Over the week-end of the 3rd and 4th of October 2009, a conference titled Critical Thinking for Development Education: Moving from Evaluation to Research, took place in NUI Galway.
Organised by the Development Education & Research Network (DERN) at NUI, Galway, one of the papers presented was by Richard Borowski and Jane Plastow from Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS).
The two researchers traced the background to the project; the summary of their findings of which is also presented as follows:
"African Voices is a project run by LUCAS that takes African postgraduate students studying any subject at the University of Leeds, trains them in relation to the British education system and to active learning methodologies and then sends them out into Leeds schools, years 5-8, to work in a range of modes to challenge negative ideas about the continent, to help make Africa 'real' to young people, and to seek to arouse their interest in different cultures.
Children's Negative Images of Africa
One of the main questions this project has caused us to debate is why children have such negative ideas about Africa. The evidence seems to be that there are two main sources of negative image making: the media and charity campaigns.
Images of Africa on Television
The images that children are exposed to in the media, and this we think would be primarily on the television, are of an Africa that is disaster ridden.
There is very little cultural or documentary material shown on British television relating to the continent; instead it appears mostly on the news and overwhelmingly then in relation to bad news stories.
When I did a trawl on the internet for this article to see what the BBC had been recently saying about the continent I quickly came to an Africa site that invited me to put in only the following keywords: civil war, elections, famine, human rights, peace negotiations, political parties and war. These are apparently for the BBC the things that primarily go on in Africa.
It is no wonder that young children see a largely undifferentiated continent of helplessness, danger and poverty: for that matter many of their parents and teachers probably see the same things. The only other image of Africa that is widely pedalled relates to the exotic.
Wildlife programmes such as the BBCs
Big Cat Diaries, or ITV's appalling wildlife drama,
Wild at Heart, where Africans usually come with thick accents and a willingness to serve while white people nobly rescue beautiful animals, are standard fare; while occasional series and documentaries tend to feature brave and beautiful young white people going off to live - ostensibly alone (except of course for the TV crew) - with Africans of the noble savage variety - Massai and San bushmen are favourites here, demonstrating how 'aboriginal' peoples really do have cultures, but are of course usually being squeezed out of their peaceful lives by the incursions of such forces as corrupt governments, predatory farmers or foreign tourism.
The brave young white people always fall in love with these ‘aboriginals’, go through a spiritual experience, wear some weird clothes and eat something utterly disgusting before sadly saying goodbye to the accompaniment of a vibrant music track.
Given this highly selective and distorted imagery it is hardly surprising that primary school children in the UK believe that Africans don't use mobile phones, buses, computers, or iPods?
Or that they think most Africans live in mud huts whereas the latest statistics show that 38% of the continent is now urbanised, and Africa is experiencing the greatest growth in the use of mobile phones anywhere in the world.
Charity Campaigns on Television
The second source of popular information is undoubtedly charitable campaigning. Programmes such as the annual Comic Relief beano or Blue Peter appeal bombard us with pictures of cute children - often again outside mud huts, and on the major charity's websites one finds image after image of poverty and suffering.
Aid Agencies: their Presence and Campaigns in Schools
Within schools, charitable giving is often encouraged as being a good thing to promote compassion in children, but inevitably it is likely to further promote ideas of African helplessness and of the superiority of life in the West, not just in material terms, but arguably in terms of the West being better, kinder and necessary to the well-being of the world's helpless poor. At worst we would argue this is a breeding ground for racism."
"These people are so different, so useless, that we in the West just must be superior", Borowski & Plastow offered this assessment of pupils' views as a consequence of the type of information and images of Africa referred to above.
Any similarities with the situation here in Ireland?
Details of the links to the Conference Paper on Young People’s Perceptions of Africa can be found here.
Visit the LUCAS Schools Africa Project.
