A former BBC journalist explains how Western media systematically covers Africa through disaster and poverty while ignoring its modern cities, infrastructure, and culture. He points to graphic footage shown after attacks in Kenya but not the US, and YouTuber Ayesha Speed's audience shocked by Africa's actual modernity, showing how news values distort an entire continent.
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So you've worked with certain international media organizations before, like the BBC?
Yes, I have.
And you believe that these guys deliberately chisel the kind of information that comes to Africa and that is about Africa? What direction do they take the stories to? Is it in a way that paints Africa bad?
Of course, nothing paints Africa in good light. No, absolutely nothing. And I'll give you very many examples. If you watch a terrorist attack in the United States of America, for example, you will never see blood, you'll never see a dead body. But when a terrorist attack happens in Kenya or any part of Africa, they will show dead bodies.
Even in the Middle East, maybe Gaza.
Even Gaza, they show, but they will not show their own. I was in the UK when I was working with the BBC. Never single moment I saw a dead body in any stories. They don't do that. But if it happens in Africa, they will show it. So there is a deliberate narrative architecture going on, of course, in the media space and in the media industry. That's what it is. And so what you have from Western media and international media when they come to Africa— yeah, that matter— the intention normally is go to the spaces where there is extreme poverty Or take pictures of hungry children. Of those faces. Yeah. Take pictures of naked children, malnourished children with big bellies, skinny kids. Take pictures of how poor Africa is. And let me tell you, the other day, and allow me to say this, we had a very young YouTuber called Ayesha Speed. Many people know him. Oh, yes. He can vast many parts of the continent. And if you watch the streams, uh, many of the comments, especially from people who've never been to Africa, who— yeah, and many who think Africa is a country, yeah, not a continent, were shocked to see that there are people who are so happy, so lively, so full of their culture.
And there's a whole lot going on in Africa, and there's a whole lot.
And there is modernity in Africa. We have high-rise buildings, we have lifts and escalators. You have pay— we've tarmacked roads, we've got cars including electric cars. Yeah, people are shocked because the image painted of Africa is one where people still live in thatched grass, thatched houses. Yeah, they don't go to school, there's no electricity.
And amazingly so, some of the guys who were surprised to see Africa in that light were Blacks. Yes, Black Americans.
And many of them are saying, I want to go back to my motherland because of this. Now they can come to their motherland because they've seen this progress. Yes, we're not where we need to be, but there is something going on.
Do you think there is deliberate— these things are so in Africa or about Africa because number one, there is a need to demarket Africa so as not to present her as the richest continent, and then the exploitation can continue. More like justifying the reason why we have to keep sending help with one hand while we're stealing with the other hand.
My first lesson in journalism, my lecturer told us, news is when a man bites a dog and not the other way around. That's the first introduction to news.
So meaning that it is not news if it is numb.
Exactly. You go for the bizarre, for the morbid, for the sad. And that's why when you watch news, it's tilted towards death, despair, and destruction. If it doesn't have those components, then it's not news. It's a struggle even in our own local media, where if tonight you want to watch the news, chances are part of the top 4 stories, it will either be a corruption scandal, it will be somebody who was killed, or it will be people somewhere who are dying of hunger. And so it normalizes and numbs your senses that this is the world we live in. It's just death, destruction, destruction, and poverty.
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