Framing Your Stories

From "Deadliest Country for Kids" photo credit Nicholas Kristof

Please look closely at the picture above. It comes from a New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof titled, "Deadliest Country for Kids." The caption in the original piece reads, "Yalua Ndama with her son, Namana Chanhamba, suffering from malaria and malnutrition, in a Lubango health clinic."
It is the second picture that comes in the original piece, the first being a close shot of an emaciated infant with protruding ribs and bulging eyes being fed with an eye-dropper.

What do you see in the image above? Probably the young mother dressed in brightly-patterned traditional clothing with an apparently naked child loosely wrapped in a brightly-patterned traditional cloth. Why? Because photographer/author has chosen to put them front and center. What about the three women in the background? The one wearing jeans and flip-flops or the one in a button-down shirt and sneakers? The one with her hair tied back in a scrunchy apparently talking to her little girl as she reaches up to touch her mother's face?

If you are looking closely, you may catch that three-quarters of the moms in this picture would look pretty normal sitting in a waiting room in New York City or Atlanta or Los Angeles. But this would be despite the composition of the picture, not because of it.

No, this image was quite explicitly composed to emphasize the "other-ness" of "The Deadliest Country for Kids," also known as Angola. The rest of the article alternates between descriptions of the (very corrupt) president and the unimaginable suffering of apparently everyone else in the country. Highlights include:

“Children die because there is no medicine,” lamented Alfred Nambua, a village chief in a thatch-roof village on a rutted dirt road near the northern city of Malanje. The village has no school, no latrine, no bed nets. The only drinking water is a contaminated creek an hour’s hike away. “Now there’s nothing,” said Nambua, 73, adding that life was better before independence in 1975. 

and:

“Death in this country is normal,” said Dr. Bimjimba Norberto, who runs a clinic in a slum outside the capital. A few doors down, a funeral was beginning for Denize Angweta, a 10-month-old baby who had just died of malaria. 

Also described are three more children on the edge of death, a poor woman so uneducated that she doesn't know mosquitoes cause malaria, and the "wailing... background chorus" of Angolan mothers losing children.

It is true that Angola is a country of staggering inequality. It's capital is one of the most expensive cities in the world, but it has one of the highest child mortality rates. It's president is famously corrupt. I have never visited there. So, why does this article upset me enough to blog about it?

Having spent the last two+ years living in Mozambique, I have become much more tuned to how African countries/cultures/people are portrayed in the Western media. Much can be summed up in the opening sentence of this article: "LUBANGO, Angola — This is a country laden with oil, diamonds, Porsche-driving millionaires and toddlers starving to death."

There is an amazing satirical piece titled, "How to Write about Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan writer, that touches on this points brilliantly. I am tempted just to copy the whole thing here, but I will restrain myself to a few selected paragraphs:

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with... The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. 

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good.  

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause. 

How often do we get to read about good things coming from Africa? Or even more rarely, normal things? It's nearly always crushing poverty, disease and death on one end, and rampant corruption and its associated shameless opulence on the other. If there is something good, it's frequently an idealized "there's this tribe in Africa that doesn't have singular pronouns in their language because they believe so strongly in community," type of story.

Why is this? Maybe because, like the Kristof piece in the NYT, the objective of many stories published in the West about Africa is to get people to donate money to alleviate the suffering of the poor. It may be because corrupt leaders need to be held accountable. It may because Westerns are addicted to bad news and stories of tragedy, whether they happen in Africa or any other part of the world.

And in the end, if people just want to help people in need, what's wrong with this?

First, it's manipulative: it is using real people's real suffering to tug at the heartstrings of potential donors in order to reach a financial end.

It's dehumanizing: while there are people of all kinds on the enormous continent that is Africa, focusing on the "otherness" that many people associate with it only perpetuates a huge gap between "us" and "them," frequently with the implication that "we" are better/more advanced/more capable/etc.

It's dis-empowering: by focusing on what is wrong - corrupt, inept leaders; ignorant, uneducated village-dwellers; dirty slums - without also telling the stories of those working to solve the problems, it perpetuates the so-called "white savior complex" that Westerners frequently develop, that overwhelming need to sweep in and "fix" things or "save" people in Africa.

This applies to many situations, not just portraying Africa. Think about the movie "The Blind Side." When it came out, many people loved it, but many complained that it also had an element of this "White Savior Complex," to it's portrayal of a rich white family adopting a young black football player. It's an interesting example because it's a true story, which might make you think that it can't fall into this category of stereotype-reinforcing narratives. However, there were dozens-to-hundreds of decisions made regarding how to tell the story.

The biggest such decision was to frame the story mostly from the perspective of the rich, white wife who used her influence to get the poor, black kid into her biological kids' private school. It easily could have been told as the story of Michael Ohr, a kid born into difficult circumstances who, through his toughness, ability and hard work, was able to make a better life for himself with the support of a wealthy family that believed in him. The same story would have left us with a different hero.

Over the last two years, I have become much more sensitive to the choices people make in how they portray others, both in written word and image. Who is the protagonist? Who is able to influence the outcome of a situation? Who is given backstory and depth? Who is in the center of the frame and who is in the background? Because these are all choices and they affect how people are led to see others.