03 ISSUE XI
MAY 2026
MAY 2026
I feel You
Media producers should reject familiar tropes, portraying Africans as fully human rather than exotic others, as Westerners portray themselves.
By Chiara Nanni
“When I say Africa, what comes to mind?” is the powerful question with which the documentary film by the same name opens. Not surprisingly, the high school students from a class in Chicago in the United States come up with a list of words with evident negative connotations, which we could also call “thick concepts” (that are concepts that carry a specific connotation): rape, violence, poverty, hunger, and diseases.
Still from When I Say Africa.
Later, near the end of the film, which first came out in May 2025, the same question is posed to a classroom in Mombasa, Kenya, and the answers to it change radically from the previous ones. African teenagers talk about growth, culture, gratitude, and many other words with very positive connotations. From this comparison alone, we can understand the film’s point, its importance, and its immediate impact.
More often than it should be acceptable, Westerners view Africa through a haze of stereotypes shaped by racism and ideology. From that vantage point, the continent is imagined as a distant, almost mythical place defined by poverty, abandonment, and backwardness. In more extreme, yet not uncommon, cases of ignorance, African societies are reduced to caricatures: people living in huts, struggling for water, unable to drive, lacking basic household amenities, and existing without meaningful work or income, as if they were somehow outside modern life altogether.
A group of the Mombasa students sits around and speaks with frustration about the kinds of questions they get when they travel to the West: “How did you come here? Do you have airports in Africa?” In another scene, Zine Magubane, whose family left South Africa during apartheid, describes her feelings after her family returned to visit: “What I was experiencing in South Africa and what people thought I was doing were pretty different.” This very simply explains how many misconceptions and stereotypes Africans have always been subject to by Western people.
After education, exposure, and sustained critical reflection, we can begin to unlearn those assumptions. Even a basic fact – that Africa is a vast continent of fifty-four countries, each with distinct cultures, economies, languages, and contested “levels of development” can start to unsettle simplistic views. But even then we have to ask “by which standards do we measure levels of development?” Knowledge alone isn’t a cure-all. As the documentary makes clear, deeply ingrained biases and ignorance don’t disappear easily; they persist despite awareness, and require ongoing engagement, humility, and experience to truly confront.
A major theme in “When I Say Africa” is volunteer experiences (“voluntourism”) and aid movements in African countries. We follow the journey of a white American woman, Pippa Biddle, who, as a teenager, decided to travel to Africa to “help” people. In Tanzania, she realizes that those people were fine without her, that her presence was even harmful at times and unnecessary, and, on top of that, locals tried to mask it so as not to hurt her feelings. For example, in one case, students helped build walls for a new childcare facility. One morning, Pippa woke up earlier than the rest of the group to see local men dismantle the wall and rebuild it properly – a very powerful event.
The film also underscores the role of popular culture, especially music, and its relation to the aid industry in perpetuating stereotypes of Africa. Since the mid-1990s, various versions of the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” have been deployed by British charities and celebrities to raise money among the UK public to “save Africans.” When African artists make songs, like “Ebola, Invisible Enemy,” Westerners either dismiss or don’t notice them. The film also covers the wrongheaded Kony 2012 campaign, which would ostensibly bring a Ugandan rebel leader to justice via tweets and social media posts. But as Ugandans and other Africans fighting back through the media at the time pointed out, the power to effect change, whether through people or government, still lay in the United States, not in Africa. The idea persisted that African people needed help and support because they could not sustain themselves.
Two of the film's stars are the writer Binyavanga Wainaina and photographer Boniface Mwangi, both Kenyan. Wainaina sums up how Euro-Americans view Africa: “This place is virgin, you can impose your will here, you can impose your idea.” Mwangi tells the filmmaker: “Africa existed before it was colonized, before they came to take our lands, our minerals, and sell our brothers to slavery.” Both statements reveal the logic of colonialism – and its hold on the mind – while underscoring how deeply self-interest shapes human behavior, including aid campaigns and voluntourism. What seems obvious is often ignored, consciously or not, reinforcing the impulse to cast Africa as a place to be “saved,” “civilized,” and instructed in how to behave.
These beliefs serve as a justification through which Western populations, their governments, and NGOs seek to explain their interventions in African countries. I said “unconsciously” because people who want to help Africans are not necessarily driven by bad intentions; on the contrary, it is often simply a matter of not knowing Africa's history and having internalized a particular idea of Africa portrayed in mainstream media: When the two school groups finally meet on a Zoom (or Skype?) call, one of the Kenyan girls with a healthy dose of curiosity and ingenuity, sincerely asks her peers in Chicago: “What do you mean by help?”
Overall, this film was truly impactful for me because, like Pippa, it made me feel uncomfortable with myself, prompting me to reflect on the true reasons I went to volunteer in South Africa a few times years ago and the real impact my actions had there. It left me with some tips to implement to create a more equal relationship with the African continent. For example, when going to Africa, try to view it and document it objectively, not in a way that tries to perpetuate the same logic as victim-saviors we’ve always had in our minds. “Human rights, democracy, the rule of law, equality are not Western ideals; they’re human ideals,” Mwangi tells a group of school children in North Carolina, on a visit the US, at one point.
Media producers should move beyond familiar tropes by showing Africa through everyday life - love without tragedy, intellectual exchange, humor, and treating Africans not as exotic others but as fully human, in the same way the West represents itself. Recognizing shared struggles, including the persistence of racism in places like the United States, can help unsettle internalized hierarchies, even if it doesn’t transform global relations overnight. Sometimes the point is simpler than all of that: during that joint video call, after an exchange between two of the girls – one African, one American – about stereotypes Americans and Africans had about each other, they each said: “I feel you.” In exactly the same way – same words, same gesture, hand from heart toward the screen – and instantly understood each other.
chiara nanni is completing an ma in international affairs at The New School.