Rainbow Worriers: South African Afropessimism Online

Abstract

The relationship between the rise of Afropessimism and the growth of global communication networks is more or less proportionate with the deepening of the digital divide. With fewer internal sources of information, news networks are portraying events in Africa as more tragic, more mysterious and more distant than ever before. This, in turn, has an off-putting effect on foreign investors and donors, who are becoming increasingly impatient with mounting reports of African corruption, misrule and political unrest. While South Africa's relatively advanced media infrastructure should exempt it from this trend, the discourse of Afropessimism is highly visible, both in news about the country and in posted responses to headlines. This article is concerned with the reception of reports on South Africa by one of the most vocal online groups commenting on events in the country: white expatriates. Focusing on the web presence of a number of popular sites, ranging from the Afro-dystopic to the Afro-optimistic, the article analyses the ways in which some South Africans living abroad are active in spreading pessimistic views about their homeland – a trend that is important because these views are beginning to dominate online responses. The article concludes that the high visibility of Afropessimism on blogs and on platforms such as YouTube is cause for concern, firstly because it indicates that events in South Africa are rapidly distancing it from world opinion, and secondly, because the country's future failure is increasingly being represented as a fait accompli.