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 and blew their horns. 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 misperceptions. 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.
If you think African lives are as precious as others, 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.
But first, consider this. 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, and nearly half of Africans live in urban areas.
- Most assume Africa is uniformly hot, unless they have read Ernest Hemmingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Yet many countries have mountains and more experience cold weather. Lesotho – called the 'magic mountain kingdom' has blizzards even in its southern hemispheric summer.
- Most think Kenyan and Ethiopian champion marathoners must have some genetic ability for endurance running, without realizing that these long-distance athletes' lung capacity is enhanced by training in the high-altitude environments where they were born in the Great Rift Valley area – as high as 10,000 feet.
- Most aren't aware that Africa has long-produced valuable art. Picasso's cubism was inspired by African art, and colonial rulers of Mozambique and Tanzania profited from amassing large quantities of Makonde carvings and selling them to European and American collectors and museums. In 2015 a Benin bronze sold to a private collector for nearly US $13 million. Nigeria considers most of the Benin art works to be looted artifacts and is negotiating to recover them.
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 were using phones for mobile-money transfers before most Americans owned cell phones. Kenyans began using mobile pay for shops and restaurants seven years before Apple Pay was introduced.
- Annie Jiagge was appointed to Ghana's highest court in 1969, twelve years before there was a woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Jiagge was named to head that court in 1980, a decade before all Swiss women won the right to vote.
- Namibia, after centuries of brutal German colonialism followed by harsh South African apartheid rule, fought 25 years for independence, achieved in 1990, and enshrined one of the world's most democratic constitutions.
- Led by Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, a massive vaccination and education campaign achieved the difficult milestone of eliminating persistent pockets of wild polio from Nigeria by 2015, combatting a threatened 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.
- 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.
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. 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?
Genocide, which in 2003 commanded media coverage and outrage, has returned to Sudan. In the absence of global attention, war crimes – gang rape, forced marriages, child marriages, abductions – are intensifying. Human Rights Watch [HRW] researcher Mohamed Osman salutes civilians, themselves hungry and under attack, who provide what medical care they can without basic supplies and feed tens of thousands of people in the capital area alone with funds from Sudanese abroad.
Monday's HRW report and visits to the border area this 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.
- Make a tax-deductible contribution. We pinch every penny, and every dollar counts.
- Ask your library or institution to subscribe. Local and university libraries, international institutions and research organizations are a steady source of funds. Subscriptions give access to over seven million articles in AllAfrica's archive to all accredited users.
- Join. Your individual membership of $125 annually includes full archival access and your choice of nearly a hundred topics for daily headlines in your inbox. The first 50 new subscribers will receive a beaded artisanal keychain donated for this fall fundraiser by a Ghanaian supporter, attached to a brass Adinkra or Gã symbol, and an explanatory proverb.
- Share this appeal with friends who are interested in Africa or believe African lives count and African wisdom matters – or who are simply African music fans.
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 week and another $80,000 by October.
We thank you.
Amadou Mahtar Ba, Tami Hultman and Reed Kramer are co-founders of AllAfrica.
