African imaginations

By Claude Grunitzky

 Africa is a special continent, rich in traditions and taboos. Only someone steeped in those traditions and taboos can hope to understand the challenges and opportunities before African citizens.

And yet, the West seems incapable of trusting Africans to analyse their own lives. Take, for instance, the American economist Jeffrey Sachs. An advocate for more aid to African nations, Mr Sachs is one of three editors of  The World Happiness Report 2015.

Happiness and prosperity are often (if not always) correlated. The first paragraph of the first chapter of this year’s report mentions that “happiness is increasingly considered a proper measure of social progress and a goal of public policy.” The 2015 rankings show my home country Togo as being, again this year, dead last, rock bottom in this odd geography of happiness.

Sachs and his team have derived a set of measures that supposedly extrapolate positive and negative experiences. These measures were educed by analyzing data from the Gallup World Poll. Here, ‘positivity’ is characterized by smiling and laughter, whilst ‘negativity’ is defined by experiences related to stress and depression.

By these measures, Switzerland is pure happiness and true paradise. Togo, conversely, is hell on earth. But when I actually started reading up on the backgrounds of those who wrote the report, I realized that it's the same old story. The majority of those experts – statisticians and psychologists and anthropologists and economists – have never lived in Africa. Subsequently, when they do travel to the continent from their academic observatory, it's usually in and out, rarely venturing far from the airport-to-hotel route.

How can these experts continue to publish rankings when they have not made the effort to understand the specifics of local African cultures, taboos and social norms? Many people in Togo are very happy, thank you very much. They are just not very good at expressing it in words that an American economist might understand.

Last week, at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in the Q&A part of the session that followed her lecture, “You know I've actually found that the older I get, the less interested I am in how the West sees Africa, and the more interested I am in how Africa sees itself. I used to spend a lot of emotional energy being angry, but now I'm actually much more interested in Kenya covering Nigeria than I am in the U.S. covering Nigeria.”

I feel exactly the same way. And that is why I have decided to do something about it. Twenty years after I co-founded my first media venture, TRUE Magazine, out of Jefferson Hack's Dazed & Confused office on London's Old Street, and 19 years after I launched TRACE from my Clerkenwell Road bedroom, I have decided that my new venture will be an Africa-focused digital media platform called TRUE AFRICA.

Made in Africa, by and for Africans and people who love Africa, I have decided to imagine TRUE AFRICA as a conspiracy of progress. I am sick and tired of those old typologies, where Africans themselves don't have a true voice in the global discourse on Africa.

As a Togolese-born media entrepreneur who crosses continents with different passports on a weekly basis, I hope that TRUE AFRICA will one day be seen by Africans living in Africa, and in the Diaspora, as a powerful iteration of the transcultural momentum I have devoted my entire adult life to powering. This, to my founding team, is an important venture, because we feel it can only succeed if it conjures a clear and positive image of the continent - even lower income and seemingly unhappy countries like Togo should be viewed differently.

In the many ideation sessions I have been leading in Lomé, Conakry, Dakar, Nairobi, Johannesburg and even Paris, London, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts over the past three years, my co-conspirators and I have been coming up with dozens of effective uses of the African imagination and how it can best be applied to digital media.

Whether in photography, videography, infographics or just plain writing in authentic African styles, TRUE AFRICA will only be relevant if it succeeds in contributing intelligently to the dialogue about the future of Africa. The desired aim is to facilitate pan-African and trans-continental conversations about African happiness, while providing new keys for inspiration and future prosperity. TRUE AFRICA will work if we are able to identify and train the most talented young writers and creative trouble-makers all over the continent.

I see TRUE AFRICA as a model for profitable, self-sustaining social investment in Africa's future. We are still figuring out a way to create innovative education programs to expand digital literacy and bridge the digital divide. We believe this can be achieved by using value created at the top of the pyramid to fund innovative journalistic programs. This outcome will help train the next generation of African journalists.

It is important to my co-founders and I that, one day, these journalists are able to make a living and support their families as properly compensated employees or freelancers. Down the line, by creating real jobs in Africa's nascent media industry, we hope to prove those happiness experts wrong. We aim to contribute to future African prosperity. And true happiness.

This brings me to the topic at hand, which my participation, on May 21^st, in the Legatum Institute and Ford Foundation's 2015 Africa Prosperity Summit. I will be embarking, eyes wide open, on my first trip to Dar es Salaam, the land of Julius Nyerere, the controversial father of the Tanzanian nation, who wrote in his 1973 book “Freedom and Development” that “intellectuals have a special contribution to make to the development of our nation, and to Africa. 

And I am asking that their knowledge, and the greater understanding that they should possess, should be used for the benefit of the society of which we are all members.” What better call to action?