You ask if poverty in Africa is as bad as the media portrays.

No. No, it isn't. Africa is used by the media. It is used as a tool for boosting ratings, it is used to make us feel better about our lives and the helpfulness of our government, and the media is, as such, maintaining prevailing stereotypes about the continent and its people. The bottom line with large media networks is their ratings. When Africa can secure them ratings by providing pornographic images of starvation, violence, anguish and destruction, the media is quick to disseminate these memorable images. When the poverty of Westerners or the dishonesty and corruption of their politicians is raised for discussion, Africa is available to provide examples of people in much more deplorable circumstances and leaders who seem to be almost cartoonishly evil. Consider how many times danger, violence, sickness, death, theft, rape, child soldiers, cannibalism, famine, drought, locust, victimization of white people, political disappearances, mobs, dictatorships and shootings are discussed as the problems of Africa. Have you seen many stories about its developing infrastructure, budding economic alliances, the growth of its local small businesses, the achievements of its students, writers and musicians? These positive signs are good news, but from a network's point of view, they don't make good news.

Of course, there are areas that are terribly poor, where people live in sprawling city dumps, have absolutely no job opportunities, wade through their own sewage and die of treatable 19th century illnesses. There are areas where tiny children cling to your hands and follow you in huge numbers looking filthy and begging for money, where disfigured beggars crawl on all fours pleading with you and calling you "boss," where the hospitals run out of anesthesia for months at a time, where there are no surgeons. There are places that look worse than the media portrays and they need a great deal of help. They are a part of Africa and that part sucks. But why does the media focus almost exclusively on them? What might the West have to gain by portraying Africa as a continent that cannot look out for itself, a totally helpless and miserable place? Do you think that mainstream media is as critical of our own country? Do celebratory articles about technological inventions, clever CEOs, the great fun of famous people, sporting triumph and discussions of American power and influence appear more or less frequently than stories that examine American poverty, crime, sickness, prison inadequacy or environmental short-sightedness? Are you satisfied with your media?

But let me clarify. Many of the Westerners who come here for work or "to help" end up sticking around because they like the place, not because they feel like absolutely irreplaceable and life-saving missionary saints. This is called the developing world and it is developing. Like most places in the world, many of these countries boast well-developed, westernized, mansion-packed, golf course-having areas for their affluent citizens and the urban areas cater to these lucky ones with restaurants and clubs that would be at home in a major U.S. city. But that is little encouragement. The good part is that numerous countries are slowly filling the gap between these rich people and the sniffling child beggars. They are filling it with something like a middle or working class that manages to get by and that class is increasingly connected to the rest of the world with cheaply available cell phone and Internet technology. In terms of rural areas, there are also millions of small and self-sufficient villages scattered across the entire continent; they are, factually speaking, poor, but not necessarily destitute or even necessarily discontent.

The UN publishes a list of the most impoverished countries every year.* Africa always dominates this list and this chimes with the popular understanding that Africa is suffering. But if you speak with hard-working young Africans, many of them are not clamoring for aid money or begging for air-lifted bags of rice, they are speaking intelligently about the U.S. trade policies that prevent their industries from developing. They complain that things they are being given (old clothes, old machines, old books) undercut the market for things that they make and force them into a crippling and humiliating begging-bowl mentality. At many of the major gatherings of world leaders in recent years, delegates from Africa have not been clamoring as loudly for aid as they have been for a reduction in subsidies from Western governments to Western farmers (these prevent Africans from competing with Western industry, despite the relative cheapness of their labor) or a reduction of import duties for African goods (which also prevent Africans from taking advantage of foreign markets). To people who understand the economic situation, Africa is not so much poor as it is disadvantaged—or more pointedly, taken advantage of.


* Find the UN's most recent Development Index on the Internet. Which of the ratings do you find most interesting and why? Each student could compare one African nation with the United States in ten different categories. What are the comparisons that you find most shocking, most important or least revealing? What is the Development Index good for?



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