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Abdulaziz Dino Gidreta
African New Generations as Passive Victims
There have been chains of damaging effects of these historical and global misrepresenta-
tional practices and phenomenon. Certainly, African reductive images will have cognitive
effects on subsequent African generations, as carriers of reductive images and thus as
passive victims. Self-conception and self-perceptions of Africans can be threatened by
what has been produced and propagated. Some Africans might tend to internalize what
others say about what they are (self-conception), evaluate themselves or give self-atti-
tude based on what others say about what they are (self-perception) and act or behave
the way they perceive themselves (role-perception).
In these triple connections of conception-perception-role, for example, in the overstate-
ment of Africa as conservative, non-innovative, old-minded, Africans might develop a
self-image of passive recipients of the Western ‘civilized’ life values. Thus, unconscious
ordinary Africans will now conceptualize themselves as incapable and non-innovative;
perceive themselves as having a reduced performance and capacity as compared with
Western citizens; and develop a passive role in the global dynamics.
This can be connected to Fanon’s (1967) attempt of applying Lacan’s theory of mirror
stage in the effort to explain the reproduction nature of images, and self-images in partic-
ular. Fanon claims that black people’s subjectivity is formed by the recognition of them-
selves through the images reflected on mirror, through the Other’s eye. Fanon’s psycho-
analytic interpretation on the construction of the inferior blackness seems to contribute
to the “active” reconstruction of the blackness, not to the “reactive” response to Other’s
gaze (1967). Such a cognitive crisis will result in a further damage in self-presentation
or self-selling tendencies of Africans in the international socio-political, cultural and eco-
nomic dynamics. This clearly will have a cumulative effect in delaying African pace of
socio-economic development.
African can also be subject to invisibility, ignorance, delegitimization and pessimism. As
far as the media coverage is concerned, as the result of African countries’ reductive imag-
es, there is a direct effect that has already resulted in the invisibility of Africa in the media.
There is a tendency of non-covering African countries that do not hit the headlines most.
There is also a gradual ignorance to the human aspect of life-development in Africa. By
spearheading the idea that African crisis is ‘natural’ and the ‘good news’ are exceptions,
minor attention is paid to African societies and their current potentials (Mezzana, 2005).
The negative and reductive images will then facilitate the delegitimization of African po-
litical, economic and social actors (Mezzana, 2005). There is also a consequential and
widespread development of Afropessimism at the overseas (Okigbo, 2002, as cited in
Mezzana, 2005).
