For our own health, take Afropessimism with a pinch of salt
It has been just over 18 months since the internet was briefly set ablaze by the controversy over a reductive, condescending and paternalistic recruitment advert in the New York Times, which was looking for its next Nairobi bureau chief.
The ad was riddled with pre-judgments about the kinds of stories the successful candidate would be filing — something one would think was borderline unethical for a news organisation.
“Our Nairobi bureau chief has a tremendous opportunity to dive into news and enterprise across a wide range of countries, from the deserts of Sudan and the pirate seas of the Horn of Africa, down through the forests of Congo and the shores of Tanzania.”
This wasn’t even the most offensive part of the ad.
“[East Africa] is an enormous patch of vibrant, intense and strategically important territory with many vital story lines, including terrorism, the scramble for resources, the global contest with China and the constant push-and-pull of democracy versus authoritarianism.”
These are the stories that the New York Times explicitly wanted from its Africa correspondents. Did the publication’s journalists even need to leave their homes if the stories they would be submitting had already been written for them?
African countries have had to contend with a fresh wave of this type of casual condescension and gleeful pessimism from the (mainly Western) media since the start of the global outbreak of the coronavirus.
Whether because of a delay in mass testing in some countries, or simply because the Covid virus hadn’t yet made it to the shores of others, Africa was among the last regions in the world to report its first wave of widespread infections at a time when the pandemic already had a death grip on countries such as Italy, China, the US and Iran.
A sigh of collective disbelief that this sickness hadn’t yet torn its way through the African continent was audible from many in the international media.
As recently as September 2020, headlines included the Guardian’s “Confounding: Covid may have already peaked in many African countries”, as the paper breathlessly reported on speculation by British MPs on why the virus had not behaved “as expected” in Africa.
One hypothesis was that we were not dying in sufficiently high numbers, as anticipated by UK health experts, because “people [have] pre-existing immunity to Covid-19, caused by exposure to other infections”.
In other words, the pandemic wasn’t killing as many of us as expected so it must be because
Africa is already riddled with disease. The stereotypes really do write themselves.
Elsewhere, earlier this month
The Economist led with the front page: “The pandemic could undercut Africa’s precarious progress”.
The editorial got off to a good start: “Sub-Saharan GDP fell by 2.6% in 2020, compared with 3.5% for the world. Of the 24 countries that posted any growth at all, 11 were in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its official Covid-19 statistics look good, too: with 14% of the global population, it has about 3% of recorded cases and deaths.”
But cognitive dissonance swiftly took over in the form of speculation that the continent must surely be undercounting infections and deaths, followed by an almost hopeful prediction that economies would soon collapse as a consequence of strained balance sheets, underspending on welfare and furlough amid widespread lockdowns, and the likelihood that Africa would fall to the back of the vaccine queue, lacking as it does the bulk buying power of wealthier countries.
The latter prediction is the most chilling of all, as the growing phenomenon of vaccine hoarding by rich nations has begun to emerge in the wake of successful vaccine trials.
In Canada, the health authorities have signed deals with pharmaceutical companies to secure as many as 414-million doses of the vaccine — which according to Duke University in North Carolina is enough to vaccinate its population five times over.
In addition, Canada has signed up for — and made a $345m (about R5bn) contribution to — Covax, an initiative of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, to make vaccines more equitably available around the globe, especially to low-income countries.
The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will secure a further 1.9-million doses from the Covax facility, enabling it to jump the queue ahead of countries lacking the financial resources to make direct side deals with the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing the vaccine.
My wonderful therapist often warns me that the danger of having others project their hopes, fears, expectations and frustrations onto you lies not in the fact that they have a distorted impression of you, but that you might start to believe in that distortion of yourself.
The same is surely true of an Africa upon which the world projects its lowest expectations, its guilt, its greed, and ultimately its shame.
The danger lies not in our being underestimated by the Western media but in our starting to believe that the toxic analysis of who we are and what we can achieve is both accurate and inevitable.