Africa Is Not a Country: Breaking through the harmful stereotypes

Africa has 54 countries, more than 2,000 languages and1.4 billion people – if you need reminding, which you do.

“Not everyone is allowed a complex identity,” Dipo Faloyin writes in the introduction to Africa Is Not a Country, after a beautiful, joyous description of his family. “Being able to define yourself openly and fully is a privilege; it is a grace many take for granted… Few entities have been forced through [a] field of distorted reality as many times as Africa.”

This book aims both to show us how a whole continent has been reduced to harmful stereotypes, and where we are all failing. Largely, Faloyin – a senior editor at Vice in London, where his work has a specific focus on culture, race and identity – lambasts colonialists, charities and the media. (Full disclosure: Faloyin has edited my work before for Vice, but we have never met.)

Bob Geldof, he says, is 'the de facto spokesperson for this new age of celebrity-backed philanthropy'

In a chapter called The birth of white saviour imagery, Faloyin looks at the rise of “fundraising by any means necessary”, speculating that cameras overtook colonialists as possibly the most “dangerous” tool used against Africa. Bob Geldof, he says, is “the de facto spokesperson for this new age of celebrity-backed philanthropy”.

There was Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which “condensed all of the worst stereotypes of the region”, presenting Africa as a place of “dread and fear” where the only water is the “bitter sting of tears”, and Live Aid in the 1980s, which effectively ignored the political underpinnings of Ethiopia’s famine. There is Comic Relief, which continues to be criticised for how it centres white celebrities in campaigns related to African countries.

There is the once most viral video, Kony 2012, which was already out of date when it aired, and encouraged the Ugandan and US military to threaten the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group instead of respecting the viewpoints of northern Uganda’s civilians, who were supportive of amnesties and peace deals.

Do the ends justify the means when it comes to raising money, Faloyin asks. Or can, as has happened on many occasions, the lack of nuance do more harm than good? What long-term damage has this type of lens caused to Africans from across the continent who try to be seen as equals in global settings, but can struggle to do business, get equal pay or be recognised for their expertise in all sorts of areas?

What does it mean to be patronised or pitied before you are even seen, to paraphrase Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? And how much tourism money is Africa losing if westerners never consider going on holiday there?

Pop culture

Then there is pop culture: books and movies, particularly Hollywood-made ones, where the “go-to formulas have proven frustratingly lucrative, and a magnet for critical acclaim” and “Africans are featured as bit-part players in their own countries”.

The chief flaw of the book is exactly the one it’s titled for: that Africa is not a country and one manuscript can never be anything but superficial when criss-crossing a continent. Though it comes to 351 pages, covering so much ground means Faloyin inevitably falls into the same holes – of failing to provide context – that he is criticising. (For example, he uses Ugandan government quotes to counter the misleading Kony 2012 documentary, without including the further context that the government also had reason to be insincere about the reality of what was happening in the north, given that they were accused of carrying out war crimes there.)

He tells us how 'everything in Lagos is negotiable', to the extent that his Nigerian vet offered his family another family's dog upon 'losing' theirs

Faloyin is aware of this, beginning with disclaimers, including that he is not “generically African”, he’s Nigerian, and the book reflects his viewpoint as such. His writing is at its strongest when he describes either his relatives, or Lagos – Nigeria’s economic capital and the city of his birth. By population, Lagos is “London, New York and Uruguay combined”, where “traffic… is the city’s official sport”. He tells us how “everything in Lagos is negotiable”, to the extent that his Nigerian vet offered his family another family’s dog upon “losing” theirs (“our ‘good boy’ was eventually found again”).

The history sections feel rushed. Faloyin looks at the so-called “scramble for Africa”, when European colonialists (“the White Men In Khaki… names that are still taught with glory in schools, such as Livingstone and Stanley”) carved up the continent. He then goes through the post-independence history of seven countries, and on to a chapter on the priceless treasures looted from Africa and efforts to get them back from European museums.

It is easy to point out that this book tries to cover too much ground, but how many texts written by western writers throughout history have done the same?

Africa Is Not a Country is a necessary book that deserves its place in the canon as essential reading for anyone seeking an introduction to this vast continent – as well as  the rest of us, who need to be regularly challenged on what we think we know about Africa and the damage done by that.