Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus
If reporting doesn’t improve, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost to history
We needed this article to be written for months. Thank you @Nanjala1-I share some of ur pearls 🧵
thenation.com/article/world/…
If reporting doesn’t improve, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost to history
We needed this article to be written for months. Thank you @Nanjala1-I share some of ur pearls 🧵
thenation.com/article/world/…
"As #Covid19 races its way across #Africa, there are 2 stories happening at once. 1st t is of governments using their armies and militarized police to beat, threaten, and shoot their way to #publichealth."
"2nd is of communities knitting together their meager resources to fill..
"2nd is of communities knitting together their meager resources to fill..
"the gap of absent states...of tailors across informal settlements in Nairobi & Mombasa sewing face masks out of scrap fabric & handing them out for free after price gouging by commercial suppliers."
"Both of these stories are true, but only the 1st one is on track to enter the archives of how Africa navigated the #pandemic."
"When confronted by a new situation, the punditry & analysis is inclined to pay attention to what is likely to go wrong rather than what might go right."
(I tweeted about this weeks ago!)
(I tweeted about this weeks ago!)
"Africa is spoken for and spoken about, but so rarely allowed to speak, and this allows only a handful of narratives to survive. We get PR-like tales of singular figures triumphant against all odds, the white savior who braves malaria to deliver unprecedented interventions..."
"Archives are not neutral; they’re sites for contestation and projections of power. This is why historians from the global south, like Brenda Sanya, a Kenyan feminist scholar, argue that questioning a nation’s history as represented by the archive is absolutely necessary."
This pandemic is calling for tools that the media is not accustomed to using, one of which is thinking beyond the news cycle to what the story of this moment will look like 50 or 100 years from now.
"This is the task for #journalists covering Africa and Covid-19: Hold space for communities that those in power would rather not hear. It is a tremendous challenge. "
"Flawed and partial accounts of pandemics that understate the agency of affected communities and overstate the contribution of foreign interventions can have consequences long after the emergency period" (end 🧵...but soooo much more eloquent writing here thenation.com/article/world/…)
