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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
Motives for Misrepresentation of Africa: Common Allegations
We witness enduring chains of historical and global representational practices, operating
together, to cause the misrepresentation of the African continent. Surely, all these practic-
es must be ignited by implicitly inscribed interests through such explicit systems of mis/
representation. In this case, we can at least reaffirm the classic assumptions that project-
ed effects of these chains of practices is to keep African continent directly or indirectly
ruled, for future takeover of natural resource alongside all global supremacy competitions
and hegemonic proud.
In fact, this could also be associated with capitalist’s intention of the need for sustainable
consumer, for economic and cultural products. For a producer to produce there must be
a consumer to consume. Marx claims, even to the extent that, a consumer is a producer
by the sense ‘it’ supports the producer to produce, by consuming (1976).
Suddenly also, there emerged the humanitarian intervention curiosity, accompanied by
the discourses of establishing a seemingly continuous role for the ‘supporter’ and the
‘supported’, the ‘giver’ and the ‘receiver’. In general, the recurring motive behind all
these practices could be to provide a rational and public excuse for slavery, colonialism,
neo-colonialism, and the ongoing capitalist - consumerism.
After all these series of collections, displays and narratives, the international public contin-
ued to conceptualize Africa as land of several troubles, and the people as ‘missing’ some-
thing else. And regretfully, there is quite inadequate public consciousness and/or willing-
ness to conceptualize these contested images of Africa together with the root-causes
- that colonizers originally exploited African resources, and then almost unarguably, they
themselves introduced and propagated series of prejudiced and stereotypical ‘phrases’
about Africa.
Such a publicly taken-for-granted image could damage the self-selling, competition and
integration efforts of Africans in the international spheres, in a world where image contin-
ues to play most of the crucial life games. Thus, any conceptualization of life-difficulties in
Africa should be integrated with the imaginations that African continent is uninterruptedly
changing in spite of the aforesaid chain of historical wrongdoings upon its resources, and
most vitally upon its image.
In other words, the current Africa has numerous developmental obstacles and delays. Yet,
most of the narratives on African developmental disconnections with the rest of the world
have been pessimistically discoursed, and the grand causes have not been articulated.
