Window on Africa

In a series of 140 –character tweets, he wrote:

‘I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending.

Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles.

Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems.

All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country.
People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations.

None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure.

But of course it did, because people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world.

Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.’

Mr Cole’s tweets were quite timely for me. In the last few weeks, encounters with strangers have all in some way led to the 'Africa situation'. The 'Africa situation' being what people have seen or read about Africa and taken as the gospel. 

What follows are looks of pity and a conversation that goes like this: ‘It’s terrible what’s happening in Africa’, ‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like to grow up in conflict’ and my favourite: ‘Do elephants walk along the street with people?’ Yes. Believe it or not that is a legitimate question, asked more than once. The animal though tends to change every now and then.

It’s like someone asking me when I’m overseas if kangaroos roam the streets of the CBD. Which, I’ll note, has also happened on more than one occasion.  A misconception.

A common misconception/myth/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is that Africa is a country and not a continent. Firstly there are 54 countries – the most recent being South Sudan. It has a population of about 1 billion and thousands of languages from Cape Town all the way up to Cairo.

The colours of the continent are as diverse as walking through Melbourne’s CBD. Indian Africans, White Africans, Asian Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, Arab Africans, the list goes on. With all this diversity, it begs to question why one area of Africa is usually imprinted in people’s minds. Is there violence? Yes. Is there poverty? Yes. Is there starvation? Yes.

But what you may not read about Africa is that in the middle of this supposedly unfortunate continent, you’ll find 3G connectivity, Louis Vuitton stores and even the golden arches of McDonalds.

While the rest of the world may still be stuck with images from Bob Geldof’s Live Aid concert of starving children, or the 1980’s ‘Out of Africa’ film, Africa has been making strides. What’s interesting is how this part of Africa is still being portrayed today.

Celebrities clamouring to support charity after charity because without them, Africa wouldn’t survive, right? Images of glamorous models and celebrities surrounded by animals in deepest, darkest Africa, or them cradling snot-faced children who have seemingly been saved from their backward way of living continue to flood our sub-conscious.

Why not replace some of these images with Africans in science, leading the way in cutting edge innovation, or technology, or the arts or fashion. Again, the list goes on.

That is what will help the continent in the long term.  When African innovation can be celebrated on a global stage, this then encourages more Africans to do the same, and with that economies do well, jobs are created and you veer closer to breaking the cycle of poverty.

This is not to dismiss the challenges that the continent faces, which are many. But this is not a problem akin to Africa alone. 

As Teju Cole writes, ‘The paradox is this: not every aspect of the life of those who are terribly poor is terrible poverty… Everything—the normal things and the awful things—happens all at once for other people. You know, just as in your life.”