Spectacular Africa

Debord’s idea of the spectacle as a means of maintaining the status quo can be applied to Africa (or Haiti) and the way in which aid agencies and media persistently portray the continent as chaotic and impoverished in order to advance their own interests and those of Western governments. These images sell the message that teary-eyed African children desperately need to be “saved by wealthy Americans and that Africans are incapable of developing functional societies without Western meddling. To most Americans, “Africa” means famine, AIDS, illiteracy, genocide, soldiers, colorful “natives,” and elephants; we don’t even conceive of an Africa that includes businessmen, philosophers, orchestras, and skyscrapers. When I was about ten, I was shocked to discover that the African continent actually has electricity, big cities, and universities—magazines and television had only shown me skeletal Ethiopians in the desert and water buffalo stampeding through the safari. Recently, when I told a friend I would be going to Namibia (one of the most stable countries in Africa), she exclaimed in horror, “Oh my god! You’ll get machete-d! You’ll get AIDS!!”

In reality, most Africans are not starving or getting raped, and are living ordinary lives in towns and cities free of lions. Yet even when one knows that the entire continent of Africa is not a pit of despair, it is hard to shake the immediate thought: “Oh…Africa…” This is because the American public is relentlessly bombarded with the same tragic, decontextualized images of Africa, with no background information, no positive stories about progress and innovation, and no insight about the West’s contribution to many of the problems that do exist in Africa.

Not only does the sensational coverage of African wars, disease, and starvation fuel the non-profit sector, but it also functions to maintain hegemonic assumptions about race. When combined with the media narratives about African-Americans, and Haitians, these images encode blackness as “poverty and violence” and create a sense that black people are somewhat less human than white people by only showing chaos and suffering among masses of people, rather than including a personalized voice of an individual who is actually experiencing the situation. Gotham discusses the media’s role in reinforcing racial prejudice in the following paragraph:

“I want to suggest that race and class can also be viewed as spectacles, power-laden media productions and performances that embrace strategies of ephemerality, discontinuity, and fragmentation in the delivery of information. In general, the way the major news media framed their coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath reinforced an overwhelmingly negative view of New Orleans as a city of rampant crime, intense poverty, racial tension, and other pathologies.”

The American public is constantly fed images of black “dysfunction,” which is presented in a way that focuses on individual responsibility and ignores the structural inequalities that create and sustain racialized poverty and crime. As Gotham states, in covering Katrina “Little media attention was given to the long-term effects of government retrenchment and cutbacks in weakening the public infrastructure of disaster-prevention and disaster-relief policy.” The same can be said about Africa. The media tell us nothing about the role of Reagan/Thatcher neo-liberal economic policies in producing much of the poverty and insecurity in contemporary Africa, and instead frame the problems as though they are simply a result of Africans’ “hopeless inefficiency” and genocidal dictators. Africa is turned into a spectacle of horrific suffering or wondrous exotica: starvation, rape, ethnic cleansing, sensational landscapes, abundant wildlife, and people with unusual piercings. It is also part of the world that is persistently referred to as “third-world” or “developing—terms that barely conceal white supremacist ideology, and justify the need for American and European efforts to “develop” the continent.

Altogether, the media uses spectacles of urban crime, natural disasters, and extreme poverty among Africans, African-Americans, Haitians, etc. to reinforce notions of black inferiority and distract from the reality of systemic, structural racism that is the root of these problems.