Africa Day
We are used to speaking about Africa as if that vast territory of more than 30 million square kilometres could be reduced to a single homogeneous entity. Yet few continents encompass such diversity. More than 2,000 languages are spoken there, and over 3,000 ethnic groups coexist, making it one of the most culturally varied regions on the planet. Many Westerners naively believe they “know” Africa after only brief and highly partial experiences, as if the continent were a single country. It is impossible to fully grasp a space so vast, with profound differences from one region to another.
The Western gaze has reduced and essentialised all this richness, turning the continent into a caricature of exoticism, poverty and conflict. Not only do we fail to understand Africa, but we are often not even aware of the filters through which we perceive it. Over time, a mental framework — an “invisible wall” — has taken shape, made up of prejudices, stereotypes and biases through which any information or judgement about the continent is processed. This confusion goes far back, and can already be seen in maps: the Mercator projection, created in 1569 for navigation, distorts the relative size of continents, making Africa appear smaller than it really is, while Europe and North America are visually oversized.
This wall has several layers. The deepest stems from the legacy of slavery and colonialism, which for centuries portrayed Africa as a space of exploitation, a place “without history”, merely an object serving external interests. Layered upon this is a media system in which Africa only becomes news when it appears as a stage for conflict or as the victim of disasters. Educational systems do not help either: Western categories are routinely presented as universal, while Africa is practically absent from curricula. Few Europeans or North Americans would be able to name five African writers or philosophers, or have even a basic knowledge of the history of Mozambique or Ghana, to give just one example.
Even within the field of international cooperation, so often driven by good intentions, Africa has frequently been cast as a passive victim, dependent on external aid and lacking autonomous decision-making capacity. Projects designed in Europe with little understanding of local contexts and an obsession with quantitative indicators remain all too common, exporting Western organisational models while underestimating local communal practices.
True knowledge begins when we accept that our perception is limited and that the other cannot be contained within our preconceived frameworks. “Africa” has been, to a large extent, a European intellectual construction rather than a reality understood from within. Recognising these limits may be the first step towards finally beginning to look at Africa differently.
Director of Fundación Mozambique Sur and Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.