tbh I just don't know anything about Africa. News sources available on the English-speaking internet are almost silent about everyday life, and good luck finding anybody online living in sub-saharan Africa.
Even the history available to mere casuals such as myself are pretty sparse, and almost all of them are written by/for Europeans, informed primarily by European study and so on.
All I know is, Africa is basically an entire continent that has been used and abused by every form of shitty government, turned up to 11.
Africa's an elided continent. Part of the point of this article is to demonstrate that it is a political circumstance that causes your lack of knowledge; not an mere silence but a centuries-long silencing, built into a global continental hierarchy.
And there's an increasing amount of good scholarship and media coming from some places in the continent, among some amazing work that already exists. I try to put some of it in f/Africa.
I spent some time editing a thousand or so abstracts for a social justive archive (http://connexions.org/) a few years ago, and I noticed that the struggle against South African apartheid was very prominent in the past. There was also a lot of criticism against the behaviour of the west in both Somalia and Rawanda, but there does seem to have been a reduction in social justice topics in the last decade or two.
I don't think its because people don't care, and I agree that there is a general lack of knowledge about African social justice topics.
zorblax wrote
tbh I just don't know anything about Africa. News sources available on the English-speaking internet are almost silent about everyday life, and good luck finding anybody online living in sub-saharan Africa.
Even the history available to mere casuals such as myself are pretty sparse, and almost all of them are written by/for Europeans, informed primarily by European study and so on.
All I know is, Africa is basically an entire continent that has been used and abused by every form of shitty government, turned up to 11.