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Home > Programs > Trade and Agriculture > Which Continent Is It? |
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GUESS WHICH CONTINENT EACH OF THESE STATEMENTS REFERS TO: 1. "On the afternoon of July 10, soldiers of the army began storming the city of where more than 40,000 people sought shelter from the war. A United Nations officer hunched over his computer and tapped out a desperate plea "Please help." Nobody did. The town was overrun and what followed is described by Western officials and human rights groups as the worst crime in since World War II: the summary killing of perhaps 6,000 people. ....Surveying the stony moonlit field piled high with bodies, a soldier merrily declared "That was a good hunt. There were a lot of rabbits here." 1 2. In_ a child dies from poverty every 53 minutes.2 1 in 5 children under the age of eighteen and 1 in 4 children under the age of six lives in poverty and faces hunger 3; and 2,685 babies are born into poverty everyday.4 3. 30 million people in _suffer chronic underconsumption of adequate nutrients.5 1.3 million _s fell into poverty in 1993 and the number of poor people is increasing three times as fast as the overall population.6 4. Dead bodies and their parts endure. In the _s celebrate the feast of by parading his jaw around town.7 SURPRISE! None of the above examples is from Africa. If you guessed any of them were from Africa, it is important to ask yourself why. The answer is simple, of course. Day-to-day media coverage of Africa consists almost entirely of bad news stories -- horrendous wars, corrupt and/or brutal dictators, pandemic diseases, traditions and customs portrayed as "primitive," and, of course, droughts and famines. The resulting general image of Africa in most Americans' minds cannot help but echo the descriptions above. Mainstream media are not alone in these descriptions of Africa. The current conventional wisdom among Western scholars, policymakers, and development "experts" alike is that Africa's poverty and hunger are due to African policymakers' misguided policies, to widespread corruption, to African farmers' failure to produce enough food and to African women's success at producing too many babies.9 This dominant discourse on Africa is racist. It is a continuation of colonial views of the continent. It is racist because it explains a global economic phenomenon, poverty and hunger, by attributing it to a set of characteristics and circumstances portrayed as unique to Africa and Africans.
Not only are these supposedly "African" characteristics not the causes of poverty and hunger, they are also in reality characteristics and circumstances found across all human societies. For example, was the widespread corruption in the Reagan Administration emblematic of North American policymakers? Were the Savings and Loan industry scandal and the pentagon's $400 hammers causes of hunger and malnutrition in North America? 10
The portrayal of globally present violence, corruption, hunger and famine as all endemic to Africa is accomplished by two principal means. First, African countries are talked about only in terms of war, famine, pandemic diseases, and corrupt dictators. We rarely get stories about the daily life of African peoples-- the vast majority of whom are not subject to any of these phenomena. In addition, we get next to no information about the rich complexity and beauty of African cultures, the marvelous blending of the old and the new. The majority of Americans--even as we enter the twenty-first century-remain unaware, for example, of something as basic as the fact that there are cities in every African country that look very similar to European and North American cities. We know, in short, more about Africa's animals than we do about its peoples. Second, these racist images in the dominant discourse on Africa are accomplished by the use of coded phrases to describe globally occurring events and categories in words that are uniquely applied to African contexts and refer to a supposed African "primitiveness." What the media and the academy call call tribes in the case of Africa. Similarly, the term "African" is not used to refer to either North Africans or to the white descendants of European settlers in places such as Kenya or southern Africa. African means "Black." This colonially originated, racialized coding of the term "African" leads, in turn, to truly bizarre analytical constructions such as "Black-on-Black violence" to describe a political battle in South Africa, which parallels the political battles and resulting violence in places such as Northern Ireland, but which have never been described as "white-on- white violence." The construction of Africans as primitive, backward, and, as a result, inferior to the West has been and continues to be used as the basis for Western intervention in the lives of African peoples. And those Western interventions--from European colonization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the name of a "civilizing mission" through the current re-colonization of the continent in the name of "development" by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, transnational corporations, private banks, and bilateral donors such as the European Community and USAID--have laid not only the structural basis for current poverty and hunger in Africa, but the cultural basis as well. Cultural notions of Western superiority inherent in the equation of "modern," "developed," and "civilized" with "Western" have had several detrimental effects on African societies. As Food First has pointed out on numerous occasions, precolonial African societies were, with rare exception, food self-sufficient and able to cope with recurring climactic induced famines. But the greed of European elites coupled with colonial cultural arrogance led to massive disruptions in the values, practices, and institutions ensuring that food self sufficiency. European cultural arrogance meant that local values, practices, and knowledge were devalued and, more often than not, ignored. Hence, European colonial administrators banned precolonial sustainable agricultural practices such as multi-cropping in favor of mono-cropping in order to concentrate on those cash crops needed for Europe's purposes, and also because they believed these non-European-looking practices to be therefore "primitive" practices. Today the "modern" versus "primitive" model continues in the touting of Green Revolution technology as the answer to Africa's hunger problems. In addition to the profit motive, it is Western belief in the power and efficacy of "science" pushing an inherently environmentally unsustainable technology. Moreover, Green Revolution emphasis on expensive inputs exacerbates economic and social inequalities. The saga of maize in southern Africa is a classic example of the damage Western interventions have done to national and household food security. In precolonial southern Africa, miller and sorghum were the staple products. British colonial policies replaced the more drought resistant miller and sorghum with maize in order to supply both Britain's consumers and African miners working in the British-owned mines in South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. 11 Until the 1970s, international research organizations such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and CIMMYT (the International Center for the General Improvement of Maize and Wheat) focused research on hybrid maize varieties to the virtual exclusion of research on less drought-sensitive staple food crops such as miller, sorghum and cassava. They pushed adoption of hybrid maize varieties which are not only even more drought- sensitive than local maize varieties, but also require expensive and environmentally damaging chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Worse, the particular hybrid varieties pushed were the least favored by African households because they are less suitable for rural storage conditions, handpounding and cooking needs.12 The World Bank, FAO and bilateral aid programs have poured money into promoting these hybrid varieties. And Western countries like the United States used food aid programs to dump huge quantities of surplus corn into local food-markets. The end result is that a region once able to cope with recurring droughts via its diversified production is now far more dependent on maize and as a result is subject to widespread famine when such droughts occur. None of this is intended to paint an Edenic portrait of a precolonial African past. Nor is it intended to excuse post independence African elites, leaders, administrators, and policymakers from their mistakes and/or fallacies. But the contemporary dominant discourse on Africa continually hammers on the latter while paying scant attention to Western culpability in the problems the fifty-two independent countries face. Worse, even Africa's friends remain committed to a unlinear deterministic notion of what development means. Africa's friends in the West, indeed the majority of Africans educated and trained in Western-style institutions, all assume that development means, in essence, somehow ending up looking like Europe and the United States. But as anyone who has had the privilege of spending time in an African country knows, what is most fascinating and most awe inducing is how the peoples of the continent are picking and choosing what it is they want to use from their own past and from European "traditions." Theirs is not a unilinear but rather heterogeneous and extraordinarily fluid notion of how human societies change. That employee in the photo accompanying this article probably speaks several African languages in addition to one or more Western languages, may practice both Islam or Christian and indigenous African religions, and can probably sing the lyrics to both Hootie and the Blowfish and Lady Smith Black Mazambo songs. She is equally at home in her all-electric kitchen and her grandmother's thatched roof house in her mother's home village. Similarly, the Masai warriors who choose to continue dressing in loincloths and to carry spears on the city streets of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (and are major tourist "attractions" in Kenya and Tanzania as a result) also use veterinarians to help them improve their livestock. As long as Westerners continue to construct "Africa" in the current racist dominant discourse, those of us living in the West will pay at least two heavy prices. First, we will miss learning what African cultures and civilizations have to teach us. Many of us in the West, suffering from the emotional and psychic toll of "modernity" seem to be trying to get back to where many African societies never left. Traditions in which an individual found her or his meaning within the context of community and family, notions that none of us or all of us own the earth's resources, the belief that humankind should live in harmony with, not dominion over nature--these were and are enduring values in many African cultures and resonate more and more loudly in the West today. As long as we can be persuaded that hunger in Africa is due to African "backwardness," to its lack of "development," then we will be unable to make the link between hunger and malnutrition in Africa and perpetual and growing hunger in the United States. We will fail to see that the problem is essentially the same and has the same root causes--the lack of economic democracy and the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. The difference is only in the extent of the hunger and malnutrition, and even that difference is rapidly diminishing. In short, constructing Africa as "unique" and as "backwards," as separate from the United States means we will never learn, as environmentalist and writer/philosopher Gary Snyder advocates, to not only think globally and act locally, but to think locally and act globally." Institute for Food and Development Policy |
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