What then happens was shown by Herman Melville in his short story "Bartleby the Scrivener." The story is named for its maddeningly obstinate main character, a law clerk who seems increasingly unable to function in the world but who rebuffs all efforts to help him. The first-person narrator's feelings toward Bartleby change over time:

My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill.

This reaction may not be altogether admirable, but it is deeply human. Yet in the Third World today, in Africa and elsewhere, it is based on a big lie; these are not hopeless places, characterized mainly by "excessive and organic ill."

Over the past couple of decades, the most significant development in the Third World has been the rise of independent grassroots organizations--labor, education, ecology, feminist and human rights groups, which are changing the political scene in places as diverse as India, Brazil and Zambia. Yet you will rarely read about these organizations, even in the major American newspapers. You will almost never see them on television.

Americans can identify the dishes in Thai restaurants, but they have never been introduced to Dr. Prawasi Wasi, a gentle physician who is that country's beloved social conscience. In the jet age, Westerners may go on safari to Kenya, but they don't know about Professor Wangari Maathai, the feminist ecologist who helped start the Green Belt movement there. Its 600,000 members have planted 10 million trees; Maathai's outspokenness has earned her attacks from the Moi regime as a "subversive" and "traitor." And how could the Western press have ignored Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician who died recently after spending decades issuing blistering, raucous pop songs attacking one military dictator after another from the smoky, after-midnight confines of his Lagos nightclub?

Leaving out these kinds of people distorts our image of the Third World. The result is to confirm Melville's hard truth about how humans react when faced with apparently hopeless cases.

How much of this one-sided coverage is because the media are giving the public what it wants? We cannot deny that Western culture has for several centuries included a widespread Orientalist wish to see the Third World, particularly Africa, as exotic, inferior and helpless without us. As Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian novelist, says in his provocative essay lambasting Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa."

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