Misperceptions and miscommunication have driven centuries of media coverage of Africa. Historical records recount the first meeting between an American journalist and the head of a village on the Lualaba, the headstream of the Congo River, in the early 1870s.
- Mojimba: When we heard that the man with the white flesh was journeying down the Lualaba, we were open mouthed with astonishment. We will prepare a feast, I ordered; we will go to meet our brother and escort him into the village with rejoicing! We assembled the great canoes to meet the first white man our eyes had beheld, and to do him honor. But as we drew near his canoes, there were loud reports, bang! bang! And fire-staves spit bits of iron at us.
Henry Morton Stanley: We came into a vast stream nearly 2000 yards across. As soon as we entered its waters, we saw a great fleet of canoes. The canoe men gave a loud shout when they saw us. We had no time to pray or to take sentimental looks at the savage world. We felt for the first time that we hated the filthy, vulturous ghouls who inhabited it. We made straight for the banks and continued the fight in the village streets, and there only sounded the retreat, having returned the daring cannibals the compliment of a visit.
AllAfrica challenges persistent media myths. We tell Africa's stories – by, from and about Africans, elevating coverage by dozens of African media through collaborations with newspapers and broadcasters and through our own original reporting. We are the only truly panAfrican media organization, publishing in English and French. We reach tens of millions of people, influencing policy and decision makers and speaking to and for a growing youth demographic, creating the Africa it wants to see.
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AllAfrica spotlights creative solutions to the most urgent issues facing all of us. We feature little-known African change-makers: the innovators developing mitigations for climate change; the women acting to end gender-based violence; the medical researchers who alerted the world to Covid variants; the scientists working to prevent the next pandemic; the faith leaders who mediate disputes; the African agricultural scientists reviving indigenous crops that are more climate resilient and can be grown organically, preserving soil and water; and the engineers who are devising clean energy-generation techniques. We celebrate the musicians, athletes, designers and filmmakers who enrich global arts, culture and entertainment.
If you believe African lives count, and African views are valuable, there are multiple ways you can support our journalism, at a time when independent media voices the world over are struggling for sustainable models. See multiple ways at the end of this letter.
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Consider these little-known facts:
- A South African surgeon performed the world's first successful human heart transplant in 1967.
- People in rural areas of Kenya used phones for mobile-money transfers before most Americans owned cell phones, and Kenyans used mobile pay for shops and restaurants seven years before Apple Pay was introduced.
- Justice Annie Jiagge joined Ghana's highest court in 1969, twelve years before the U.S. Supreme Court seated a women and was named to head that court a decade before all Swiss women won the right to vote.
- Namibia, after centuries of brutal German colonialism and South African apartheid rule, enshrined one of the world's most democratic constitutions after independence in 1990.
- Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate led a massive Nigerian vaccination and education campaign, achieving the difficult milestone of eliminating persistent pockets of wild polio by 2015, reducing global spread.
- Prior to Covid lockdown, Africa welcomed 84 million international travelers, flocking to white-sand beaches, climbing mountains, taking photo safaris, sampling fine cuisine. The number of U.S. tourists visiting the continent in the same period was less than 600,000.
Some years ago we surveyed journalism students at prominent U.S. universities, in cooperation with Professor Neil Henry, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley after he was Africa bureau chief of the Washington Post. Our research found that the majority of students polled reflected media stereotypes.
- Most imagine Africa as a continent of lions and elephants, without cities or skyscrapers. Yet most Africans have never seen a lion or an elephant outside a zoo.
- Most assume Africa is uniformly hot, even if they have read Ernest Hemmingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Yet many countries have mountains and cold weather. Lesotho, the 'magic mountain kingdom', experiences blizzards even in its southern hemispheric summer.
- Most think Kenyan and Ethiopian champion marathoners must possess a genetic ability for endurance running, without realizing that these long-distance athletes' lung capacity is enhanced by training in the Great Rift Valley environments, as high as 10,000 feet, where they were born.
- Most aren't aware that Africa has long-produced art masterpieces. Picasso's cubism was inspired by African art; colonial rulers of Mozambique and Tanzania profited by amassing quantities of Makonde statues. In 2015 a private collector bought a Benin bronze for nearly US $13 million. Nigeria considers most of that Benin art to be looted artifacts and is negotiating to recover them.
As everywhere in the world, Africa's 54 diverse nations face daunting challenges of conflicts, climate chaos, resurgent diseases, a growing wealth gap, and governance. But even Africa's bad news is covered badly, often without explanatory context.
U.S. media deem African crises, in contrast to Ukraine's or Gaza's, less worthy of attention. As in those countries, Sudan's geopolitical significance threatens regional and global stability. Genocide, which in 2003 commanded media coverage and outrage, has returned to Sudan. People are dying from injuries and starvation. The head of the Norwegian Refugee Council calls the war that has raged for a year and a half "a horrific mega-catastrophe". Over 22 million people are haunted by famine. Red Cross convoys evacuating wounded children and elderly civilians are attacked. Medicines Sans Frontiers said on July 24 that its medical volunteers are shocked at the "scale of the horror".
How much have you seen, heard or read about Sudan's rival armed factions, wanting to control access to rich gold veins, that ejected an interim civilian government? Or about U.S.-sponsored peace talks that are side-lining a democracy movement that mobilized the nation to push out a long-time dictator despite arrests and killings?
A Human Rights Watch report this week documented the spread of 'war crimes' of sexual abductions, forced marriages and child brides in the absence of international attention. Visits to the border area last month by two American heads of UN organizations – Cindy McKane of the World Food Program and Unicef's Catherine Russell, plus an earlier visit by U.S. UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield – provoked a small flurry of U.S. media coverage. If your public radio station carries an hour of BBC news, you may have heard periodic reports of the conflict. But aside from episodic coverage, Sudan is missing from the headlines. Nearly alone, AllAfrica has consistently told these stories.
Please support AllAfrica's coverage of Africa in all its complexity.
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- Share this appeal with friends who are interested in Africa, believe Africans matter – or who simply appreciate African music!
The UK Guardian newspaper raised $2.2 million from U.S. readers in its 2023 end-of-year funding appeal. With your help, we hope to raise $20,000 this month and another $80,000 by October.
We thank you.
Amadou Mahtar Ba, Tami Hultman and Reed Kramer are co-founders of AllAfrica.
