Media and the story of the broken African and American narratives.

America-

Streets lined with gold,

Skyscrapers,

No pains,

No beggars,

No worries,

It’s all good.

Africa-

Hunger,

War,

One country?

Big jungle?

Tree homes?

Bushmen?

The questions I have been met with in response to my African heritage have been as varied as the people they come from. While some people are quite knowledgeable about the world’s geography and are aware of the existence of other cultures and civilizations, a vast majority are really clueless, for lack of a better word. From some of the questions I have been asked, I could tell that their views of the world, especially Africa, seem to be tightly confined to the images shown by the media houses and the occasional movie about a figure, incidence or place in Africa. Facebook groups like “The Africa they never show you” and “Africa is a continent, not a country! And no I cannot speak African!” have since been created in response to this systematic misrepresentation of Africa and Africans in the diaspora.

There is however a second side to this story. While I am in Uganda, it’s not unusual to meet people whose view of America is largely defined by music videos, scenes from upscale Manhattan, and scenes from the set of CSI, Boston Legal or whatever Hollywood movies and series they watch. For this research paper, I am choosing to focus on America and Africa as examples of the ‘North and south’[1] of the digital divide as highlighted in Norris’s editorial on Information Poverty and the Wired World (2000). Uganda is the country I will focus on for specific examples in sub-Saharan Africa. The focus of this research is to study the factors that have contributed to this persistent misrepresentation of both Africa and America.

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[1] Norris, Pippa: Information Poverty and the Wired World. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Volume 5, Number 3, Summer 2000. Page 2