Africa: Towards Reality-Based Talk

analysis

Almost a decade ago, Republican strategist Karl Rove disparaged what he termed the "reality-based community" of his critics, claiming he and his friends had the power to create their own reality. The slogan has become a catch phrase justifiably used to illustrate the distance of Rove's party from reality. Yet, on African issues, commentators of all political persuasions, Africans as well as non-Africans, not infrequently fall back on dubious generalizations about the entire diverse continent.

Thus, commentaries on "Africa Rising" are now proliferating across the international media, at the same time as images of violence and poverty continue to vie for attention depending on the news cycle. Events displaced from each other by thousands of miles are taken to characterize a continent, or, more modestly, a giant and internally diverse region such as "West Africa." Critics of African states or of U.S. policy on the continent speak sweepingly of "militarization of Africa," without bothering to specify the time period or the representativeness of the national situations they have in mind, apart from the latest to hit the headlines.

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