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Africa’s Reductive Images, Contesting the Sources, and New Generations as Passive Victims: A Reflection on Historical and Global Representational Practices
JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
media persuasion activities that could improve literacy and, in turn, allow populations to
break free from traditionalism. As to Chandra the media were both channels and indica-
tors of modernization; they would serve as the agents of diffusion of modern culture, and
suggested the degree of modernization of society (2004: 217). In African case, hence, the
diffusion of the ‘modern culture’ had to be done by magnifying the primitiveness of Africa
and the need for Western culture to modernize and raise Africans from their conditions
(Korasick, 2005: 2).
With the same line of thought, Tomasseli states that the modernization ’cure’ propagates
vast doses of top-down communication injected through major infrastructural invest-
ments in mass media and communications technologies, aimed at replacing traditional
values, introducing technical skills, encouraging national integration and accelerating the
growth of formal education. However, Tomaseilli adds that modernization approach was
uniformly a failure in Africa; and so it perpetuated dependency (Servaes, 2007: 304-305).
As the economic root has totally remained the essence of the modernization paradigm,
“non-economic” factors including attitude change, level of education, mass media and
institutional reforms were later initiated, as thinking about modernization did not solve
problems (Servaes, 2002: 19-20). According to Servaes, referring to the advocated uni-
lineal and evolutive perspectives, and the endogenous character of the suggested de-
velopment solutions, critiques argue that the modernization concept is a veiled synonym
for the ‘Westernization’, namely, the copying or implantation of Western mechanisms and
institutions in a third world context (2002: 20).
There are common allegations that humanitarian works have also misused their assign-
ments in Africa. They mis-produced large number of immoral contents (mainly pictures
and videos) about Africans as severely and constantly starved. Such acts were based on
their claimed intention to maximize foreign fundraisings which then were highly criticized
for partiality, dishonesty and mis-management.
Most importantly, the convergence of the Western media narratives and their humani-
tarian encounters in Africa produced excessively contested images in terms of morality,
which then have impacted the image of African continent. Let’s take the case of the story
of Sudanese toddler whose story had been propagated as indicator of continuously mis-
erable life in Africa. The incidence has become famous mainly after the photo was sold to
The New York Times, one of the giant Western media companies.
It was in March 1993 that photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan,
where he took the iconic photo of a vulture preying upon a south Sudanese toddler
near Ayod (now in South Sudan). Carter said he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the
vulture would spread its wings, which it did not. Carter snapped the haunting photograph
and chased the vulture away (Selwyn-Holmes, 2009).
