Africa Stories: Changing Perceptions

Climate change, human rights abuses, mass migration, pandemics, economic chaos…the list goes on. All these problems have grown too big and too complex for any individual nation to solve. However, instead of collaborating, nations spend all their energy and resources competing against each other in pursuit of the ‘national interest’. This has to change if we want to make the world work.
 
Against the backdrop of rolling news cycles, and omnipresent campaigns from aid agencies highlighting intractable issues of persistent privation, it is easy to see how notions of ‘dependency syndrome’ and provocations such as ‘shithole countries’ might gain traction in the global attention-marketplace to shape (mis)conceptions and discourses about many of the 54 sovereign territories that constitute Africa. While doom-laden scenarios often secure donations in the short term, it is argued that they deter more sustainable solutions. Many developmental challenges faced by various nations in Africa are symptomatic of a wider, underlying global problem: that we haven’t yet worked out how to organise ourselves as a single species inhabiting a single planet.
 
Dislocating the focus of prevailing perceptions and narratives of Africa as largely constituted by nations perennially in receipt of handouts from richer countries, this event brings together researchers, development practitioners, NGOs, social movements, and diaspora voices to explore some important known knowns, and some unknown knowns, in global perceptions about Africa.