As Pambazuka celebrates its 10th year and 500th issue, Ama Biney discusses challenging ‘the negative images and stereotypes" of Africa in our globalised world.
By Ama Biney, United Kingdom.
In constructing Pan-Africanism in Africa, there is a critical role for a vibrant Pan-Africanist media to challenge the negative images and stereotypes of Africa in our globalised world. This is necessary on account of the fact that when Europeans colonised the African continent they not only colonised the land and its minerals and agricultural wealth, but how African people and their descendents were to be portrayed in the world. In other words, Europeans colonised information and knowledge about Africans in addition to colonising the African mind.
Pambazuka News is crucial in disseminating information about African people by African people and therefore in countering the distorted perceptions of Africa. As Chinua Achebe recently expressed: ‘People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It’s not viewed as a serious continent. It’s a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don’t do what common sense demands.’
Pambazuka News is therefore a necessary forum for Africans to engage in debates and share critical information as to what is happening in other African countries and good practice, as well as to promote networking and ultimately facilitate the building of African unity in the continent. That Pambazuka is able to connect thousands of African and non-African people who are committed to a world built on the principles of solidarity, social justice, freedom and equality via the technology of the internet is a manifestation of the level of productive forces in the 21st century that are being harnessed for positive ends.
African realities continue to be dissected within the electronic pages of Pambazuka News, from environmental issues, food security, culture, sexuality, gender, social movements, politics, economic issues affecting Africa and military issues such as the hegemony of AFRICOM (African Command) – because the impact of colonialism and imperialism, along with its current manifestation (globalisation), is hegemonising in its reach. In order to challenge and control the processes and consequences of globalisation, Africans and progressive individuals from the North who are seeking a just world need spaces in which to forge alternatives, shape and influence debate and share information in order to resist hegemony from the North. The electronic news forum is also essential for Africans to articulate against the anti-people policies of tyrannical African governments, policies often implemented at the behest of the IMF (International Monetary Fund), World Bank and northern governments that continue to bind African economies to vulturistic neoliberal capitalism that African countries need to be weaned away from.
Pambazuka is part of the long historical continuum in the diaspora and on the African continent of Pan-African journals and newspapers set up as a forum for Africans and peoples of African descent to define their realities and challenge the status quo. At the beginning of the 20th century that reality was one of colonialism and imperialism and The Pan-African was set up in 1900 by Henry Sylvester Williams, who also organised the first Pan-African Association in 1897 and the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 in Westminster in London. Soon after this was the publication of Marcus Garvey’s ‘The Negro World’ with the setting-up of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 in Jamaica and subsequently in New York. W.E.B DuBois founded the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in 1905 and its journal Crisis. Since these early Pan-African journals and newspapers, a plethora of others were born. In London, following the formation of the Pan-African West African Students’ Union (WASU) in August 1925, students launched their journal called WASU: the Journal of the West African Students’ Union of Great Britain in March 1926. In the USA, the Association of African Students (AAS) in the United States of America and Canada published The African Interpreter in 1943. Many other journals – too numerous to mention – existed throughout the 20th century (and prior) as platforms on which Africans and people of African descent could articulate their concerns and problems.
In the 1980s and 1990s there were magazines such as West Africa magazine, African Concord, Africa Events and several others that have since sadly collapsed.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, Pambazuka News should remain focused on providing a much-needed platform for African social movements, civil society organisations, progressive intellectuals, poets, campaigners, artists and writers to ‘write what they like’ in the Steve Biko tradition, a tradition that speaks to the problems, achievements and realities of African people both on the continent and in the diaspora. Nor must we gloss over our mistakes in implementing the colossal tasks of the developmental agenda for the African continent, but analyse them objectively, and of course seek to seriously learn from them as we move forward as diverse peoples in a continent full of potential.
Harnessing electronic media to globalise resistance to Africa’s continued hegemony is one of the many roles of Pambazuka News. Also, whereas the Western media is rarely interested in positive news about Africa, such positive ‘success’ stories are necessary. As African people, we must not only have a correct analytical diagnosis with which to understand, describe and explain our realities but such diagnoses will inform effective solutions to problems and issues. There is a critical dynamic between theory and practice and policy and action. More importantly, learning about successful individuals and communities overcoming and challenging social, economic, political, ecological and cultural problems provides inspiration in the transformation of our societies and the world. The capacity for hope in resisting hegemony is vital in the struggle for a better and more humane world.
* Dr Ama Biney(photo) is a pan-Africanist and scholar–activist. She lives in the United Kingdom.
Credit: Pambazuka News.
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