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Michela Wrong-Correspondent
What do you remember about the film “Independence Day”? Will Smith looking cute in a jump suit? The autopsy scene where the squid-like alien kills the scientists? The warm, mindless surge of patriotism it generated?
The Nigerian writer Dipo Faloyin noticed something different.
At the film’s climax, the alien mothership is destroyed in a military operation mounted by a coalition of Earth’s continents.
“Each continent, that is, except for one,” he notes in his acerbic debut, “Africa Is Not a Country”: “Nobody bothers to inform anyone in Africa.”
Viewers do get a glimpse of Africans celebrating just moments later, in the form of five shirtless, paint-smeared boys joyfully jabbing spears into the air.
“It’s now obvious that we couldn’t help the military operation — we don’t even have roads or electricity, let alone fighter jets.”
The brief scene captures the assumptions that have long dogged the continent, whose citizens are routinely presented by Western filmmakers, pop stars and philanthropists as primitive, helpless and irrelevant, their complex identities denied.
Imposed on 54 diverse countries, it’s a stereotype Faloyin is bent on examining and demolishing, a task he carries out with verve.
He kicks off with the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where Europe’s powers diced up the African continent among themselves, heedless of existing ethnic and language boundaries.
After a brisk account of how African states negotiated that awkward status quo once they achieved independence in the 20th century, Faloyin plunges into the material that intrigues him most: how the rest of the world persists in portraying Africa as a single country where elephants jostle up against warlords, bereft of such modern banalities as urban centers, accountants or school children.
“Africa Is Not A Country” was inspired, Faloyin writes, by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2005 Granta essay, “How To Write about Africa” — a “joyful satire” that was a reworking of an email Wainaina sent to the same magazine after it published an “Africa Issue.”
Faloyin’s admiration for the late activist verges on hyperbole (“one of the greatest writers of his or any generation”), but he adds heft to a missive Wainaina dashed off in a moment of eye-rolling pique.
It’s a well-worn path.
The damage done by the humanitarian aid industry has been examined by the likes of William Easterly, Linda Polman and Dambisa Moyo.
I’m not sure I needed to be reminded of how patronizing the lyrics to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” were, or the arrogance of the 2006 charity documentary “Invisible Children,” which told Western viewers they could end the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony’s reign of terror simply by raising public awareness.
But I enjoyed learning about the debate among the “Black Panther” actors over which accent the inhabitants of the mythical Wakanda should adopt.
Faloyin’s critique of museums in North America and Europe, which find endless excuses not to return looted artifacts to Africa, many of which are not even on display, also won me over.
And it’s impossible not to relish a book that boasts an entire section on jollof rice, and the horrific moment when the British chef Jamie Oliver riffed on the classic West African dish in an act of desecration “comparable to a passer-by suggesting they attempt brain surgery for the first time using your grandmother as a guinea pig.”
But while Faloyin excels at articulating the complaint, he has little to offer as a remedy to a problem rooted in a centuries-old global power imbalance.
Fairness dictates, too, a recognition that intellectual laziness is hardly the white man’s exclusive preserve.
People in Africa are just as prone to perpetuating sweeping stereotypes: about those in other parts of the continent, and also about life in the West, whose inhabitants are assumed to be universally prosperous and upper-class.
The difference, of course, is that while an African’s failure to perceive a Westerner’s “complex identity” has little impact on the latter’s daily existence, the Westerner’s assumption that Africa is all lions and spear-brandishing Maasai helps keep the aspirations of 1,4 billion people squashed.
Online Reporter