*****************************************************************
Note: Fiscal year of AAM is October 1 - September 30.
*** Subscriptions for 2006/07 Membership are now due!!!!
Join African Association of Madison, Inc. for $25 per year
Mail check to: AAM, PO Box 1016, Madison, WI 53701
Phone: 608-258-0261 -- Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: www.AfricanAssociation.org
*****************************************************************
What an excellent piece to read. Thanks to Dzigbodi for sharing.
Thomas Adeetuk
College Library
Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608)263-3145
----- Original Message -----
From: Dzigbodi Akyea <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, February 8, 2007 3:28 pm
Subject: Big Labels but Little Context
To: [log in to unmask]
> *****************************************************************
>
> Note: Fiscal year of AAM is October 1 - September 30.
> *** Subscriptions for 2006/07 Membership are now due!!!!
>
> Join African Association of Madison, Inc. for $25 per year
>
> Mail check to: AAM, PO Box 1016, Madison, WI 53701
> Phone: 608-258-0261 -- Email: [log in to unmask]
> Web: www.AfricanAssociation.org
>
> *****************************************************************
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Thought I'd share this brilliant and beautifully written article by
> Ms Adichie, the author of "Purple Hibiscus". Also the author of "Half
> of a Yellow Sun".
> Have a good day.
>
> dzigbodi
>
> From the West, Big Labels but Little Context
> By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
> Monday, November 13, 2006; Page A21
> Growing up in Nsukka, a small university town in eastern Nigeria, I
> often had malaria. It was so commonplace that when you went to the
> medical center, a nurse would say, "Malaria has come again, hasn't
> it?" Because I know how easily treatable malaria is, I was surprised
> to learn that thousands of people die from it each year. People like
> the relatives of David Banda, Madonna's adopted son from Malawi.
> But of course most American media do not say "Malawi"; they just
> say "Africa." I realized that I was African when I came to the United
> States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned
> to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I
> was expected to know, to explain.
>
>
>
>
>
> I reject this facile compression of a varied continent into a
> monolithic country, but I have also come to accept that African
> nations do have much in common with one another. Most have a history
> of European colonization. Most also have a failure of leadership, a
> long line of presidents and prime ministers and heads of state all
> intent on the plunder of the state.
> And so I was wearing my "African" lenses as I watched Madonna on
> television, cautiously, earnestly explaining the media circus around
> her adoption. I did not think it my place to wonder what her
> motivation for adoption was. I did cringe, however, when she said that
> her greatest disappointment was that the media frenzy would discourage
> people who wanted to do the same thing that she had done: adopt an
> African child. She wanted people to go to Africa and see what she had
> seen; she wanted them, too, to adopt.
> Later, watching David Banda's biological father speak about being
> grateful that she would give David a "better life," I could not help
> but look away. The power differential was so stark, so heartbreakingly
> sad; there was something about it that made Africa seem terribly dispensable.
> Madonna will give David a better life, at least a materially better
> life: better food, housing, books. Whether this will make him a
> happier and normatively better human being is open to debate. What
> really matters is not Madonna's motivation or her supposed flouting of
> Malawian adoption laws (as though non-celebrities would not also
> hasten adoption processes if they could). Rather, it is the underlying
> notion that she has helped Africa by adopting David Banda, that one
> helps Africa by adopting Africa's children.
> It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently
> lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to
> reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in
> the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown
> poverty and conflicts without any context.
> If I were not African, I would, after watching the coverage, think
> of Africa as a place of magnificent wild animals in which black
> Africans exist as tour guides, or as a place of desperately poor
> people who kill or are killed by one another for little or no reason.
> I once watched CNN's Anderson Cooper, who is undoubtedly
> well-meaning, interview a Belgian (who, we were told, was a "Congo
> expert") about the conflict in that country, while Congolese people
> stood in the background and watched. Surely there was a Congolese who
> was qualified to speak about Congo. Surely there are Congolese who are
> working just as hard as the foreigners and who don't fit into the
> category of either killer or killed. Surely the future for Africa
> should be one in which Africans are in a position to raise their own children.
> Which brings me back to Madonna. I applauded her funding of
> orphanages in Malawi. I wish, however, that instead of asking
> television viewers to go to Africa and adopt, she had asked them to
> send a check to malaria-eradication organizations. I wish she had
> added, after one of those thoughtfully dramatic pauses, that Africa
> cannot depend on aid alone, that aid is like salted peanuts: The more
> failed leaders got, the more they wanted. I wish she had said that she
> was setting up an organization to use donations as micro-credit and
> that this organization, by the way, would be run by locals rather than
> expatriate staff whose expatriate salaries raise the rent in the cities.
> I wish she had pointed out, with suitable celebrity-style rage,
> that Western countries need to stop appeasing and propping up hopeless
> African leaders, that Western banks must stop enabling and accepting
> stolen money from these leaders, that Western donors who insist on the
> free movement of capital across borders must also insist on the free
> movement of labor, that Western trade subsidies make it impossible for
> Africans to compete. I wish she had then shown, with graphs on the
> screen, how these things affect the father and relatives of David Banda.
> Of course this isn't really about Madonna. It is about a formula
> that well-meaning people have adopted in looking at Africa, a
> surface-only, let's-ignore-the-real-reasons template that African
> experiences have all been forced to fit in order to be authentically
> "African." If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear
> to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts
> of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder
> whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of
> leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. I
> wonder whether I would know that Africa has class divisions, that
> wealthy Africans who have not stolen from their countries actually
> exist. I wonder whether I would know that corrupt African countries
> are also full of fiercely honest people and that violent conflicts are
> about resource control in an environment of (sometimes artificial) scarcity.
> Watching David Banda's father, I imagined a British David visiting
> him in 2021 and I wondered what they would talk about.
> Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a novelist, is the author of "Half of a
> Yellow Sun”
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Expecting? Get great news right away with email Auto-Check.
> Try the Yahoo! Mail Beta.
>
> *** Send email to the list: [log in to unmask] ***
> *** Access AAM list archives:
> http://listserv.icors.org/archives/AAM.html ***
>
>
>
>
*** Send email to the list: [log in to unmask] ***
*** Access AAM list archives: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/AAM.html ***
|
