Breach Candy Group: Blog

What was probably most interesting about the Mobile Brain Bank-Africa conference I attended today was the overarching sense that something seems to have radically changed. Why do I say this? What has changed? Let me explain. My background is critical media anthropology. Here, the classic joke amongst some of the die-hard media anthropologists is a rather funny anecdote about a Western journalist who arrives at an unnamed African city to write about the recent crisis there. He/she gets of the plane and asks the first person he/she sees coming out of  the airport: 

"Anybody here speak English AND has been raped."

Of course this anecdote functions to a degree to maintain the purity of anthropological knowledge over other such "parachute epistemologies" that Western NGOs and journalists adopt when they try to understand the complexities of Africa. How could poor non-anthropologists understand this faraway different place without spending years there, getting seriously sick at least once as the rite of passage and going a bit mental and native for a bit etc? We have heard this many times and such a cultural anthropological approach of course has its own problems. Where this anecdote, however, is so telling is that - for the longest time - Africa used to be represented in the Western imaginary as a continent of abundant natural beauty (yes, many many lions, antelopes and giraffes, acacia trees, and orange sunsets and sunrises ) but also as a dark sinister place of irrational calamity, crisis, famine and human suffering. I used to live in Ethiopia during the time of the Live Aid and the 1984 famine and the stereotypical images of starving big-eyed children with their ribs sticking out have been burned into the collective imaginary Westerners have of Africa ever since. I have taught critical theory that looks at such pictorial representations of Africa on numerous occasions and I am always surprised how omnipresent these still are amongst students.

Now, here, I am today at the conference listening to many of the talks on mobiles and Africa and none of the cliches (well, almost none) are being used. Rather, Africa is represented as continent of emerging innovation, indigenous ingenuity, emerging dynamism and, heaven forbid, of undergoing a "revolution" as Esko Aho, the Nokia executive and ex-Prime Minister of Finland put it. A revolution to something better, something new, something that Africans can be proud of. If the 21st century will be Indian as many have proclaimed - now it seems Africa also has arrived with its mobile industry booming.

Of course the conditions of the ground are always much more complex than what one conference can tell us. However, what this
conference confirmed to me - once again - was that there has been a radical shift in how we now approach the emerging future of Africa. And this will eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

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