil volumes. So potent were the images of blacks as victims, he says, that they reduced the possibilities of representing blacks in the former roles of saint or devil, proud Magus, regal personification of Africa, or even richly dressed and petted page boy.
The legacy of that history persists in modern popular images of the continent. The 1981 movie First Family, starring Bob Newhart and Gilda Radner, featured an African ambassador who threw his diplomats out of airplanes to appease the gods.
A Citicorp ad of the previous year showed a white traveler in a safari suit surrounded by scantily-clad, spear-wielding Africans but still miraculously within the reach of the banks financial services. Lose Citicorp Travelers Checks in Maputo, said the ad whose geography was as fuzzy as its ethnography and You're Not Up the Zambezi Without a Paddle.
A study by James Larson of the University of Washington found that, between 1972 and 1982, African stories although less likely to make the network television news shows than stories from elsewhere were 11% more likely to be about crisis.
The crisis orientation, says University of California historian Sylvester Whitaker, misses one of the most compelling African stories the sur-vivability of African communities.
If you read that the GNP is disastrous, Whitaker says, that investment is in decline, that health problems are growing how are Africans making out at all? When you ask yourself that question and actu-ally begin to look for some experience to answer your question, it turns out that theres an awful lot of creativity that grows out of the dilemmas of African states. Those are stories, Whitaker says, that Americans never hear.
Yet major African crises can go unremarked, too. In 1973, Robert Maynard, who became owner/editor of the Oakland Tribune before he died in 1994, chastised the U.S. news media for ignoring the genocidal civil war in Burundi that killed as many as 250,000 people, including half the countrys primary school teachers. Stories that conveyed the horror of events in Burundi, Maynard argued, could have pressured the U. S., as the principle outside economic force in the country, to take action that would have saved lives.
Even the Ethiopian famine of 1984 that seared its images into public con- sciousness was all but ignored by the networks for two years after it had been documented, wrote Joanmarie Kalter in TV Guide, and it became a crisis of unprecedented proportions partly because it was ignored.
But like the abolitionists crusade that solidified an image of blacks as victims rather than actors, the fly-encrusted, stick-thin children of the anti-hunger campaign have had an unintended result. What is being called compassion fatigue has fused with a contemporary view of Africans as either brutal and corrupt or passive and exploited. The dark continent has come to be seen as the lost continent.
Things could have been different, says Dominique de Menil, who launched the Image of the Black project in 1960. There was a time when the West adopted a black knight as its patron saint, she says, a time when artists did not neglect to include an African among the resurrected, a time when a white King Solomon embraced a black Queen of Sheba.
But the dream of an authentic cooperation between Europe and Africa, of a sharing of ideals and knowledge, she says, was shattered by crimes so atrocious that they left no images.
This article was published originally in "Capturing the Continent: U.S. Media Coverage of Africa," a special 1990 edition of Africa News.
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