From: Faiza Hassan

Does the Intelligence services of the west also get Africa wrong. Just curious.

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On Jan 6, 2014 3:44 PM, “Yona Maro” wrote:

Western media continue – and will continue – to get coverage of African issues wrong because of their inability to confront this unspoken hierarchy of knowledge and the barriers it generates. Firstly, in this scheme, The Rest is necessarily set up in opposition to The West in resulting coverage, and issues or situations are rarely, if ever, analysed for their intrinsic impact or worth. Events or situations are therefore analysed as what the West is not, and so articles are a process of either reifying or undermining pre-existing assumptions that are either set up in history books or in other literature about Africa in general or the phenomenon at hand. So the coverage of the crisis in South Sudan is either used to reiterate or undermine beliefs about ethnicity and its role in conflicts in Africa: where “ethnicity” is a trope that can easily distinguish “Africa” from The West but is now a shorthand so overused and misused that it’s lost its explanatory value.

Secondly, one must recall that any reading of a polyglot nation using a colonial language is necessarily an act of interpretation, and Western coverage of African situation is always going to suffer from this process. Sending people who speak only English or even Swahili to find people who also speak English or Swahili is always going to create a selection bias, and necessitates a process of translation within which the nuance of coded, non-verbal communication will be lost.
Link:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/why-do-western-media-get-africa-wrong-20141152641935954.html?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffereb012&utm_medium=twitter

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