Africa is again becoming a “country” in the popular discourse of Western media intent on rebranding the entire continent as the eternal basket case.
Despite North Africa’s Arab Spring (which has inspired a global movement against corrupt and undemocratic leadership) and the birth of Africa’s 54th state, Southern Sudan (the result of the Sudanese people’s will expressed via a referendum), the idea of Africa as an uninterrupted landscape of human suffering and political failure remains steadfast in Western media discourse.
This perspective is anchored in the tried and tested method of presenting this vast, diverse and in many instances breathtakingly beautiful continent paradoxically, as a homogenous mass of starving people stranded on barren lands under the yoke of despotic leadership and deadly diseases…Thus also implying that Western intervention is necessary and even noble.