Editor,

Refer to the letter, "Why we must expose the self-appointed Africa expert” (The New Times, June 6).

Why would those who think that Africa is a country care how genuine the expertise of their "analyst” is? Most western audiences and readers have been fed with one-dimensional cartoonish views of Africa by their pseudo experts for so long that we shouldn’t be surprised if the average Westerner believes most Africans live in trees.

Any Tom, Dick, Harry and their uncles who have ever set foot on the African continent becomes an instant expert on the 54 (55 if you include Western Sahara) highly varied countries that it comprises.

Ever wonder why so-called resident correspondents of western media houses will, for instance, report on Burundi or eastern DR Congo from Nairobi or Johannesburg, thousands of kilometres away, and give the impression of reporting locally without any health warning to their audiences and readers that they have no greater insights into developments on the ground than if they were in London, Paris or Washington?

Worse still, a lot of African media will often also reproduce these stories and give them even greater dissemination in their own countries.

Those correspondents from so far away from the theatre they are reporting on are often also advertised as experts. Yet the glaring deficiencies in their knowledge of the people, places, the developments and their dynamics are very clear in their reporting to most of us locals.

But given the even greater ignorance of their target audiences and readership about our region and individual countries, they can continue to feed them with hilariously false stories of the goings on in "dark” Africa and get away with it indefinitely.

Mwene Kalinda