Mpiwa Mangwiro-Tsanga
I am an African child who grew up, with so many questions about the contradictions in my country and continent at large. I questioned the meaning of liberation for Africa if black communities continue to suffer from lack, hunger, poverty, and disease. My primary education taught me so much about Africa and its resources and yet it did not tally with the realities I saw. I did not understand why if my continent is so rich, its citizens continue to be portrayed in a negative light associated with suffering. I was taught about the wars that were fought for independence and liberation, yet people’s voices continue to be suppressed. These contradictions left me with so many questions that throughout my life I have been searching for answers to. In other spaces I have heard my continent called names I do not believe describe me and my fellow African brothers and sisters and this has made me raise questions regarding the narrative and imaging of Africa and its potential.
Uzuri Wa Afrika is a platform that was inspired by my experiences both inside and outside my beloved continent Africa. I realised that the perceptions about me and my fellow continent’s women and men were born out of narratives that are about us but not often from us. Africans, particularly black people have had to challenge and break through multiple layers of alienation and repression. Yet despite the strides that the continent has made and is making, Africa continues to be presented in the most negative terms as backward, and we are often treated as a homogeneous group despite our diversity. Despite its geographical diversity and beauty, the continent is often portrayed as a jungle, in contradiction to its endowments. Most mainstream media images of Africa are often associated with hunger and poverty, malnutrition and children surrounded by flies, war and death. While these aspects certainly do exist, it is the one-sided portrayal of the continent as helpless and poor, without providing any contextual understanding of Africa’s history, the impact of colonisation and exploitation of natural resources, corruption and political climate among other things that distort the continent’s realities and capabilities.
African values and cultures are often presented as barbaric, archaic and static. While such views have created a predominantly negative impression on how the rest of the world perceives Africa, they have also had a negative impact on Africans. By constantly being told they are poor and incapable of developing themselves, Africans have at times ingrained such negative identity and exhibit it much to the detriment of the continent. It is not uncommon to sometimes find black Africans looking down on themselves, treating each other badly in denigrating ways that the continent has been subjected to by others.
African mainstream media also rarely reports on Africa positively. It tends to carry the same attitude as the Western media, constantly presenting the continent in a negative light and giving analysis which is rooted in Western ideology and understanding, a position which continues to entrench the negative perceptions.
Uzuri Wa Africa seeks to promote positive imaging, representation and understanding of Africa through showcasing the continent’s potential, achievements, beauty, and creativity as well as celebrating its diversity and rich cultures and resources. The platform also seeks to explore the opportunities and capacities that the continent’s citizens have as well as take Africans through a journey of knowing one another. This is so as to help foster a sense of unity and collapse the notion of ‘exclusion and otherness’ as similarities and differences are explored in more positive ways that are aligned to Pan-Africanism.
Uzuri Wa Afrika seeks to encourage us as Africans to use our voices to challenge ourselves, motivate, question and aspire to be better in a constructive way. It seeks to help us remember who we are because as I often say, “The battle of the African mind is a struggle against forgetting our heritage, history, the positive strides that have been made as a people truly independent of colonial/external influences.”
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