Choose Your Words Carefully

I finally wrote my first Letter to the Editor (finally showing that I am my father's daughter!) It hasn’t been published, but it felt good. It was in response to an editorial I read on the New York Times' website, "Stopping Ebola in America, " about steps the US needs to take to keep Ebola in check. I had no problem with most of the points made in the piece, but then I came to a line that just made me cringe: "There is room to improve the screening in West Africa, where government officials and workers are often incompetent and in some cases unable to use the temperature devices they have been given." I had to respond.

It has been interesting following the coverage of the Ebola epidemic from here in Mozambique. This part of Africa is far from the outbreak and I would guess there is less transit between the affected area and Mozambique than there is with the US. The Mozambican government put plenty of preventative measures in place: checking passengers traveling from affected areas, setting up a unit in the Maputo hospital to deal with any potential cases, but I wasn't surprised to hear that the infection appeared in the US before here. Despite being on the same continent as the outbreak, Mozambique is very far from Liberia and travel between the countries is difficult. So where I live, we aren't directly affected by Ebola, but the coverage in the news has touched on many things that feel relevant to me, particularly because "Africa" is often treated as a single entity in US and Western media.

It may not be surprising to hear that living in Africa for two years has changed the way I read news and commentary about the continent; how the people and cultures here are portrayed feels much more personal when applied to my friends, colleagues, students and neighbors. I can't say that I have anything particularly original to say on the subject; most of these things have been said repeatedly by all sorts of commentators, but here goes anyways. If nothing else, I need the catharsis of getting my feelings on the page.  

Africa isn't homogeneous. Which is not just to say that it is up of different countries, cultures and ethnicities with varied histories, traditions, and current ways of life. It also means that it is home to millions of individuals with personalities and stories and temperaments. And feelings. Feelings which can get hurt when people say insensitive things about them. Many of these individuals are not poor, incompetent people living in the bush, as the statement in the Times piece seems to want to portray. Some are intelligent, motivated, educated, and engaged. And this population knows how Western media talks about Africa as a whole. I will never forget the acute embarrassment at the beginning of my second semester teaching English here.

I like to start out my first class with a new group by opening the floor to questions. They are allowed to ask whatever they want, as long as it is in English. The vast majority are similar: "How old are you?" "Are you married?" "How long have you been in Mozambique?" "What do you think of Mozambique?" But one of my students threw out: "What do people in America think of Africa?" Caught off guard,  I stumbled over a response that basically amounted to: "Well, different people think different things, depending on their experience and knowledge, some people don't know a lot, but others have been here..." He listened to my awkward rambling and then hit me with, "It's just that I saw this American movie once and there was a kid who was being bad and his mom told him, 'If you don't stop, I'm going to send you to Africa!' So, people must think it's a bad place to be, right?"

How to respond to this?! I took a deep breath and tried to explain that Americans tend to focus on bad news in general, not just about Africa, and since there are places with wars and hunger and negative things, sometimes this gets in the news more than the good things and that shapes people's ideas. Partly wanting to save a little face, partly just not wanting him to think that all Americans believe Africa is where you get sent when you misbehave.

When the New York Times makes the statement that government officials and workers in West Africa are "often incompetent," it does damage in so many ways.

• It bunches together an entire region consisting of many countries (17, according to the UN) as though they are one. Nigeria is not Mali, and Mauritania is not Sierra Leone. There may be cultural similarities among some of the countries, but to make a sweeping statement about their governments and capacities as though they can all be equated is like making a statement about the management of American companies as though Walmart is the same as a Manhattan bodega is the same as LL Bean.
• It reinforces a damaging stereotype regarding the abilities of Africans to take care of themselves, which supports the idea that they need us to come in and save them. The editorial was signed by the New York Times’ editorial board. I am very curious to know who on that board is an expert in West African governance. On what are they basing their assertion? Their own extensive personal experience? Long-term study of the region? Or is anecdotal and based on prejudice? We have no way of knowing. The fact that an anonymous group can dismiss the abilities of an entire region without any claim to expertise is unfair; but Western intellectuals rarely hesitate to opine on what’s wrong in Africa and propose solutions without necessarily having a lot of experience living in the region and we accept it. "Experts" who have studied one country can be called on to solve problems on the other side of the continent.
• It oversimplifies a complex problem. It stands to reason that an outbreak like the one happening now is exacerbated by inadequately trained medical personnel who don’t have access to decent equipment and facilities. Look at the whole statement: "There is room to improve the screening in West Africa, where government officials and workers are often incompetent and in some cases unable to use the temperature devices they have been given." It starts out okay: sure, there is room to improve screening. Then comes that word, “incompetent.” I have already made clear my feelings on that. But it is followed by, “…in some cases unable to use the temperature devices they have been given." So, if someone gives medical workers a new piece of technology without the proper training on how to use it, who is incompetent? 

To me, if someone wants to get involved in development work, they need to be committed to first understanding the context of the problem they are addressing. Next, they need to work with local actors to identify possible solutions. But most importantly, that solution can’t be new equipment or technology without the necessary training. There needs to be real capacity building in order for any difference to be made. The classic example is the use of mosquito nets in the fight against malaria. American organizations collect money, buy bed-nets and ship them to rural Mozambique. Then they are surprised to find that people, never having seen a bed net before and receiving no instruction on how to use one, use them to fish or o protect their crops from bugs.

All this is to say, the statement made by the Times’ editorial board is only one instance in a pattern of how West Africa, Africa as a whole, and African people are portrayed in Western media: as homogeneously incompetent. The fact that it is okay for this statement to be made by an anonymous group not claiming to have any expertise in the region reflects the attitude that most Americans are well-educated and competent enough to give advice regarding development (a problem I have with my own presence here). It also shows the laziness of people wanting to solve complex social issues with technological interventions alone, not a long-term commitment to building the capacity of the local populations. This is bad on its own, but made worse by the fact that the subjects of such a statement can read it and this will inform all of their interactions with Westerners.

As I concluded my letter to the editor: In summary, such a casual assertion of ineptitude that paints an entire region as "less than," only serves to reinforce a simplistic version of a historically fraught power relationship between Africa and the West. It sells short everyone involved.