01 ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025
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 challenging. The documentary film “When I Say Africa” is a valuable resource for explaining this phenomenon.
Still from “When I Say Africa.”
The film opens with young students from a US middle school being asked what comes to mind when they hear the word “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 and discourse is shocking. The US students 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 Americans, slightly embarrassed, explain that “[they] didn’t mean to offend [them], it’s just the way people here speak about Africa.”
“When I Say Africa” explains how Western media portrays Africa and how this discourse ultimately serves Western interests, whether through direct or indirect exploitation. The film draws on examples spanning from the 19th century to the present day.
The central theme of the documentary goes like this: According to Westerners, Africa needs saving and cannot speak for itself to Western audiences, so Westerners must speak and act on its behalf. Western media represent 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 idea of Orientalism – to describe how the depiction of the “Other” serves particular interests of an already existing colonial power dynamic, and most importantly, that 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.
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 when the visitors are asleep or have left), 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.
Still from “When I Say Africa.”
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 West's exploits. Still, Bono and Geldof get to pat themselves on the back and sleep better at night.
My main conclusion is this: 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. In 1975, Chinua Achebe made the same criticisms of Joseph Conrad’s orientalist portrayal of Africa. Sadly, 50 years after that publication, still “what thrills [the West is] just the thought of their humanity – like [ours]… ugly.”
One of the film’s most striking moments comes when a Kenyan student tells one of the Americans over Zoom, “Just because we see clean streets [in movies] doesn’t mean America is doing very well.” It’s a simple point, but it lands hard: the kinds of problems people often assume are unique to African countries—homelessness, underfunded schools, and more—are also very real in the West. The difference is that Africa is the place where these issues are endlessly highlighted and exaggerated in the Western imagination.
In the end, Boniface Mwangi—one of the film’s central voices—offers a clear challenge: the West should focus on fixing its own problems instead of trying to export its care elsewhere. At the same time, Western audiences need to stay open to African self-representation and push for real structural changes in global power relations. As the credits roll, the film drives this home by showing a series of photographs taken by African photographers, many of them connected to EverydayAfrica—the kind of self-representation the documentary champions.
All of this reinforces my central point: the orientalist way Africa has long been depicted is not just an innocent misunderstanding but a tool that has helped sustain post-colonial hierarchies. Dismantling those hierarchies requires addressing that representational power head-on. Any effort that ignores the discursive side of the problem will always fall short.
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.