kiyo:
AFRICA in Perspective
I like this… people fail to realize how wrong those globes are…
This caught my eye today. Yes, Africa in terms of space is much larger than many of these countries, and it’s a shame we don’t further correct our misgivings about its diversity, the fact that it is a continent and not a country, and the fact that all parts in Africa- yes, even down to the cities, are all different.
Our perspective on this behemoth called Africa is out of wack. Not just in size, but this geographical ‘re-setting’ presents a narrative of our lack of knowledge and understanding of Africa’s incredible, multi-dimensional diversity and endless character that we are willing to attribute to even the smallest of nations elsewhere.
Different thoughts, different politics, many different races, hundreds (thousands?) of different ethnicities, thousands of different languages, different backgrounds, different landscapes, different businesses and economies…
My point? That there is danger in telling just one story, that solutions to problems can’t always be mass-delivered, but tailored to sustain; and that we should consider the other details that have escaped our limited views of the continent. Let’s face it:our knowledge (or visceral feelings…) of the continent has affected our relations with it for better or worse.
It is not reasonable to believe that 50+ nations operate in some sort of concert (or concerted mess if you consider much of the reportage about “Africa”) in many ways.
Even these disparate nations’ similarity in ills results in large part from a deep-rooted similarity in arbitrators.
I realize that this may be just an image about space comparisons. But how can we just consider differences in space between the United States and Africa and not consider the differences in our knowledge between the rather small nation and the great continent?
How little we underestimate the powerful narrative of images.
*steps off of soapbox*
