KEY POINTS:
A few evenings ago I was watching television with my Ethiopian wife. We were at the house of one of her Ethiopian friends and watching American Idol. During the programme Bono appeared on the screen, appealing for Idol Aid.
This segment featured Bono, on one of his Geldofian
quests, kissing the locals and showing us HIV-positive children. During this I sensed a feeling of awkwardness, possibly sprinkled with a little shame, descending over my wife and her friend.
As usual, I began feeling agitated and almost repulsed by the sight of that slightly creepy looking, ageing rock star. Not repulsed by the things he is trying to achieve, namely eradicating poverty and disease, but by the skewing effect that images such as these have on the perception of Africa in the minds of Western viewers.
I asked my Ethiopian companions if they agreed that such images distorted Westerners' perceptions of Africa.
"Of course!" they replied, the words coming out as if they had already been boiling in their throats. My wife's friend then went on to tell me about some of her experiences working at an African hair salon in Auckland.
A customer once asked her, "are you from Africa?" Her reply, obviously, was the affirmative. The result of this was her customer injecting a highly sympathetic tone into her voice, before replying, with almost awe, "and you survived?!
And what about your family, how many of them are still alive?"
She informed the customer that her family was still alive and well, despite the fact that most of them were still living in Africa. To this the customer was still awed, though slightly disbelieving.
And this is no isolated incident.
But what is it that gives the West such a warped and twisted view of Africa? What makes a large proportion of Western society believe that Africa is nothing but an Aids infested, war ravaged hell-on-earth?
The guilty party here is undoubtedly the Western media. Most Westerners will never even contemplate travelling to Africa, so their view of the continent is wholly moulded by the mass media.
How often do you read something in the media about Africa that isn't about HIV/Aids, poverty, war or despotic rulers? Not very often at all, I dare say.
But why is this? Why does the Western media seem intent on focusing on the negative when it comes to its coverage of Africa? For a start, a preconception of Africa as cultureless, tribal, heathen and impoverished has reigned in the minds of Westerners since the days of slavery. Such preconceptions provided the very justification for slavery to exist.
Throughout colonial and post-colonial times that same portrayal of Africa as a dark land of chaos, war and disease has readily been accepted as the norm.
When your average Westerner is flicking through the international section of their newspaper, and sees an article on Africa, they expect to have their preconceptions reconfirmed, and the Western media is ever ready to provide this.
Of course, the Western media would be accused of ignoring or dismissing Africa's problems if it didn't report on the negative aspects of life throughout the continent. It's true - poverty is a terrible problem in Africa, as is HIV/Aids and war. But a bit of balance would certainly help viewers and readers to realise that Africa is not a land of pure chaos, filth and disease.
Suicide is almost unheard of in Ethiopia, and a recent study of 65 countries by New Scientist magazine suggests that the happiest people in the world live in Nigeria.
Africans in the Diaspora and at home would love the Western world to realise these things - to look beyond the mass media headlines. I've learned from my wife that there is a special kind of joy in the hearts of Africans that Westerners, for the most part, haven't begun to realise the existence of.
* Christopher Adams is a New Zealander recently returned from Ethiopia.
