LETTERS: How best should we look at Africa?

Editor, RE: “A new Africa calls for a new understanding and narrative” (The New Times, December 4). Looking at Africa through continental, regional, country, or even sub-country lenses may have its uses, after all that is what models are for. However, the most meaningful and potentially revolutionary way of looking at Africa is by elevating the individual African voice above group voices. Africans must put individuality ahead of community. That will help Africans improve how they discuss politics, economics, and security. By focusing on individuals first they will build better societies based on re-balancing in favour of more understanding, compassion and empathy. Community that has been used as a cover by selfish people and has obscured the role of personal responsibility, ethical choices, and the respect and dignity that attaches to people rather than communities. It might lead Africans and other groups to stop insisting on people’s responsibilities to their communities and start considering their own responsibilities to themselves and to others, whom they might come to see not as members of groups allegedly opposed to their own but rather as individuals. That is what I call granular thinking. Forget about other templates. They will lead us nowhere. Imboko Ndiranga *** “For a long time the dominant media...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...” So what is new about this? It is in reality nothing more than a repackaged contemporary version of that old western meme of “Africa, the Dark Continent”. And what is more, we Africans help to perpetuate this continent-wide stereotyping, in the behavior of some of our “rulers” as well as the African reporter-analysts who have borrowed wholesale that western conceptual template for how to cover Africa. Mwene Kalinda

Opinions

LETTERS: How best should we look at Africa?