Who are you, Africa?

In a couple of hours i will be on my way to Frankfurt airport, once more, this time for my flight to Nairobi. It’s another journey (or as called in Swahili: Safari) to begin and i’m really looking forward to it. I can’t remember being so excited about something for a long time. Beside the life down there, it’s all about my projects. I will shoot two films. The first is about the effects of global change to the people in Kenya. The second one is about a couple of projects by Baobab. After that i will have a couple of weeks left to fly down to Rwanda and from there go into DR Congo, both famous for all the wrong reasons, to get a sense how life is today. I will do my best to capture it in the best way possible.

What do you think, when you think of Africa, the continent? I thought a lot about it in the last weeks. How it is displayed in the Media, about what we think about it and why we always talk about Africa and not about Rwanda, Ghana, Burkina Faso and so on. Here’s a shot essay i wrote a couple of days ago in the train:

Who are you, Africa?

by Simon Sticker

Africa, the dark continent, the place most of us will maybe call the most extraneous to us. What do we think about it? Why do we always name it Africa, even when we talk about a special country on this continent? Just the lack of knowledge? What makes it so different to the rest of the world in our minds?

Until a point (i can’t remember the time…) my understanding of Africa was more or less the one of a blank paper. Even travelling in Northern Africa or the infamous boulderfields in South Africa changed that in any way. Africa, the Africa, we’re normally talking about, was just everything in between. This was the real Africa, the dark continent, the place where all this bad things happen, we only hear from from time to time in the media. I had no structure in my mind and if someone would had asked me to do a mental map, i would have had no idea. The arab world in the north and the western-minted South Africa, the rest was Africa. And i think that is a view many people in Germany have. But what are the reasons for that? Why is there so less knowledge about this huge continent?

Media

Even when we always think we have the full access to information and we got free press and all that, everything we get to know has gone through a big filter. In our time the life has gone faster and faster, events happen in short order and there is to much information to handle it. We need this filter on the one hand, but also it’s pretty clear, that this filter influences our view in many ways. So why is there such a lack of information about Africa’s countrys in our media? Maybe the answer is brutal but easy: It’s not important to us. In an ultra-industrialized world like we live here, Africa with an amount of only four percent on the worlds economy, is more important for what it’s famous for: primary products like gold, diamonds, coltan and so on. But the way it is exploited by the industrial nations is normally nothing the economy wants to see in the press. So what do we get to know in the media are the different humanitarian disasters happening. Every few month there is something coming up for a couple of weeks, just to be forgotten after some time again. A great example is the DRC. In late november there was no day with no shocking news. Two weeks later it was close to impossible to get more information through the normal media. The most shocking thing about it is maybe that it’s a crisis lasting now for years, which hasn’t stopped yet. But the world does not stop and  at other places there are things happening and we forget about it as another crisis somewhere in Africa. One of the problems to form a more sophisticated picture of Africa’s countrys may be that the crisis may be different, but end in the same various problems: violence, famine, dispelled people- something too far away in our world to really connect with it. And also hard to communicate on a spatial level, because it seems like it’s happening nearly everywhere down there in ‘Africa’.

Tourism

When you think of tourism in ‘Africa’ you think of safaris, the big four, maybe white beaches, exclusive lodges and all that. The focus in african tourism seems to focus on the upper class, with a communication based on the wildlife and great nature, far away from the real life in the streets. That may build a totally different picture, but is so far away from the other side we hear about, that we don’t relate it to each other as if the tourism is happening somewhere else.

The Africa in us

What is our interest in Africa? For what do we need Africa? And why aren’t we interested in getting to know more about it? Why is every continent on earth more differencated in our minds than Africa? I think the answer of this questions in on the one hand could be found in the above mentioned. But there must be something else, i guess. And this is about the foreignness and the self protection in us. When think of the news of all the crisis and think of it as the only information we get about the countrys, one of the problems becomes pretty clear: No one wants to hear about the suffering all the time. No one wants to get into something that may hurt. And that’s human. We got our own problems. Totally different, maybe not life-threatening, but real and physical. And that let me come to the foreignness. We could not relate to the crisis happening, ’cause we never experienced something like it. It’s far away, happening in a different culture. But from time to time kind of a general conscience seems to come up, when another crisis gets to worse to look away. That’s good, but it’s always ’somewhere in Africa’.

Personal account

My personal view on this continent, just a few kilometers away from Europe, but far away in our minds, changed not with travellings, like mentioned in the beginning. It started to change with personal stories, people i’ve met, it started to change with myself reading about certain stories like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It changed with Fidèle Kientega from Burkina Faso, a politician i met one night in Cologne, a great man, with an impressive history. It changed with seeing pictures of the Ethiopian highlands, evolving the wish in me to go there. It changed with my little godson in southern Ethiopia. It changed with Darfur. And it changed with the prep of my journey, starting in a couple of days, to Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya.

Far away in your mind is nothing you could measure in meters, far away is something about how less you could relate to it.

Who are you, Africa? What a overbearing question…