Abstract
This article disputes academic accounts of Afro-pessimism, which see it as a product of ideological or discursive bias in the viewer, or as a crude generalisation across very different countries and cultures by examining the context for and major themes of Afro-pessimism after 1994. In particular, it shows that modern Afro-pessimism is largely a product of liberal concerns and liberal media. It demonstrates the salience of these themes by showing how they permeate and influence former US President Barack Obama’s African outlook by a close reference to his speech to the Ghanaian parliament in 2009 and suggests that they may provide the context for the views of current US President Donald Trump.
Highlights
How fair are Western media about Africa? Are they biased Afro-pessimists, as many academic critics suggest (De B’béri & Louw 2011; Nothias 2012; Nothias 2015), or are negative portrayals based on reality? After all, on objective measures such as life expectancy, income and access to modern amenities, Africa as a whole ranks far behind the developed world
The attempts to delegitimise any critique of Africa fail to observe the crucial feature of what we can call the second wave of post-1994 Afro-pessimism: that it is largely the product of left-wing and liberal media organisations and journalists
In Obama’s speech to the African Union in 2015 he explicitly mentioned the dangers of wildlife trafficking (Obama 2015)
Summary
How fair are Western media about Africa? Are they biased Afro-pessimists, as many academic critics suggest (De B’béri & Louw 2011; Nothias 2012; Nothias 2015), or are negative portrayals based on reality? After all, on objective measures such as life expectancy, income and access to modern amenities, Africa as a whole ranks far behind the developed world. Even on more subjective measurements such as the Happiness Index, inhabitants of African countries, on average, are far less content with their lives than citizens in the rest of the world (Helliwell et al 2017). At this point the debate often turns, not to the merits of the critique of Africa or its substance, but into an academic exercise of discourse analysis and psychological “explanations”. A recent dissertation applies Van Dijk’s claim that anybody who denies that their negative portrayal is driven by racism is suffering from intention denial and justification (Van Dijk 1992, in Nothias 2015: 229)
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