The documentary Yellow fever by Ng’endo Mukii (2012) is a six-minute video that packs a lot of aspects about Africa explaining how it is viewed and its interaction with the rest of the world. The director uses imagery, daily experiences like braiding hair and talking with other people to show different beliefs we are subscribed to.
Ebron’s article, performing Africa, explains more about Africa as a performance. Most of Africa’s history has been acquired from oral sources, as a result it has little presence in written scholarly articles. Africa’s image on the global platform is seen through “news account of ethnic wars, famines and unstable regimes” (Ebron,2). Despite the fact that this might be the case for some nations in Africa, it is not the whole story. Africa is also full of natural resources, amazing people and beautiful scenery.
When I was preparing to come to the United States of America for my undergraduate education, I went through a number of orientation programs. During one of the sessions, we had alumni from my high school tell us about their experience as Africans in the United States of America. It was surprising to hear that some people thought we still lived in the jungle and had lions as pets. Some people are even surprised that we know English, despite the fact that we got admitted into the best colleges in the United States and the world.
Another feature of Africa as a performance is dress. I will first use use Gondola’ s article to analyse how clothing takes functions other than covering the body. He analyses the search of elegance among congolese youth and the rise of la Sape (fashion) movement. In an African city that never truly offered the youth a place in society, they find an escape from the city’s economic chaos. (Gondola, pg30).
La Sape is different from regular fashion in such a way that it helps the sapeur create a new social identity. This enables the youth to have a sense of belonging to the upper class . I have always considered dress as a way to reinvent oneself, and at times I dress unconventionally to gauge people’s reaction. As a usually timid person, I use dress to communicate and put myself out there. In a way it enables me to create a new persona.
In the show an African city, fashion plays a big role in portraying africa. Nicole Amarteifio who created the show says “it is offered as a counter-narrative to popular depictions of African women as poor, unfashionable, unsuccessful and uneducated.” The five main characters are dressed in fancy clothes both by African and western designers. On the flipside, other female characters in the show are still portrayed as unfashionable. Overall, I believe the show was the first step towards de-exotizing african women.
Next I am going to evaluate the visual representation of Africa. I will first use the article by Fatimah Tobing Rony, the Third eye, To evaluate the Western gaze. After that I will delve into the world of art, and talk about the value and authenticity of African Art over time.
Finally, I will explore how Africans tell their own story using media by focusing on Nollywood.
The third eye, an article written by Fatimah Tobing Rony, shows Africa as seen from the Western gaze. The article shows how the people in the west used to observe Africans without any interactions and drawing conclusions from that encounter. “The impulse to characterise most non-European groups as having undesirable and mostly reprehensible was clearly a means of creating a broad Western Subjectivity that reached beyond the nation” (Rony, 27).
In the article, the word primitive appears many times while characterising Africans. I feel like the word was used as a way to showcase africans as “lesser than humans.” It is also mentioned that the European considered Africans as the missing link between man and animals. As a result, anthropologists were very fascinated with Africans.
Next, I am going to talk about African art, and how it has changed over time. The African art industry has had little visibility in the past, however that pattern is changing. However the increased interest in African art can also be seen as a threat,as this means limited access to the continent's masses (nytimes, pg2). It is very unlikely to find an art museum in most big African cities. I have had the chance to visit the only art museum in my country, and I was mesmerized. The art exhibition told many stories and showed a wide array of craftsmanship.
The authenticity of African art has been an object of discussion and discord for centuries. “Authentic” African art is defined as any piece made from traditional materials by a native Craftsman for acquisition and use by members of local society (Steiner, pg101). On the one hand Europeans considered authentic art as one that had been created and used by Africans before the European contact, hence untainted by European influence. On the other Africans defined art as one that was taken to Europe and put in museum exhibits.
The next thing I will talk about is how Africans tell their own story to the world by focusing on the film industry- mainly Nollywood.In the article, Global Nollywood by Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, the author discusses why the industry had a wide-spread popularity. One of the reasons is that it helps the audience connect to their Africanity. Nigerian culture is similar to most African culture, and as a result, the Nollywood movies are able to reach a wide array of audience. “The films are able to move the African viewers away ‘from struggling to fit into western stereotypes of beauty and slimness (pg.4)’”. Some pastor use the content to evangelize, as most Nollywood movies are religious in nature. The diaspora use it as a way “to reconnect to a cultural home (pg. 6).”
The ability of Nollywood to reach a wide array of audiences has allowed it to make an impact on African culture as a whole. However, it poses a threat to locally produced cinema. Ghanaian, Tanzania and Congolese film makers struggle to make their styles popular and are sometimes forced to copy Nigerian aesthetics and narratives. Ng’endo Mukii’s documentary, Yellow fever, is different. The style of the documentary is completely different from Nollywood, and it is very refreshing. Despite being very short, it touched on issues of skin color, hair, and the concept of being African.
The documentary emphasizes on the violence we make our bodies go through to look a certain way -achieve western standards of beauty. I will first talk about the color privilege- lighter skinned people are considered as more beautiful. In an interview, Mukii talks about how people treated her due to her skin complection. On one hand, she was treated well like a “cute cuddly dog”, on the other hand, people were jealous of the color of her skin. I have had the opposite experience. Despite being a very light skinned baby, I grew up to be a very dark skinned child. At age five I had a nickname, Nyirabukara, that meant the dark one (or black).
Another way Africans, especially women, violate their bodies to achieve eurocentric standards of beauty is altering their hair. At a very young age, they start braiding it, adding extensions and relaxing it. All of these are done to achieve straighter, longer and more manageable hair. As a child, I was allowed to keep my hair until I turned 10. Everytime we went to the saloon, my mother told us that if we complained about the pain, she would make us cut it off. Since then I associated beauty with pain, and this is a flawed way for a child to view the world.
I believe the whole discussion of how Africa is portrayed in the word is a matter of who has the power. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk- the danger of a single story- she talks of how stories have power. “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize,” Chimamanda. Once many diverse stories of Africa as a continent are told. the way it is viewed globally will change for the better.
Bibliography
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg accessed on April 30, 2018
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DATFjkueaM accessed on April 30, 2018
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixNGF3-v1C8 accessed on April 30, 2018
- Paulla Ebron, “Performing Africa” in Performing Africa (2002), pp. 1-27
- Ch. Didier Gondola, “Dream and Drama: The Search for Elegance among Congolese Youth,” African Studies Review 42, no. 1 (April 1999), pp. 23–48
- Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin, “’These girls’ fashion is sick!’: An African City and the geography of sartorial worldliness,” Feminist Africa 21, 2016, pp. 37-51.
- Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Seeing anthropology” in The third eye: Race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle (1996), pp. 21-44.
- Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, “Nollywood and its diaspora: An introduction” in Global Nollywood: The transnational dimensions of an African film industry (2013), pp. 1-22.
- - Christopher Steiner, “The quest for authenticity and the invention of African art” in African art in transit (1994), pp. 100-129.
- Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Modern African Art Is Being Gentrified” The New York Times, 20 May 2017
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