Out of Africa: The Traps of Safari Journalism

In his eloquent diatribe "How to Write About Africa," published several years ago in Granta, the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina offers the following advice: "Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these." He continues, "In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country.... Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book." Wainaina's sarcastic suggestions point to a truth about writing on Africa: more often than not, it depicts the continent as nothing but a modern-day heart of darkness, where poverty, violence and disease overshadow the rest of human life and experience.

Of course, if writing about Africa seems preoccupied with poverty and violence, there is good reason for that: poverty and violence afflict the lives of millions of Africans. But Wainaina's point--that writing about Africa deals with the continent as if poverty and violence were the only things to be found there--is a salient one. "Taboo subjects," he reminds us, are not lurid acts but quotidian ones: "ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation."

Wainaina lambastes Western writing about Africa, but as the literature of Africa is increasingly penned by Africans, it is worth considering how his criticisms might apply to native depictions of the "dark continent." In two such books--Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, and The Translator, by Daoud Hari--there is no shortage of poverty and violence. Akpan's collection of short stories revolves around the lives of children facing situations of extreme hardship in countries like Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia. Hari's book, a memoir, chronicles his work as a guide and translator for Western journalists and aid workers in Darfur from 2003 until Hari was granted asylum by the United States in 2007. Both books are first efforts from native writers who are making their debut at a time when the market is hungry for "authentic" indigenous voices (Akpan is Nigerian, and Hari is a member of the Zaghawa ethnic group, one of the tribes under attack by the Sudanese government). But though it is a welcome change finally to read African writers on African life, these books also share many of the flaws of their Western predecessors, betraying elements of the safari reportage that Wainaina justly criticizes.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.