THE NEW CONTEXT

01  ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025

An Uncomfortable Portrayal of Media Orientalism


A new film exposes how Western media’s supposedly noble portrayals of Africans have long concealed exploitative power relations—and boldly talks back to that history.

By Xavier Moysen Álvarez



When teaching my students at the City University of New York about the concept of “Discursive Formations,” some have difficulty understanding how language and representation typically serve as vehicles for exercising power dynamics. In the Foucauldian sense, a discursive formation is a regime of truth constituted by the creation of a supposed body of knowledge that shapes perceptions and practices in favor of existing power relations. I certainly don’t blame these students. Foucault is a remarkably difficult theorist, and finding a concrete example of how discursive formations operate in real life is a challenging task. For that reason, the documentary film “When I Say Africa” is a great resource to explain this phenomenon.



Image from the film “When I Say Africa.”

It opens with young students from a middle school in Chicago being asked what they think of when they hear “Africa.” The call is being facilitated by journalist Austin Merrill and photographer Peter DiCampo, the founders of EverydayAfrica, a social media photography project that aims to portray daily, incidental life on the continent.  Students at a Kenyan school are asked the same question. The difference in replies, in discourse, is shocking. The children from Chicago can only imagine “poverty,” “rape,” and “disease,” whilst the African children (they’re at a boarding school and from different countries across east and southern Africa) imagine “potential,” “gratitude,” and “culture.” During a Zoom call with the Africans, the young people from Chicago, slightly embarrassed, explain that: “[they] didn’t mean to offend [them], it’s just the way people here speak about Africa.”

The documentary explains how Western media portrays Africa and how that discourse ultimately works in favor of Western interests, whether through direct or indirect exploitation. The film utilizes examples ranging from the 19th century to our present day. For me, the central theme of the documentary is the following: According to Westerners, Africa needs saving and cannot speak for itself to Western audiences, so Westerners must speak and act on its behalf. And the West represents Africa, the continent with the most countries (54 in total) on earth, as a monolithic, backwards, pitiful landmass desperate for help. This is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism – the depiction of the “Other” serves particular interests of an already existing colonial power dynamic, but most importantly, it is also necessary for the constitution of the West’s representation of itself. What is the West, if not everything that Africa is not? Through the classroom exercise of the kids in both hemispheres, we see this orientalist discursive formation at play.

The main drivers of the Orientalist narrative, of course, are the mainstream legacy media. Going back to the 19th century, News agencies in the colonial metropole “divided” the world based on which news agency from which country, usually from the US and Europe, would cover each part of the world. But what are the real-life consequences of this? How does this serve to perpetuate this condition of oppression in the material sense? The film does a great job showing how organizations around the Western world mobilize Christian Westerners through “charity missions” to “help the less fortunate” Africans by building homes, for example. In reality, the people benefiting the most from these missions are not the people from Africa (since the majority of these homes are poorly built or rebuilt by local populations), but Westerners who return to their countries with a sense of “self-growth” or better job prospects, and the organizations that pocket large sums of money by organizing these trips.

The film spends some time exploring humanitarian efforts aimed at the African continent. It traces these back to colonialism, starting with those from the Belgian Congo late in the 19th century, through the Band Aid campaign in the 1980s to relief the famine in Ethiopia, to, more recently, the US-based #KONY2012 campaign to arrest the leader of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army and efforts to manage an Ebola outbreak in four countries in West Africa.  
Irish pop star Bob Geldof gained fame and notoriety for fronting the Band Aid campaign. The campaign song, “Do They Know It's Christmas?” was called out for being overtly racist, and for all the money raised, the campaign failed to make any structural improvements to the famine conditions in Ethiopia. However, it did help advance Geldof’s figure in the West as a “philanthropic” figure who masterminded “the most powerful song in rock and roll history”. To date, the song has had four new versions, including during the Ebola outbreak. #KONY2012 was rightly criticized for oversimplifying the Ugandan Civil War. In the end, it had little effect in the region, and Joseph Kony is still free.  



Image from _

These discursive representations of Africa perpetuate existing power relations through the mechanism of exploitation, othering, and by putting a band-aid over the open veins of a continent bled dry by colonialism. Walter Rodney explained: “The process of accumulation in the capitalist metropoles required the underdevelopment of the greater portion of the globe.”  The film briefly describes how damaging the IMF was to the new African economies after decolonization, further setting them back. If Africa needed saving from anything, it was not from itself, but from the exploits of the West. Still, Bono and Geldof get to pat themselves on the back and sleep better at night.

My main points are these: from the KONY 2012 debacle to the “charity mission” scams and the hollow fundraising of Band Aid/Live Aid, these efforts do more to hinder real structural change than to promote it. And these could never have been accomplished without the orientalist discursive formation created by the mainstream Western media apparatus. The same criticisms Chinua Achebe made when he criticized Joseph Conrad’s orientalist portrayal of Africa in 1975 persist today, as the documentary shows. Sadly, 50 years after that publication, still “what thrills [the West is] just the thought of their humanity – like [ours]… ugly.”

One of the most decisive segments of the film comes when a student from the Kenyan school tells one of the Americans over Zoom: “Just because we see clean streets [in movies] doesn’t mean America is doing very well”. Perspicuously, most of the problems African countries face are also present in the West: homelessness, the lack of a strong educational infrastructure, among others. However, the African continent is the only place where this happens in the Western imagination.

As a solution, Boniface Mwangi, one of the film’s main characters, explains that the West should prioritize its local problems instead of trying to export its care somewhere else. In addition, Western audiences must be receptive to African self-representation and push for structural change in relations of power. As the credits roll, we see a variety of images taken by a myriad of photographers from Africa, many of whom are featured in EverydayAfrica – the self-representation the documentary endorses. This underscores my main point: The orientalist way of representing Africa has been a mechanism to perpetuate post-colonial subjugation, and therefore any attempts at dismantling this power relation must also seek to abolish the discursive aspect of it. Any attempt to do so without accounting for this will be hegemonically incomplete.






Xavier Moyssén Álvarez is a PhD student in sociology at the New School for Social Research. His work focuses on the intersection of violence, state theory, and media. He is from Mexico.