This reminds me of the discussion we had in class last week about preconceptions on the Sahara. The fact in this age of modernization, technology and internet, many people still think of Africa as a country, of Africans as people living the jungle, with animals (I have friends who have been asked this), or of the Sahara as no man's land shows how powerful historical accounts can be and how important it is then to be as accurate as possible.

Wainaina uses sarcasm to perfectly denounce how Westerners portray the African continent. If centuries after slavery and colonization, people still think of Africa as this poor, primitive continent, it is majorly because of such inaccurate accounts on life on the continent. These "volunteers" who share their "African experience" with the world are obviously biased by existing outdated literature but their reports worsen the situation because the stories people read are no longer on paper alone. The readers see pictures and real life videos and think they have proof of what is going on the continent without realizing that is a fraction of the story.

I think it is interesting how we as Africans also perpetuate the narrative by failing to teach the true story to the younger generation. I am curious to know the underlining reasons.

This is where I blame (Black) Africans a little bit. If we had written our own history down, people from outside would not have had such an impact on how our story is told (but I guess our civilization had not reached that period before it was interrupted). There was communication across the Sahara; for sure, it is a desert so it was probably hard to navigate but there was trading back and forth. The Sahara was not a divide just like it is not today but I guess it is easier for the media to perpetuate the old stories than showing the truth.

This all falls under the "divide and conquer" mindset used during colonization, which worked perfectly. One of the famous examples is the genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda. There are different ethnic groups in Africa, which beautifully contributes to our diversity. It is sad to see that these differences have been weaponized and such unfortunate events still have their repercussions today.

I am interested in the "when speaking or writing in English" part because indeed, "tribe" is the word that the colonizer used. African indigenous languages have their own words to describe the types of groups that is usually wrongly referred to as tribe.