The Problem With How We Talk About Africa

Open two browser tabs and search Africa news on two different days and you will likely get two different continents.

On one day: famine, coup, militia, a leader clinging to power past every constitutional deadline. On another day: youngest population on earth, fastest growing fintech sector, the next frontier market, a headline using the word Rising as if the continent just woke up.

I used to think these were opposing views of the same place, and that the truth sat somewhere in the middle. I do not think that anymore. I think they are the same mistake wearing two different outfits.

Both stories do the identical thing. They take one true detail and let it stand in for fifty four countries, more than a thousand languages, and roughly 1.5 billion people who do not agree with each other about much of anything. The famine in one region becomes a fact about the whole continent. The fintech boom in Lagos or Nairobi becomes a fact about the whole continent. Neither story is fabricated. Both are too small for what they are claiming to describe.

I wrote elsewhere about how the same decade can be read honestly two different ways, real growth and real devastation occupying the same ten years. That is not a contradiction waiting to be resolved. It is just what a continent this large actually looks like once you stop trying to compress it into a headline.

The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a phrase for this that I keep returning to, the danger of a single story. Her point was not that any single story is false. Famine happens. So does a fintech boom. Her point was that a single story, repeated enough, becomes the only lens anyone reaches for, until an entire place loses the right to be complicated in the way every other place on earth is allowed to be complicated.

Nobody asks whether America is rising or declining as if there is one honest answer covering Mississippi and Manhattan at once. Nobody collapses Europe into a single emotional verdict that has to hold for Germany and Greece simultaneously. Africa gets asked to produce one verdict, again and again, as if internal contradiction were a luxury reserved for other continents.

Each story also has a market, and I think that matters more than people admit. The despair version raises money for the donors and agencies whose continued relevance depends on continued need. The rising version sells conference tickets and investment funds and a kind of political legitimacy to the leaders who get to stand next to those graphs. I am not accusing anyone of inventing data. I am pointing out that both stories survive partly because someone benefits from telling them, which is a different thing from both stories being equally true in every context they get applied to.

I notice myself doing this too, which is the uncomfortable part to admit. When I am trying to make a case for staying and building, I reach for the rising statistics. When I want to explain why someone left, I reach for the harder numbers. Both reaches are honest in the moment. Both are still me selecting a single story to fit whatever argument I am currently making, instead of letting the full, contradictory picture sit there unresolved.

I think the actual problem with how we talk about Africa is not that one camp is lying and the other is telling the truth. It is that both camps, and I include myself in this, keep reaching for a story simple enough to fit in a paragraph, when the honest description requires fifty four separate paragraphs that do not all agree with each other.

I do not have a clean fix for this. What I have started doing, slowly, is asking myself which single story I am defaulting to before I write anything, and forcing myself to name at least one true fact that complicates it. It does not make the writing easier. It makes it slower, and a little less satisfying to read in one sitting. I think that is probably the cost of describing something this large honestly.