I don’t know how to teach about Africa, and yet it must be done. That might be a surprising admission for someone who lived on the continent for three years, who has studied, wrote about, and talked about Botswana, the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Somalia, South Africa, and Tanzania in some depth, and seriously considered pursuing a Ph.D. in African history and politics, but I question my teaching about Africa.
For one, why am I teaching and writing about Africa in general, when I just mentioned 8/54 (55 if you count occupied Western Sahara, and 56 if you count unrecognized Somaliland) African states, located throughout the continent? Who would ever think of writing about Europe or Asia in some massively generalized sense? Spoiler: This guy. It’s pretty impressive. And yet, we persist. Africa exists as a figurative black/dark hole for many people, so in that sense any light is useful. But it’s impossible to generalize a continent that is far bigger, far more populous, and far more diverse than most people imagine.
As Binyavanga Wainaina satirically wrote in 2005, “Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”
I know all this, and knew this all 10 years ago when I first fantasized about living in East Africa for a year after being inspired to learn about the continent by a wonderful teacher. I was familiar with the neo-colonial tropes, and yet when I read some of what I wrote during the year of Tanzania, I am a little embarrassed by some of the judgments I made. At the end of a year, I assumed I knew better than district officials about how to run the schools, and assumed I was, for the most part, a better teacher than my Tanzanian colleagues. The school system I was working in had massive flaws and challenges, but my youthful arrogance and self-assuredness were part of a long history of white judgment of Africa and Africans.
Can I be trusted to write and educate about Africa? And yet, the reality is that most Americans know next to nothing about Africa. Did some of what I shared help my friends and family who followed my blog help to better understand a small subsection of the African experience? Are the stereotypes we have about Africa – dark, diseased, dangerous, poor, full of conflict, and so on – a result of lack of knowledge that can only be remedied through education and the building of empathy? What sorts of a responsibility do we, as Americans, have for Africa’s underdevelopment?
Certainly, I have fallen prey to believing these stereotypes. I recall when I was younger being excited about traveling the world at some point in the future, but expressing disinterest in Africa, turned off by the stereotypes I had consumed and fear of foreign disease. Indeed, the West African Ebola outbreak revealed many of these tropes are still a major part of our American consciousness. And yet, returning from my travels, some of the funniest and most engaging stories I have about my experiences, if not told carefully, essentialize and reinforce some of the stereotypes I claim to want to subvert.
I learned earlier today that I will be teaching a section of African History next year, and my first thought was, “How can I do justice to the continent and its incredible diversity in a term, knowing that for many students this might be the only time in their lives that they learn about Africa?” Do I focus on early history? African empires? Colonialism and the slave trade? Post-colonial movements? Corrupt dictators and structural adjustment? Public health successes? Negative media portrayals? Ingenuity, innovation, and potential?
When I taught African/Middle Eastern history in Somaliland, it was easy to center the Somali experience because all my students were Somalis. It was easy for them to dissect stereotypes of Africans and Muslims, even if many of them saw themselves as more Arab than African, internalizing an anti-blackness. Nevertheless, because media stereotypes of Somalis as pirates, terrorists and warlords abound and it was self-evident to students that their ethnicity and country was being portrayed unfairly in mass media, ignoring the many great things about life in Somaliland. When Anderson Cooper and his crew came to film a segment 60 minutes, my student interrogated them on media bias, asking deep questions about how the segment intended to portray Somaliland.
How do I do that in a context where the only context many students have for Africa is images of famine, poverty, and war? The first step will be to coax out students’ existing knowledge and perspectives, not to chastise them for what they’ve picked up from their culture, but to surface what is already there and some of the misconceptions they might have. Then, I must make intentional links between America and students experiences on the topics we discuss to highlight the incredible diversity of the continent, and to balance between covering joy and pain to ensure that students develop as complete a sense of perspective as possible in order to build empathy for the experiences of Africans who have so often been constructed as a dark, foreign and dangerous other.