One of my literary heroes is the Kenyan author and editor Binyavanga Wainaina, who died—at just 48 years old—in 2019, and whose collected works were published last year. Wainaina was both stylish and unflinchingly political, and in his too-short career, he wrote a lot of remarkable things, including the heartbreaking coming-out essay “I Am a Homosexual, Mum.” (In Kenya, where gay relationships are punishable by prison time, this took a lot more courage to write than it would for the average MFA student in Brooklyn.) Wainaina is best known for “How to Write About Africa,” his scathing send-up of the cliches that keep popping up when non-Africans write about the continent: 

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.

Since Wainaina wrote that in 2005, not much has changed. The same old stereotypes are alive and well, which became obvious when executives at the New York Times wrote in a 2019 job listing that they wanted someone to patrol “the pirate seas of the Horn of Africa” looking for “unexpected stories of hope.” (The Times was mercilessly mocked online by actual Africans, including the Kenyan filmmaker Munene Mwarania, who filmed himself hiding among the plants in his backyard and said he was applying for the job from “deep in the forests of Congo.”) But if anything, Wainaina was giving the media too much credit, especially when it comes to the major news outlets in the United States. A lot of the time, the problem isn’t even that our journalists discuss Africa badly. It’s that they don’t bother to discuss Africa at all. 

This problem first came to my attention last spring, when I was doing research for an article about lotteries in the United States. (You can read that here, by the way. I think it turned out okay.) I noticed, and I said at the time, that NBC Nightly News had made no mention of the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region—which lasted for two years and may have killed as many as 600,000 people—in a run of broadcasts from November 2 to November 8, 2022, even though the peace deal that ended the war came on November 2. Lester Holt and José Díaz-Balart, the evening anchors for the network, just didn’t mention it. They did, however, run a story about the Powerball lottery and its record-high jackpot every day during that span of time. This struck me as a glaring omission, and a pretty perverse set of priorities from NBC. But since then, the pattern has only been repeated. 

On May 29 of this year, South Africa held its general elections. The results were dramatic: the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela, failed to win a majority in Parliament for the first time since apartheid ended in 1994. That development has huge implications, both for South Africa and the wider world. Among other things, it may alter the course of the country’s International Court of Justice case against Israel for genocide, since some of the non-ANC parties in the new coalition government are officially neutral on the bloodshed in Gaza. But if you rely on U.S. TV networks for your news, you’d hardly know anything had happened. 

Just like they did with the Tigray war, NBC Nightly News completely ignored the South African election results, making no mention of them on May 29, May 30, May 31, or June 1. Instead, they chose to focus on topics like the felony conviction of Donald Trump (okay, fair, that’s pretty big news,) the death of Michelle Obama’s mother at age 86 (less big news), and one truly banal story: “Some Florida Transplants Rethink Move to Sunshine State.” The “transplants” story took up three minutes of the May 29 broadcast, or roughly 10 percent of the half-hour show. You’d really think that airtime could be better used to report on a seismic change in the politics of South Africa, a nation with a population of more than 63 million people. But apparently for NBC, interviewing a middle-aged white guy named Dennis on his complaints about life in Florida was more important. It wasn’t just NBC, either. In the same four-day period, ABC World News Tonight also neglected to mention that South Africa was getting a new government. Instead, anchor David Muir gave us hard-hitting stories like “Charges Dismissed Against Golfer Scottie Sheffler Over Traffic Incident” on his May 29 show. We also learned which 12-year-old won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 31.

To its credit, PBS NewsHour at least mentioned the South African elections. But they did so extremely briefly, devoting less than a full minute of their “News Wrap” segment to the topic “South Africa Votes” on May 29. On June 1, the program again devoted around 30 seconds of “News Wrap” to South Africa before moving swiftly on. But in the same broadcast, PBS aired more than seven minutes of coverage about the upcoming elections in Mexico. ABC World News Tonight also covered the Mexican elections on June 1, while ignoring those in South Africa. You could argue that this makes some sense, since Mexico is a neighbor to the U.S. and South Africa is not. But that excuse falls apart when you take into account the perfectly good, informative segment NBC Nightly News ran on India’s elections for the Lok Sabha, half a planet away, on June 1. It’s not that these networks have any problem covering politics in foreign countries, even distant ones. It’s specifically Africa that gets ignored. 

We can see this phenomenon with newspapers too. The New York Times, in particular, pays very little attention to Africa. In 10 days from September 11 to 20 of this year, the print edition of the paper has carried 35 stories about Israel-Palestine (total population 14 million), 24 about Russia and Ukraine (total population 180 million people), and only 10 total stories on the entire African continent of 1.4 billion people: 

The picture looks even worse when we consider the kinds of stories that are run about Africa. Many of them have a U.S. focus. Those counted among the ten include “Three Americans Sentenced to Death for Failed Congo Coup,” “United States Backs Africa’s U.N. Security Council Bid, With a Catch,” “U.S. to Wave Requirements for Egypt Aid,” and “U.S. Pushes Nigeria to Release Imprisoned Binance Employee.” These are technically stories to do with Africa, but are more about the U.S. relationship with Africa, or about Americans who happened to be in an African country. The other six stories are all about natural disasters or violence, meaning that there was not a single article in a ten-day period on African electoral politics, economics, or society, leaving readers who get their news from the Times with the impression that the only noteworthy things that happen in Africa are flooding and wars. Or, as Wainaina acerbically put it: 

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation[…] Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket.

This year, the nonprofit journalism group Africa No Filter released its first-ever Global Media Index on Africa, a statistical analysis of how the continent is covered in 20 different news outlets worldwide. The study ranked the online platforms of international news organizations from the BBC to China’s Xinhua, along with U.S.-based ones like the Wall Street Journal and CNN, considering more than 1,000 articles over a six-month period. The results were dismal. In its “diversity of topics” category, the Index found the same overwhelming focus on violence, natural disasters, and other “negative” topics as we’ve just seen with the New York Times, and a corresponding “scant attention to topics such as culture, the arts, innovation, technology, and other positive developments.” And in its “Diversity of Countries” category, the study found that no major news outlet consistently covered 100 percent of Africa’s 54 countries. Only two—Voice of America and the Agence France-Presse—even cracked 50 percent:

(Chart: Global Media Index on Africa)

Here, we should note that Voice of America is funded entirely by the U.S. government, and is closer to a propaganda network than a real news agency. Meanwhile, the rest of the Index’s top 11 rankings are either European, Canadian, or Middle Eastern, with American media occupying the bottom half of the chart. Two of the biggest and most influential papers in the United States, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, actually cover Africa the least. We can speculate on why American outlets do noticeably worse than their counterparts in other countries; the fact that the U.S. never had African colonies like France or England could play a role, as could the dramatic cuts to newsroom staff that have taken place at outlets like CNN, and the underlying anti-Black racism that pervades so many aspects of life in the States. But the difference between our news agencies and others around the world is dramatic. 

In fact, the U.S. media ignores Africa even when it’s a matter of life and death. In 2007, Swedish researchers Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about how natural disasters are covered in the U.S. media, examining roughly 5,000 examples from between 1968 and 2002. Some of their findings (laid out in attractive graph form by Our World in Data) are unsurprising. It turns out, for instance, that visually spectacular disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes get more coverage than things like famines and droughts. But it also makes a difference where the disaster happens. Eisensee and Strömberg calculated how many deaths it takes for an event to appear in the U.S. media, and found there’s a geographic disparity. A disaster that kills just one person in Europe will typically be covered, but it takes 45 African deaths to generate a headline: 

Only the Pacific region (which includes countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, among others) is covered less than Africa; there, it takes 91 deaths to catch American journalists’ interest. In a very literal sense, the media behaves as if Black and African lives matter less than European ones. Forty-five times less, to be exact. 

In particular, there’s one ongoing news story in Africa that is just as complex and consequential as the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, but isn’t covered nearly as much by major U.S. papers. It’s the war in Sudan, which has been raging since April 15 of last year. Like Ukraine, Sudan’s civil war is a long, drawn-out, seemingly intractable conflict. Like Gaza, it’s a human rights catastrophe, with more than 8 million people displaced from their homes, deadly outbreaks of disease (and no medicine or clean water to treat them), mass starvation (and aid trucks blocked by the military), and countless other atrocities. We don’t even know the full death toll yet. Official estimates stand at 14,790, but that’s almost certainly too low, as one leaked United Nations report suggests up to 15,000 people were massacred in a single city in the Darfur region. But although the major newspapers do occasionally report on Sudan, the focus is far lesser. At the New York Times website, the “Africa” category sometimes goes for more than a week without a Sudan-related headline, and there’s no special category for “Sudan Civil War” the way there is for “Russia-Ukraine War” and “Israel-Hamas War,” each of which are updated multiple times a day. It’s no better at the Washington Post’s “World” page, which has a special tab for “War in Ukraine,” but nothing else. In fact, when Sudan does come up in the U.S. press, it’s  usually from a writer asking why the crisis is being ignored.

If we believe that all human lives are of equal value, and that all wars are equally tragic and horrible, this state of affairs makes no sense. Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan all need urgent diplomatic and humanitarian help, and they all need journalists to turn the spotlight their way. But as we’ve seen, only the first two are treated as “top stories.” Where is the “Sudan Civil War” tab on the websites of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the articles to fill them? Why aren’t these papers commissioning dozens of freelance journalists from the streets of Khartoum? You could argue it makes sense for American news outlets to focus mainly on conflicts in which the United States is involved—but then again, we are involved in Sudan, as a U.S. ally in the United Arab Emirates has been arming one of the warring factions, something our leaders could pressure them to stop doing. For the Herald of Scotland, foreign affairs editor David Pratt suggests another, more depressing reason for the disparity: simply because these events are unfolding in Africa. 

As I can attest from personal experience, just like other journalists who have covered African affairs, there is nothing new in this editorial neglect. In part, it stems from the misguided perception that those outside of Africa rarely have any interest in the continent or its people. Short of pillaging Africa’s vast natural resources at every opportunity, for so long now the prevailing thinking among some in powerful and wealthy nations is that the continent is too distant, too big, too complex, too removed from our own lives for it to really matter.

There’s no getting around it: what Pratt is describing here is racism. It may be direct racism on the part of editors and media executives, who simply don’t care about African people or their stories. Or it may be secondhand racism, with the editors pandering to an audience they believe doesn’t care. (Which, by the way, is circular logic—you can’t blame the readers for not being interested in something if you haven’t told them there’s something to be interested in!) But either way, the idea that people and events in Africa don’t “really matter” is the worst kind of bigotry. It’s the same attitude Wainaina identified in his essay, almost 20 years ago. Africans are always  “starving and dying and warring and emigrating,” so why worry about the details?

These are not abstract questions, and there are real-life consequences for this journalistic negligence. In their study’s abstract, Eisensee and Strömberg note that “relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters,” or the lack thereof. When a disaster occurs at the same time as “other newsworthy events,” like the Olympics, the victims are less likely to receive press attention, and therefore U.S. humanitarian aid. The same is true, on a much larger scale, when entire countries and continents go undercovered. Again, there are glaring contemporary examples we can point to. Right now, Al Jazeera reports that aid appeals for Sudan have received “less than half of what is needed” as “International attention and action have amounted to too little, too late.” Foreign Policy notes that there have been “no rallies, no A-list celebrities, no calls for outside military intervention,” and that “few world leaders pay anything more than lip service to condemning the atrocities.” (Compare this to the global outpouring of support that took place when the Notre Dame cathedral caught fire in 2019!) The media is a key part of that picture. If they were blasting the airwaves with coverage, and asking U.S. political leaders about their Africa policy when they interview them and moderate debates, things might be different. Instead, they’re letting hundreds of thousands of African people suffer and die in silence, largely unremarked upon. 

So what should the U.S. media be telling you about Africa? A lot. Apart from Sudan and South Africa, which we’ve already mentioned, there are numerous African countries where important political developments are underway, but barely being discussed in the States. Senegal, for instance, recently elected the youngest head of state in all of Africa: 44-year-old President Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Faye is a leftist and a pan-Africanist, and his agenda includes renegotiating all of Senegal’s oil, gas, and mineral contracts to bring greater sovereignty over the country’s natural resources and “free ourselves from ties of dependence” to European nations, especially France. Until recently, a conservative-controlled legislature was obstructing this project, so Faye dissolved Parliament on September 13 and announced a new round of elections for November. If a similar snap election was called in Canada or Germany, it would probably get at least a brief mention in the news, but have you read anything about Senegalese politics on your website of choice, or heard it discussed on TV? Probably not.

There are a dozen other examples like this. In Kenya, there was an enormous protest movement over the summer, which resulted in the deaths of at least 50 people and brought momentous changes to the country’s economy. Like a lot of upheavals around the world, it began with skulduggery by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which demanded that President William Ruto eliminate food and fuel subsidies for his citizens and dramatically raise tax revenue before it would disperse a much-needed loan. Ruto did as he was ordered, proposing a 16 percent tax on bread and a 25 percent tax on cooking oil—and the Kenyan people, unable to live with this new burden, rose up against him. On June 25 thousands of protestors overpowered the Kenyan police—who fired on them with live ammunition, killing several—broke into Parliament, and set parts of it on fire (while also rescuing opposition MPs.) And on June 27, Ruto announced that he would withdraw the tax plan, saying simply: “I concede.” It was a powerful example of how ordinary people can change the course of history, when they get together and fight back against their rulers. The Kenyans achieved far more in the way of concrete results than the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S., and they inspired another wave of demonstrations against rising food and fuel prices in Nigeria the following month. But they received far less international acclaim than they deserved. 

Across Africa, there’s been a heated political struggle over LGBTQ rights in the last few years. In Ghana, the Supreme Court recently upheld a reprehensible law (inherited from British colonists) that criminalizes same-sex relationships as “unnatural carnal knowledge,” with penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment. In Uganda, there’s an even worse homophobic law that allows the death penalty in some cases—and U.S. lawmakers like Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI) have traveled there to support it. In Zimbabwe, the police jailed and deported a Ugandan tourist for the “crime” of possessing a sex toy (of the phallic variety) in August. In Cameroon, things are looking a little brighter, as Brenda Biya—the president’s daughter—has come out as a lesbian and called for a variety of anti-gay laws to be repealed. There are obvious opportunities for international solidarity here, and in the case of Uganda people in the United States bear responsibility for the actions of leaders like Walberg who are actively trying to make the situation worse. But it doesn’t help when this information is buried in the pages of obscure publications like Pulse Uganda, where most Americans will never see it. 

Political events in other African countries, meanwhile, have the potential to erupt into catastrophic regional war. Right now there’s an ongoing diplomatic crisis between Ethiopia and Somalia, all over a small separatist region called Somaliland. Like Kashmir in India or Catalonia in Spain, Somaliland has considered itself an independent nation since 1991, but Somalia proper has never recognized its claim to sovereignty. But that hasn’t stopped Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed from bypassing the main Somali government and making a separate deal with Somaliland, with the aim of leasing part of its coastline and establishing a port to gain access to the Red Sea. (Ethiopia, you see, is completely landlocked, and Mr. Ahmed would like to change that.) In response, Somalia has called the deal an “act of aggression,” said that “we are ready for a war” if Ethiopia doesn’t “come to its senses,” and this month even threatened to start arming Ethiopian rebel groups if the deal isn’t revoked. In the New York Times, Somalian writers Afyare A. Elmi and Yusuf Hassan recently called the situation “The Coming War Nobody Is Talking About”—and sure enough, the Times hasn’t mentioned the subject again since their article was published. 

Finally, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one country people in the United States ought to be intensely concerned with. For one thing, our tech industry—especially the manufacture of rechargeable batteries—depends on the supply of cobalt from the DRC, and our tech companies are directly responsible for the conditions of “modern-day slavery” that many Congolese people live under. Speaking to NPR, author Siddharth Kara—whose book Cobalt Red is the definitive one on this topic—describes the situation: 

The mines have taken over everything. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Now, add to that the menace in many cases of armed forces pressuring people to dig, parents having to make a painful decision, 'Do I send my child to school or do we eat today?' And if they choose the latter, that means bringing all their kids into these toxic pits to dig just to earn that extra fifty cents or a dollar a day, that could mean the difference between eating or not.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that news outlets like the Bezos-owned Washington Post, just to name one at random, don’t draw attention to this. It might raise awkward questions about all those shiny new Amazon gadgets. But that doesn’t make it excusable. 

There are other important events going on in the Congo too, like the spread of mpox (formerly called monkeypox), which has killed at least 635 Congolese people this year. Not only is this a humanitarian crisis in its own right, but it threatens to become the next big international pandemic. And yet, rich countries like the U.S. that have plenty of mpox vaccines have so far been reluctant to share them with the DRC, a suicidally selfish course of action. As if that weren’t enough, there was also a failed coup attempt against the Congolese government this May. As we’ve seen, the U.S. media has reported on the three American citizens who fought on behalf of the coup-plotters, but aside from that coverage of Congolese politics is thin on the ground. Instead, it’s fallen to social media users to organize an “All Eyes on Congo” campaign, similar to the “All Eyes on Rafah” movement for Palestine, to bring wider attention to the country’s issues. 

I can think of one notable exception to the general pattern of failure. Back in February, New York Times journalists John Eligon and Joao Silva wrote an excellent in-depth report on the politics of eSwatini (also called Swaziland), the last absolute monarchy in Africa. To make an extremely long and complex story short, the country has been ruled since 1986 by King Mswati III, a despot who lives in extreme luxury while his people are some of the poorest and most underprivileged in Africa, and who occasionally kidnaps teenagers to be his royal brides. (His father, Sobhuza II, ruled from 1899 to 1982—so there have only been two leaders in the last 125 years, with a short-lived regency council in between.) There’s also an active Marxist-Leninist movement, the Communist Party of Swaziland, who are busy trying to overthrow him. Eligon and Silva went to eSwatini and interviewed people on both sides, including a man who serves as one of Mswati’s bodyguards and his communist son. (And you thought your family reunions were awkward.) And astonishingly enough, the New York Times made it their cover story on February 18. I’ve kept a physical copy of the paper in question, because it’s so remarkable: 

This is exactly the kind of thing the U.S. media should be doing all the time. Right now, it’s an exception to the rule—but it doesn’t have to be. 

It was never acceptable to ignore Africa, but today the failing is more conspicuous than ever. For anyone who fancies themself well-informed about the world, not knowing the name of the president of Nigeria should be considered just as embarrassing as not knowing who Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron are. If anything, it should be considered a greater gap in one’s knowledge, since Nigeria has a population of over 228 million people compared to just 66.9 million in the UK and 67.9 million in France. Again, if we really believe that all human lives are equal, this makes political events in Nigeria significantly more important than events in either European nation, since they affect three times as many people. And yet, when was the last time you saw a report about President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and what his government is up to? Did you even know his name? Probably not—and that’s the media’s fault, because they never told you. 

The remedies aren’t exactly mysterious. On a personal level, we have to make an effort to seek out news sources that actually tell us about the whole world, not just the paler bits. This can mean things like the BBC World Service and Al Jazeera, both of which tend to do better than U.S. papers and TV networks. For what it’s worth, we at Current Affairs also try to include as much Africa material as we can in our Biweekly News Briefing. But thanks to the internet, we can also seek out African news and analysis directly from Africa, reading things like the Pan African Review, the Namibian, the Daily Monitor of Uganda, and so on. For those of us on the political left, it’s important to keep up with African organizations and movements like the Communist Party of Kenya, the Economic Freedom Fighters of South Africa, or the Nigeria Labour Congress. Beyond that, though, we have to put pressure on our media organizations to change for the better. They need to be hiring actual African journalists, not just dropping white guys into the continent to cover it with the predictable embarrassing results. When elections happen in a place like Senegal or South Africa, they need to break down who the candidates are and what their policy platforms involve. In short, they need to care about Africa, its 54 countries, and its 1.4 billion people the same as they do everyone else. And until they do, maybe it’s time to stop giving them our time, money, and attention.