African Intellectuals and Decolonization

The African Renaissance and Discourse Ownership

The African Renaissance and Discourse Ownership Challenging Debilitating Discourses on Africa Steve Odero Ouma Introduction Africa in the twenty-first century has experienced significant changes and advances toward realizing the African Renaissance. In comparison to the immediate postindependence period of the late 1980s and early 1990s when political instability was the norm, today Africa is without a doubt more peaceful. During these periods there were more than twenty-one military coups in Africa, namely, in Algeria, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Central African Republic, Dahomey, Ethiopia , Gabon, Gambia, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), and Zanzibar. Aside from the significantly smaller coups and military regimes in place and the institution of formal democracies in the continent and an ongoing process of constitutional reform in a plethora of countries from Kenya to Ghana, the continent is a far cry from the tumultuous region it was twenty years ago. Additionally, regarding economic growth, the World Bank has reported that sub-Saharan Africa alone registered an average growth of 6 percent GDP for the first time in 2006, well above historic averages for both developed countries and all developing countries.1 Despite the global financial crisis, Africa registered an increased average growth rate of 6.2 percent in 2007 and a drop to 3 percent in 2008. This is against the backdrop of economies in developed nations in the Euro zone registering an average of –4.8 percent, with Italy recording negative economic growth rate of –2.6 percent, Belgium 118 / The African Renaissance and Discourse Ownership –3.1 percent, and Germany –3.8 percent in January 2009.2 Moreover, living standards in Africa have hit their highest mark in the last five years since independence. Foreign private capital flow into Africa amounted to $38 billion in 2006, a figure surpassing the inflow of foreign aid. Further, with the establishment of the African Union (AU), a more elaborate regional organization as compared to its predecessor , the Organization of African Unity (OAU), African countries have for the first time been able to assemble fairly effective military forces to serve as peacekeepers in troubled African regions such as Somalia and Sudan. These facts do not erase the reality that Africa still faces formidable challenges relating to poverty, good governance, and political and economic stability. Despite these commendable achievements, the image of Africa and the African is forlornly pejorative internationally. Many people around the world today generally display an abhorrent lack of knowledge about Africa because although they have never visited Africa, they possess certain images about the continent that they believe to be true. These images are a product of predominantly Western media and its representations of the continent in television programs, movies , and the Internet, as well as in print media, including newspapers, magazines, journals, and books.3 The predominantly Western media is largely responsible for a systematic trend of misrepresenting Africa to the world. In the same manner that colonialism had a distortive effect on the psyche of the colonized and that this distortion continues to manifest itself in the lives of individuals in the postcolonial world, many sociologists , psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts agree that when individuals are continuously fed a type of image or misrepresentation , the result is the congealing of the images to form stereotypes or generalizations.4 These meta-contexts have framed perceptions about the continent in a vicious cycle that has spanned generations.5 This cycle is perpetuated when children of a given generation are born into an environment in which these metacontexts are already deeply entrenched in the social fabric, from education to entertainment. All through childhood nurturing to adulthood, a worldview is formed through this warped mental construction . Generalizations and stereotypes, once deeply entrenched in the minds of persons, invariably create conditions that engender explanatory constructs used to interpret events or evaluate behav- Steve Odero Ouma / 119 iors, such as the cultural practices of Africans, rather than inquisitorial constructs seeking to investigate the reasons behind events or certain behaviors. This constant misrepresentation has led to warped perceptions of Africans and Africa among Africans and the rest of the world. Some of these perceptions, for example, can be as ridiculous as the belief that many people in the continent are living Stone Age lifestyles in caves and trees while clad in leaves, bark, and animal skins.6 These perceptions prevail...