HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA
By Binyavanga Wainaina
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title.
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever.
Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless.
Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances.
Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla.
1. Why do you think the author says to use the words "Darkness" or "Safari"?
2. What do you think it means to treat Africa "as if it were one country"?
3. Why do you think the author says you shouldn't have "African characters laugh," or show "school-going children who aren't suffering"?
4. What kind of stereotypes about Africa is the author criticizing in this article? How do you know? When have you seen these stereotypes yourself?
5. Who do you think he's criticizing? Why?
6. Most African countries were colonized by European countries until the 1960s or 70s. Think back to the poem "White Man's Burden" that we read earlier in the year. What kinds of reasons did Europeans give for their colonization?
7. What do you think is the connection between the reasons Europeans gave for colonization and the stereotypes that people still have about the continent?
