A new Africa calls for a new understanding and narrative

For a long time the dominant media spaces in the world have packaged and presented a worrying template on African life. This is a template that highlights conflict, poverty and disease as the outstanding markers of life on this vast continent. These are arguably the only reason we are easily accorded airtime on the global news circuit. When security forces in Uganda took on members of the Rwenzururu Kingdom in Western Uganda, the lasting narrative was of the arrest of a defiant king and the death of scores of unnamed people. The unfortunate incident had many East Africans proving once again that they had not invested enough time in learning more about what happens across their borders with many asking questions like, why does Uganda have kings and yet it has a president? The gory pictures of the dead and of women paraded naked or thinly clothed that did the rounds on social media fit so well in the now firm stereotype of a continent where life is not of so much value. The high death toll didn’t seem an incentive enough for the storytellers to provide more context to the story beyond repeating of official statements from state security officials. Kasese proved that not so much has changed in the way such stories form how the rest of the world looks at us. It was just another story about African ‘tribes’ and lots of lives lost in a horrific manner. To complete the picture, a journalist was arrested and later charged for abetting terrorism something that gave the story an East African angle thanks to the fact that the Ugandan journalist in question is a well known face on the Kenyan station, KTN. Actually her story took on a ‘Migingo’ twist with some people on Twitter arguing whether Joy Doreen Biira should be referred to as a Kenyan journalist or a Ugandan journalist. All said and done, the politically volatile Rwenzori region is another reminder that we should do more in terms of national building and regional integration instead of whining about how the colonialists left us with arbitrary borders and using that as an excuse for all conflicts. After all it is not really true that before these borders were drawn, Africa was beacon of peace where people only exchanged hugs and business cards. We need to stop feeding the hopeless African narrative with such avoidable conflicts. The cry of Africans telling their stories has to start from ensuring that the stories are the ones that bring hope instead of fear to those who inhabit the continent. In Kenya, a new narrative emerged with the early announcement of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education results without any known cases of examination malpractices. Praises were heaped on the Education Cabinet Secretary, Fred Matiang’i for bringing back credibility to exams that had become a sport for cheats. As an educationist myself, I am pleased that Kenya seems to have woken up to the fact that education is no longer a mere basic right but more importantly a strategic sector for any serious country with aspirations of creating a competitive workforce in the future. This new narrative for a country where corruption levels long lost their shock value is clearly a step in the right direction. Continuing with the good stories, RwandAir received the second Airbus nicknamed ‘Umurage’ which means heritage. Umurage did not receive as much media coverage like the first Airbus, ‘Ubumwe’ and to me this was the real positive angle to the story – the fact that such a good deed is starting to be seen as a normal thing. That right there is what success looks like. The moment we stop being shocked and over excited for what should be normal then we are on the right track. Look at how many of us were shocked that Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh conceded defeat after losing an election. Tales of fraudulent elections have become the dominant narrative that the Gambian situation is now seen almost as an exception. Even before Gambia could sink in, it emerged that Angola’s long serving leader Eduardo dos Santos will not contest in next year’s election. The point I am trying make here is that these shockingly good stories from Kenya, Rwanda, Gambia or Angola should serve as the incentive for us to change the narrative that starts with categorising Africa as a collective block of failure. This is why we need a new narrative that exhausts an individual country instead of lazily grouping each situation as TIA (This is Africa).

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A new Africa calls for a new understanding and narrative