It has become increasingly common for scholars, activists and politicians who see Africa from African vantage points to be outraged by neo-orientalist portrayals of Africa by scholars and media from the West. By “African vantage points”, I mean that they tend to explain and offer context, on the global stage, to the well-publicised crimes of Africa’s leaderships as opposed to calling them out. I mean, whilst they are critical of Muammar Gaddafi or Robert Mugabe, they are unwilling to support coalitions of “vanguards of justice and human rights” to flash them out, even if flashing out a bad leader comes by way of sanctions. These scholars and activists are my main audience.
It is my contention that we need to be kinder and more sensitive to the West’s celebrity-missionary intellectuals and media. They commit no crime when they “misrepresent” the continent. In fact, misrepresentation as a term does not even apply to them as, indeed, they are not mispresenting anything but simply doing their job. It is liberating to be aware that 95 per cent of academics, the media, and other commentators from the West will — oftentimes involuntarily, instinctively or by association — follow the foreign policy positions of their countries. So, Michela Wrong, Nic Cheeseman, Robert Guest and others remain intellectuals of empire. But with a sophistication; they are not crude like their predecessors (such as the colonial anthropologists who were, among other things, openly racist and abusive). This new breed of missionary-scholar speaks to the visible wrongs in our midst, but decides never to offer them any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction whatsoever, to the point that they have even conscripted surrogates from amongst us. This new breed is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their predecessors.
Reflecting…
