When I Say Africa: Dr. Kathryn Mathers on Western Stereotypes of Africa

When I say Africa, what ideas or images come to mind? Dr. Kathryn Mathers, Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke looks at how forms of media and expression construct and perpetuate global perceptions of Africa. As producer of the documentary, “When I Say Africa,” she dives into the nuances of how this question is answered in the Western world versus in Africa by focusing on images and ways the continent is portrayed in American media. 

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Although originally from South Africa, Mathers’ work focuses on how Americans imagine Africa. 

“When I first came to the U.S. to do graduate studies, it was my plan to study Americans, but I was so taken aback…by the narratives and the images that I saw here about the continent and the ways that the U.S. engaged with and talked about Africans that I really wanted to understand better how it works and why it works,” Mathers said.

This experience inspired Mathers to start working on the documentary, which examines the way Africa is systematically portrayed in the Western world through the use of images and media.

Use of Imagery

The documentary focuses on how images are used to sustain harmful stereotypes and perceptions of Africa. Most of the imagery that is being shown of Africa is not made by Africans and contributes to generalizations of the entire continent, without taking into account differences in cultures and countries.

“The harm isn’t so much in the content of the images…I think it’s more that so much of the sort of imagery in film, in photography, in social media is made and presented by Westerners about Africa is so decontextualized to begin with. And even people there taking pictures of themselves are saying they’re in Africa and I’m like, no you’re not, you're in Zimbabwe or Mozambique. It’s that sort of complete flattening of the place…There’s no sense of place. There’s no sense of local politics, a local life,” Mathers said.

The documentary highlights how LiveAid, a concert originally meant to raise money for the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, resulted in a generalized stereotype of Africa that everyone was hungry and suffering. Photos of people in Ethiopia were spread and used long after the famine was over.

For Mathers, how images are used to portray Africa brings up an important human rights issue, noting an important distinction in how we portray Western vs African suffering.

“There is also, I think, some very important critique, especially for people who think a lot about photography, of how persistently easy it is to show suffering black…bodies, be it from…military violence or disease that you would never, ever show a white party like that,” Mathers said.

Volunteering and Tourism within a White Savior System

The documentary critiques the idea of “voluntourism,” in which students go to Africa for short periods of time with hopes of doing volunteer work, but in reality they are only really helping themselves, not the people they are there to “serve.”

Mathers notes that the real problem rests in the “white savior industrial complex that is embedded in systems, that is embedded in the structure though [which] white Americans… volunteer, or…structures that determine a particular relationship with Africa, and that is that people, the systems here, have privilege, power, and money, and the Africans do not.”

Voluntourism and the white savior complex is not something caused, nor able to be solved, by any individual person. The systems formed from a racialized power inequality continue to elevate western societies while oppressing African ones.

Despite the critique of the systems that promote harmful volunteering practices in Africa, Mathers highlights that there are ways that people can engage with Africa in a non-harmful way.

“I think there are ways to do it better, ways that are respectful, ways that are not extractive, but it’s really hard, and it means it has to be done grounded in really long term, sustainable relationships, grounded in projects that are actually asked for. It’s got to be done with enormous humility, because these programs are historically characterized by the idea that…people who don’t speak the language, [who] don’t know anything about the government,...who have spent no time [there], they are literally imagining that they can write policy for other countries,” Mathers said.

The documentary brings up an important question: Why do some Westerners care so much about tackling issues in other countries, countries they don’t know much about, when there are so many local issues they could deal with that have a larger effect on themselves and their community? One of the main points of the documentary is that if people want to engage in humanitarian efforts, they should start locally.

“If Americans want to change…global inequality, they have to change the way their country operates. They have to change the way economic decisions are made here. They have to change the power of corporations that are protected by the US government, despite the pretense of the free market,” Mathers said.

Screening and Discussion of “When I Say Africa”

On Oct. 6th, the Duke Human Rights Center sponsored the screening of the documentary “When I Say Africa,” followed by a discussion with Mathers and Professor of English Christopher Ouma.

One question that was brought up was how this issue is portrayed in the classroom, as the documentary started and ended with American and African schoolchildren interacting over Zoom. Both groups made a list of words they thought of when someone said ‘Africa.’ The American children’s list was primarily filled with negative connotations, such as violence and hunger, whereas the African children’s list was filled with more positive connotations, such as beauty.

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“It’s interesting that the film begins with these conversations of young people across the Atlantic, of the same generation…I thought those were some of the most powerful [scenes] of the film,” Ouma said.

"It is a co-evil space, it is a space in which people are actually all experiencing this violence,... those kids are as violated in a way by this kind of imagining, excluded from real engagement…and everyone is talking to each other, they are not talking against each other,” Mathers said.

Another issue brought up in both the screening and discussion of the documentary was how there is a bias in what is photographed of Africa. One of the scenes in the documentary shows how a photographer focuses on taking images that portray poverty and hunger versus the bigger picture of what he is seeing.

“What I have discovered in all of this work and thinking about images…Most of the travelers I’ve worked with…It doesn’t matter what you put in front of them, it doesn’t matter what experiences they have, they see what’s already been imagined,” Mathers said.

“When I Say Africa” demonstrates that the inaccurate portrayal of Africa and African people is ultimately a human rights issue. Not only does it exacerbate a power inequality between the West and Africa, but it also harms all those involved and prevents progressive conversations that could benefit both societies.