In his satirical essay ‘How to Write About Africa’ author Binyavanga Wainaina instructs Westerners, white people, and international aid workers on how to represent the continent. Using irony and cliched instructions he criticizes the way Western writers perpetuate stereotypes about Africa.
Treat it as if it were one How to instructions for Africa country, with wide open spaces and big game. Use words like ‘Darkness’, ‘Safari’ and ‘Shadow’.
Languages
Despite being one of the largest continents, Africa’s language pool is surprisingly advanced and diverse. It combines indigenous African languages with Western derived languages such as English and French.
Swahili is the most popular lingua franca in Africa with over 150 million speakers. It is also the primary language in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda and is used as a second language in southern Somalia and northern Mozambique. It’s a tonal language that uses processes like tone spread and Tonal Sandhi.
Music
In African ethnic cultures, music and dance are often functional in nature. There are specialized work songs, songs accompanying childbirth, marriage, hunting and political activities, music to ward off evil spirits or to pay tribute to good spirits, the dead and ancestors.
Most African musical composition uses repetition as an organizing principle on top of which improvisation is developed. Instruments used for rhythmic parts include drums, slit and ritual gongs, foot rattle, and different types of harps and harp-like instruments like the Kora.
Politics
The continuing treatment of Africa and African politics as exotic terrain that is replete with surprises, the bizarre and the Byzantine predisposes students to sensationalism, exaggeration, condescension and contempt in their handling of political reality. It also blinds them to the processes that give meaning and direction to African political systems.
Attempts to transcend the logical pessimism inherent in rent-seeking/neo-patrimonialist political analysis by looking for sources of optimism/hope in African politics have often failed. This text avoids such pitfalls and offers an alternative interpretative frame that allows students to grasp the recurrent patterns of political change in Africa.
How students perceive Africa is shaped by the images they see in school textbooks, news media and film. Stereotypes of poverty, disease and famine are prominent in most portrayals, obscuring the reality of wealth, power and good health in many African countries.
Help students develop a more accurate perspective using this “How Big is Africa?” curriculum, which includes several learning activities for all ages.
- Write a subtitle.
The subtitle is a crucial part of your submission. It should be clearly written, concise and enticing. Avoid filler words like “you know”, “as I say” and “as you can see”. Bernadette uses sparingly, carefully selected words and phrases to convey meaning in her subtitle. This makes her subtitle more clear than a subtitle that is longer or contains many filler words.
Use a proportional font with no serifs and monospace distribution (like Helvetica and Arial). This saves space on the line. Unlike full stops, sequence dots, question marks and exclamation marks, no subtitle flash should end in a comma or colon or semicolon because these symbols imply a long pause in the reading pace.
- Write a sub-title.
When writing about Africa, be sure to include a big, red African sunset and wide open spaces and lots of game and tall, skinny people who eat primates. You may also want to include a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and a host of prostitutes and guerillas hang out. And don’t forget to describe naked breasts, either young, old, conservative or raped. You may even want to describe mutilated genitals or enhanced genitals, but don’t go overboard or your readers will stop reading your book. They will be too busy thinking about how much they care about your main character’s plight. And they will be too tired to turn the page.
Other characters to include are The Loyal Servant, who behaves like a seven-year-old child; the Ancient Wise Man, who lives in hermitic splendour and has rheumy eyes; and The Starving African, who wanders around the refugee camp nearly naked and waits for the benevolence of the West.
- Write a subtitle.
Subtitles are a useful way to add more information to an image or text, and can help make it clear what the article or product is about. However, subtitles can be challenging to write because they must entice readers to read them while also remaining concise and accurate.
Text positioning: Subtitles should be centered on their allocated line(s) so that the eye of the viewer does not have to travel as far along the sides of the screen to read them. This is also true of subtitles that correspond to a monologue or dialogue turns introduced by dashes, which should be left-aligned (see the “Dashes” entry in section 3 “Punctuation and letter case”).
Word economy: Avoid filler words such as “just,” “some,” and “never.” Instead, use action verbs to make your message more clear and compelling.
- Write a subtitle.
Describe savannahs and deserts, jungles and highland mountains. Also, make sure that you mention the big sky and a sunset that is always red. And never forget to describe the plight of Africa’s flora and fauna, and its overpopulation.
Among the characters in your story, include The Starving African with a flies on her eyelids and a pot belly. Don’t show her naked, though. She is always a woman, but she can have large breasts, or small ones. And she must moan.
Subtitled text should be presented centered on its line(s) unless they correspond to dialogue turns initiated by dashes which are then presented left-aligned on the screen (as in printed texts). In either case, subtitles should not end with commas, colons or semicolons, since these symbols suggest a long pause in reading pace rather than the intended short pause.
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