What is WRONG with Africa...

     I'm going to blurt it out plainly... the media. The media is what is wrong with Africa. TV stations, radio stations, certain websites all publicize inaccurate statements about Africa calling them 'facts' all with the hypocritical aim of soliciting help for Africa. Most importantly the internet. Lets take an example; google. If any non-African wants to know about African children the first thing that comes to mind is google. So lets google African children and lets go to images
Here's what we get

A screenshot of the first page of google images.

     To compare, lets do a google search on American children

A screenshot of the first page of google images

      And then European children.

Here you go

Screenshot of the first page of google images.

     Are you not impressed with the American and European children? Taking a critical look at the images, one has a fair idea of the state of the various continents: Africa has poorly dressed children, some of them very lean, some of them asking for help, others with guns and scrolling down you would see worse pictures. A few of them are smiling and playing around happily(which we wouldn't see if I made this search 10 years ago).  America and Europe have neatly dressed, happy children with national colours etc and scrolling down you would not see a single negative picture. Not only google; on pinterest, on twitter, flikr, practically everywhere.

     The point is, this is the picture painted of Africa. This is true to some extent but there are unarguably similar conditions in America and Europe yet no single picture in google image search results depicts that. Why is that? → the media.
We are what we tell others we are. Most of the pictures circulating on the internet about Africa were taken by non-African visitors who since they could not make an attractive headline with positive pictures use the negative pictures to attract well wishers to their sites.

     I believe the way forward is to take control of our internet. We must take control of the images of Africans floating around the web. We must present the real pictures. We have started but we can do better. Let us tell the real story of Africa. Let us be the media. Let us portray the real picture of Africa to the world.

 

African Children

Thank you. :)