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In his biting 2005 essay “How to Write About Africa”, the late author and activist Binyavanga Wainaina dished out faux advice about how to portray a huge and complex continent. Each instruction is ironic, a dig at the lazy tropes with which “Africa” is so often depicted.
Africa, he wrote, “is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions.”
One of his sternest admonitions was against regarding disparate countries as alike. In genetic terms, Africans are more dissimilar from each other than people on any other continent. Africans speak some 2,000 languages. Egypt and South Africa are as distinct as, say, Japan and India.
Though most of the continent was brutalised by colonialism, the experiences under Belgian, British, French, German and Portuguese rule were diverse. Ethiopia, briefly occupied by Mussolini’s Italy, and Liberia, founded by freed American slaves in 1822, were never colonised at all.
Wainaina — a Kenyan, a food critic, a devoted son, a homosexual, a writer and an activist — was a living rebuke to anyone who thought they could sum up an individual, let alone a continent.
His essay is a brilliant corrective, and the warning not to lump together 54 nations — or 55 if you count Western Sahara — has endured. In some contexts, the term “Africa” has become almost taboo. The piece laid the groundwork for the website Africa is a Country, which strives to provide a multi-layered narrative of the continent’s past, present and future.
But thinking of Africa as homogeneous remains all too common. Nearly a decade after Wainaina’s essay appeared, Bill Clinton tweeted: “Just touched down in Africa.” Wawira Njiru, a Kenyan woman, feigned awe at the former US president’s superhuman powers, tweeting back: “He’s in 54 countries at the same time!”
Clinton’s tweet was “as meaningless as announcing that he landed between Calgary and Buenos Aires”, said an article in The Guardian. Africa, as Waianana noted, is “big”. You can fit China, India, the US, Japan and most of western Europe into its landmass. If that surprises you, blame the standard Mercator projection map, which bloats the northern hemisphere and shrinks the south. Yet a 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea led to a catastrophic fall in tourism to Kenya, 5,300km away — the equivalent of cancelling a trip to New York because there is a crisis in Santiago, Chile.
Unsurprisingly, then, people routinely howl down any attempt to think of Africa in its entirety. Yet sometimes it can be useful to consider Africa as a continent. Some of its greatest independence heroes, including Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, certainly thought so. Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to freedom, saw himself as a pan-Africanist. “The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart,” he said.
Though each African nation is distinct, they do have things in common. Most African countries are rapidly urbanising, though Gabon is already 90 per cent urban and Burundi only 14 per cent. Most have young populations, though that ranges from a median of 15 years in Niger to 33 in Tunisia. Most have dynamic start-up scenes, though Nigeria has three with a valuation of more than $1bn, Egypt has just one and Cameroon has none.
To look for commonality is not the same as ignoring difference. Indeed, organisations such as the African Union and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which has performed brilliantly during the pandemic, seek to find common purpose in varied experience.
“Africa” is not necessarily a colonial construct. If anything it is individual countries — say Malawi, Mali and Mozambique — whose borders are the result of imperial interference. A remarkable thing about postcolonial Africa is that, despite its mostly undeserved reputation for perpetual wars, few of its illogical, externally imposed borders have been contested through conflict.
Reimagining the continent as Africa may be making a comeback. The African Continental Free Trade Area, launched this year, is a bold attempt to create scale and specialisation by undoing the fragmentation and extractive trade patterns bequeathed at independence. South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa is right to see the project as in the spirit of Nkrumah. Yes, Africa is 54 countries, but it is a continent too.
david.pilling@ft.com
