I attended the “Current Events Convo with Sam [Stelnicki] on Stereotypes and Current Events of Africa” on October 26th in Smith-Steeb 101. (It was an academic event.)
Sam did a great job of mixing up her presentation style to keep us engaged. We played an interactive trivia game with Kahoot, where the questions appeared on the projector and we answered on our phones. The questions in the trivia game were designed to point out the (relatively) uniformed way in which our society thinks about Africa, particularly the part between the Sahara and South Africa. One of the facts revealed by the game was that cellphone ownership, as a percentage of population, was roughly the same in Africa as in America. Most of the other statistics questions made sense to me, but I’ll admit that one surprised me.
She also showed us a video called “Let’s Save Africa! Gone wrong”. It portrayed a young African actor in charity commercials who was exasperated at the tone of commercials that use African children to solicit donations. (You can watch it here.) It made me chuckle, I’ll admit, I have mixed reviews for the video. It wasn’t as funny as it seems intended to be, and the topic of humanitarian donation solicitation reinforcing stereotypes is too complex for a 5-minute comedic video.
The presentation finished with a short slideshow. The slide that stuck out to me the most was a tweet from Delta that (mistakenly) portrayed Ghana as have giraffes. I think I know more about Africa than most people, but I don’t think I would have noticed that as wrong. It made me realize that I often fall into the habit of thinking of Sub-Saharan Africa as a monolith. I do mentally differentiate North Africa and South Africa from the rest of the continent, but I often visualize everything in the middle as combination of the Serengeti, poor agricultural settlements, and chaotic, sprawling cities.
I liked how the presentation was structured to allow us to gradually realize that we had these preconceived notions about sub-Saharan Africa as a primitive, backwater place. Compared to the many other ways to tell people they are might be less culturally sensitive than they realize, it was a cool, cordial and engaging method. She wasn’t trying to make us feel guilty about how we viewed Africa; we were just supposed to open our eyes a little bit.
The presentation didn’t so much challenge my beliefs but made me realize they were pretty much wrong. I don’t hear too much about specific African countries in the news, just occasionally things about the continent at large. This realization was a little embarrassing for me. I take pride in being worldly and informed. It was like a splash of cold water to realize that I wasn’t too far removed from the people who think “Africa” is a country.
In contrast to probably most of the other people in IA, cultural perceptions of Africa isn’t even in the same stratosphere as the other topics in my STEM-heavy coursework, IA Seminar notwithstanding.
Ultimately, I wish that the Current Events conversation had been longer and more in-depth. It did a good job of showing that we, as Americans, often have an uninformed view of Africa. We only explored a small part of what is a big conversation. This was my first Current Event conversation, but it seems that a large part of it should be discussion by the students. Only a handful of people showed up, and we weren’t too talkative.
I had a chance to talk to Sam during the event, so I wasn’t left with too many questions for her. I hope there are more Current Event conversations, I will definitely try to go to them.