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Mick Hume puts his finger on why the media coverage from South Africa is annoying:

Either we are lectured by worthy Western journalists about how Africans need money to be spent on bread and houses, not football competitions, thus imposing their own fashionably miserabilist outlook on the masses of the continent. Or else we are invited to clap along with the ‘vibrant’ colours and culture of black South Africans, as they supposedly dance for the tourists like the tame natives of old. Where Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ branded colonial peoples ‘half devil and half child’, now they are depicted as ‘half helpless victim and half grinning idiot’. Enough with the Afro-nonsense, time to treat them as equals off the pitch in the way other teams now have to do on it.

Slightly related is this series of photographs, depicting people from Malawi. Photographer Duncan McNicholl explains:

We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out.  Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.

I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008.  I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to.  How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?

Overall, I think it would be beneficial if journalists put more effort into their stories, rather than simply giving us the images and perspectives we’ve come to expect, and without hiding the problems that plague that part of the world.

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HT: Jason Kottke
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