Response To Ohuoba's The Perception Of Africa

There are many misconceptions that have been universally accepted mentioned in Curtis Keim’s book Mistaking Africa, many of which are based on biased and incorrect accounts and are extremely offensive. Three important myths are that Africa is a land of cannibals, it is backward and very uncivilized, and that it is one country where everyone and the climate are the same all over. These will be explained, refuted, and the detriment to the people of Africa will be discussed.

“‘Why do you say Africa instead of just saying the country you mean?’…‘You don’t know America. You say Senegal and American people, they say, Where is that...’” (Adichie 15).

In a freezing class, two brilliant minds unlocked the fiery passion that is their talent one an artist the other a writer. Bringing to light a history long forgotten creating abstract thoughts arbitrary to our own. Komi Olaf the artist and Okey Ndibe the writer not only enlightening the class but also the world with each brush stroke and each word. Every creation stemming from the hands of these masters tell of issues at the heart of Africa from colonialism to existential dilemmas. Thru spoken word, hip-hop, art, music, poems and literature issues close at heart to the artists and to Africa are portrayed. This paper will focus on the art exhibit by Komi Olaf and Foreign Gods inc by Okey Ndibe as spoken by them during their discussion in the class on October 13th. Where the talks focused on the key course objectives being stereotypes, post-colonialism, youth culture, and resistance.

In the midst of slavery’s storm, European slave traders used sales tactics that catastrophically diminished Africa’s reputation and African’s humanity. In the process, they destroyed Africa’s historical truth; and created images that Africans were unrefined savages that mindlessly roamed the grasslands with bones jutting from their noses, in loincloths, and spears in hand…simply as if they were mere human and behaved as untamed animals. Classifying Africans as inferior and uneducated is racist in theory

The suffocating air, rush of passersby, and eerily manufactured sounds of the airport left me in a haze. I clung to my mother’s calloused hands, comforted by her warmth and by the soothing presence of my sisters. We approached an escalator and descended into America and the open embrace of my father, who I hadn’t seen for years. Unbeknownst to me, I was venturing into a realm of vending machines, unbridled patriotism, and McDonald’s. The car ride that August night featured the sultry crooning of Fela Kuti, radiating from the stereo speakers, and the rambunctious exclaims of my father in Igbo. I recall him fervidly stating: “America na-esiri onye ofu si Afrika ike, ma obara uru,” which loosely translates to: America is hard for an African, but it is worth it. We arrived in the small

This week’s lecture notes, group discussions, and readings really resonate with me in all aspects. By reflecting on my childhood experiences in early 1980s in the United States of America, where I experienced discrimination from my fellow African American classmates, who believed that they have no association with Africa as a result, treated me very gravely through their verbal and physical abuse. I assumed their beliefs generated from the Eurocentric idea and colonization whereby assimilated and acculturated these African slaves into the European culture. Inevitably, the result generated denouncing any relationship with Africa or its people. At the same time they considered them a minority within their social existences and viewed as second-class citizens in the country they considered their own.

There is vast evidence that helps support the out-of-Africa theory, and if modern humans first evolved in Africa, there must have been distinct behavioral and morphological changes that occurred before leaving the African continent. Tattersall (2000) examined data from the fossil record, looking for evidence of cognitive and behavioral changes that were necessary for modern humans to acquire prior to spreading throughout the world. Fossils were used to compare the various parts of the skeletal structure of Neanderthals to H. sapiens found in Africa. Differences were found when comparing the rib cage and pelvis. With these differences found, a possible advantage of the structure of Homo sapiens over Neanderthals can be suggested. In addition,

Africa: a continent that has gone through many hardships, but still is home to some of the strongest people, strongest morals, and strongest beliefs. Africa has been tested with so many trials, is strewn with poverty, and has been put through countless tribulations, but somehow manages to overcome all of it. The authors of these stories analyze these trials and how they overcame them. These stories showcase how Africa upholds well-armored values throughout their trials by examining their actions when fought with separation, exploring their strong religious beliefs, and analyzing how they value a better future. Africa was a separated, un-unified place, but valued, wanted, and acted to abolish this disunion.

Immigrants and other foreigners see America much differently than Americans do; many non-natives have an almost grotesque stereotype of Americans and the same is true for the reverse. The typical American sees immigrants, specifically African immigrants, as one mass, though they are all very different with different cultures. Akunna remarks that many people in her class at the community college seem to think of Africa as a completely undeveloped continent: “They asked you where you learned to speak English and if you had real houses back in Africa and if you’d seen a car before you came to America,” (116). The fact that Akunna was asked if she “had real houses back in Africa” illustrates the misconceptions that many Americans have of African people. They believe what the media shows them of Africa is all that Africa is when the media’s representation of Africa is only a very small part of Africa.

Good afternoon, for the past few months I have been traveling around the United States in an effort to educate today’s youth about the complexity, diversity, and pure beauty that is defined by Africa. I have been sent to speak to you by the National Africana Studies Association as part of a campaign to promote the study of “Africa in the classroom.” Throughout the course of my journey, I’ve seen how obvious it is that the high schoolers across the country have little to no knowledge about Africa. Quite frankly, I feel that the lack of African knowledge serves as a tremendous disadvantage to an individual by inhibiting their understanding of what the extraordinary continent is in actuality. Students across the country have a preconceived misconception about every aspect of Africa, including their economy, slavery, and culture.

Within her speech, Ms. Adichie showcases her knowledge of international understanding and its consequences by appealing to her audience's sense of pathos and ethos. Adichie focuses on appealing to her audience’s sense of pathos to encourage emotional understanding. For example, she shares with us a conversation she once had with a professor, who “told [her] that [her] novel was not authentically African” because the characters “drove cars” and “were not starving”. She tells us about how she “did not know

Okolloh’s message was clear from the beginning, the Western media paints Africa to be a country of corruption, poverty, and disease, and the only way to stop such depictions is for fellow Africans to tell their stories. She got this point across numerous times by telling personal accounts of her youth. Her stories pulled at the emotions of the audience time and time again by her openness and humility. The narrative of her presentation

Another distorted image of Africa can be seen in popular western literature like the Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The Heart of Darkness depicts Africans as being savages that bring out the bad in Europeans visiting the continent. In all fairness Conrad does say the book takes place in the Congo, but he makes no effort to distinguish the Congo from other countries in Africa. However, Chinua Achebe in An Image of Africa argues that the Heart of Darkness was nothing more than a story that reiterated negative stereotypes about Africa and Africans. Achebe argues that Conrad reduced Africa into a “… metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril…reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind.” This quote, in my opinion, not only applies to the Heart of Darkness, but to

s a sociology major, I was broadly aware of the complexities of race relations within the U.S and I thought the class would simply solidify notions that I had previously held to be true. In reality, the class taught me a lot of invaluable information about the socio cultural spheres of Africa and how systematic relationships between the U.S and Africa have historically produced and reproduced the conditions in which Africa finds itself today. Our ideology, and I’m sure other classmates will agree, has been infiltrated with biased and Eurocentric images of justified world domination through early childhood socialization in the Texas public school system. The construct in which we have been placed in encourages complacency and a sort of traditional patriotism. Patriotism that can be described as the simple acceptance of the physical and social state of the country without openly challenging long held beliefs and practices, even if these beliefs enable structural violence against black communities by part of police enforcement, facilitate the active criminalization of blackness, brutalities, murders and institutionalized racism. The social forces that affect and produce our perceptions of Africa have been so seamlessly integrated into our conditioning, even as early as primary school, that I had been unable to recognize the racist schools of thought we have inherited from our colonial predecessors through outlets that are so seemingly benign, such as children's movies. The

Over the last few decades, global media conglomerates reporting on Africa, often portrays the continent in a state of distress and in need of humanitarian aid. On the other side of the world, the United States’ coverage on Blackness and correlated the Black experience with civil rights movements, racial disparities and inequities in social mobility. Despite the technological advances and access to transnational exchanges of culture, this analysis will investigate the propagation of cultural myths and frameworks with the support of global news networks, specifically focusing on the mythic frameworks surrounding Africa as an exotic monolith and Black Americans as hyperviolent and