After spending one year in the United States, I realize how ignorant Americans are about Africa. For example, a woman felt sorry for me because she thought that everyone in my country, the Ivory Coast, was starving. Of course she was making a direct connection with the starvation problem in Somalia, which was at that time of the year receiving great coverage. She did not know where the Ivory Coast was located, and apparently Somalia and the Ivory Coast meant the same thing to her.

As references to the “Evil Empire” on American television recede into memory, sublime images of Africa as a dark continent nevertheless remain an enduring presence. This, despite the debate in foreign policy and media circles about the need to redefine now the role of the press in coverage of global affairs. No doubt, the media, television especially, have provided compelling images of the changing world order: Tiananmen Square, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, Somalia, Bosnia, the Soviet coup and the Berlin Wall. To most Americans, vivid memories of these events are in all likelihood shaped by images gleaned from CNN or one of the three networks.

Complaints about Africa’s media image have been voiced for years, and for long little seemed to change. Civil wars, famine, squalor and primitivity have continued to dominate the headlines and to paint a grim image of mankind’s ancestral home. The recent media fixation on Somalia is but one in a series of this one-dimensional coverage. In the early 1960s, the anarchy in Katanga (Zaire) dominated the news and defined Africa. In the late 1960s, it was the Nigerian civil war and the consequent misery in “Biafra.” In the 1970s, the real and conjured eccentricities of Uganda’s Idi Amin became the African news. Political conflict in Zimbabwe and South Africa dominated much of the 1980s, until the starvation of Ethiopians eclipsed everything else. Recently, the grim images were of Somalia. While these events warranted the press attention they received, their coverage to the near exclusion of non-crisis modem African life has left a severe knowledge gap and perpetuated a historical image problem.

This essay addresses how recent changes in electronic media may impact upon what the rest of the world sees of Africa on television. Its predictions are disheartening, especially to Africanists and communications scholars who have well documented the longstanding insufficiency of African news coverage. And my conclusions contrast with those of the big television news companies, who, with a “good for business, good for everyone” mentality, like to believe that the new media market and nifty new technologies can only mean more and better coverage of every part of the planet.

American media coverage of Angola’s first multi-party elections, held on 29-30 September 1992, was based on a number of misconceptions which were derived from an enduring Cold War perspective, a deference to the Bush administration agenda and a conviction that free and fair elections were synonymous with “democracy.”

Our students read magazines. Many of us, as professors, assign popular news magazines in our classes for the discussion of current events. This essay examines the coverage of Africa in Time and Newsweek to explore the images they present to their readers.

One of the results of the New World Information and Communication Order debate was the invigoration of international communication research on images and coverage of nations in the world media. Specifically, the images of Africa outside the continent became a major research question in Western communication scholarship. The results of these studies contend that several variables such as 1) event characteristics, including deviance, interest, and timeliness; and 2) country characteristics, including economic, political, and cultural significance, proximity and national security, appear to affect the ways one nation is covered by the media of another nation.

The word “black,” referring to Africans and people of African descent, is essentially a social and political construction, historically articulated and contemporarily invented and reinvented. As a social and political category, the meaning of “black” varies through contestation over the term. Yet, in its dominant use in white American and European culture, “black” refers to a static set of trans-cultural and essentialized racial characteristics. What is “black” is “not white.” As Frantz Fanon reminds us, “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” Thus, “black” in relation to “white” is made different.

In the popular media and in the minds of many people resident in the northern hemisphere, Africa has two major attributes: an environment filled with exotic forms of life and landscapes, and an environment threatened with ecological collapse and human suffering. These themes often work together, providing a base from which everything from international campaigns to basic research are launched. Like all broad generalizations, these are based on small amounts of truth and large amounts of fiction, and like all generalizations, their indiscriminate application can be—and has been—extremely destructive. As these ideas are elaborated, Africans are either not mentioned at all, or are cast in the role of destructive agents. The choice of “Ecology and Environmental Issues” as the overall theme for the 1993 African Studies meetings provides an opportunity to explore and dispel these perceptions—as well as the risk of contributing to their perpetuation.