Africa Is Not A Country By Dipo Faloyin

Ok, so, I’m opening this with a confession: I don’t know much about Africa. Or at least I don’t know as much about Africa as I should. Fifty-two countries make up Africa. I tried to see how many of them I could name and I was only able to get to ten, and even that was a struggle that took an embarrassingly long amount of time. If someone pointed a gun at my head and demanded I name twelve African countries, I wouldn’t be able to do it without throwing Wakanda and Zamunda in there out of desperate hope that I could get points for pop culture references. I can rattle off twelve European countries and twelve Asian countries with no problem but I couldn’t do that for African countries. Full disclosure, I was also only able to name eight South American countries, and even they were with great difficulty but I’m going to take one geographical blind spot at a time. Being a massive nerd my attempt at a solution was to look for a book and I found one. That book, as you can probably guess from the title at the top of this page, is Africa Is Not A Country by Dipo Faloyin.

Immediately upon beginning reading, one thing which stood out to me was the clear pride Faloyin has for Africa as a whole, and more precisely for Lagos in Nigeria. He goes big from the start with the first chapter being one of the highlights of the whole book. He writes about the city with a degree of vivid detail that can only come from someone who was raised there. He gives the whole book, but this chapter especially a level of lived-in specificity that other media with broader generalisations of Africa can’t capture. It almost feels like it would be an understatement to call this book a love letter. Seriously, the Lagos tourism board should give Faloyin a job. This book had me wondering if I’ve ever loved anything as much as Faloyin clearly loves Lagos, and jollof rice (which also gets its own particularly effusive chapter towards the end where he makes it sound amazing). His writing style is loose and informal with a palpable jubilance, but he also knows when to take a more serious or restrained approach. It has the rhythm of a conversation, and like a conversation it can go from joyful, to sombre, to frustrated and everywhere in between at any moment.

The more serious, and critical tone comes out when Faloyin focuses on the main thrust of this book, and its central point. That Africa is viewed to this day by not just the west, but much of the rest of the world as a hopeless land of famine, corruption, and an endless string of humanitarian crises. This stereotypical view also strips the people living there of all agency, portraying them as victims of a blighted land unable to do anything without international aid. Faloyin’s humour is still present here. The anger and frustration at the stereotypes and homogenised view the world has of Africa radiates off the page, but even at his most infuriated, Faloyin’s writing retains a sense of humour, with his wit taking on a more acerbic, cutting edge, dripping with sarcasm. This is most clearly seen in an extended passage where he describes how Hollywood makes films set in Africa. As a reader, this section of the book hit the nail on the head with its withering description no less effective for its lack of overt anger. He gives multiple examples of films where this stereotypical view of Africa as a whole has been reinforced over and over through the decades. Seeing it all laid out really hammers home just how deeply ingrained and culturally normalised this portrayal of Africa has become.

Faloyin never treats these stereotypes and this distorted view of Africa as accidental, or as the result of lazy filmmakers who can’t be bothered to do any research. He shows how these very specific portrayals of Africa as a place devoid of civilization and hope, have roots that stretch far back in time through to colonialism, the scramble for Africa, and even further. Faloyin argues that these stereotypes are intentional from their inception and have served economic and political purposes ever since. First slave traders benefited from portraying African people as more animal than human to justify their barbaric practices for centuries. Then when most people agreed slavery was bad, western powers in the late nineteenth century benefited from portraying African societies as uncivilised and incapable of self-governance in order to justify colonialism. These stereotypes may have morphed and softened slightly over the years, changing clothes as the times have changed, but Faloyin shows they are still present today in the form of big celebrity filled charity fundraisers. The only difference is where once African people were portrayed as uncivilised savages to be feared and controlled, now they are seen as helpless victims of famine and disasters who can’t do anything to save themselves and need the charity of the west. Faloyin makes it clear that fundraisers like “Live Aid”, charity songs like “Do They Know Its Christmas?” or online trends like the short lived “Kony 2012” phenomenon are all just the “White Man’s Burden” repackaged for the modern day. Where once there was fear, there is now pity, but the end result is the same, the dehumanisation and dismissal of an entire continent.

For as much as Faloyin obviously loves Africa and will defend the continent with an admirable passion he doesn’t just romanticise Africa in response to these overwhelmingly negative stereotypes. He also discusses the harsh realities of dictatorships, civil wars, ethnic tensions and political failures, especially with a chapter which goes on deep dives into the development of seven dictatorships across Africa. These examinations of how dictators took power and maintain it, do not shy away from the brutal reality of poverty, corruption, violence, and in at least one instance, genocide that has been enacted. A common theme among the seven dictators I noticed, was that many of them seemed to be among the original generation of political leaders who helped win independence from the west but then once in power, time passed and gradually, they were corrupted. Faloyin makes no excuses for the terrible things these dictators have done, or for the things people have done on their behalf. He does however, object to the way they can be treated like the defining characteristics of Africa itself. We in the west are often encouraged to see instability in African countries as business as usual or evidence of some unavoidable disfunction in Africa rather than as the consequence of colonial borders, extractive economics, Cold War interference, international debt structures and ongoing global inequality. Faloyin explains how arbitrary borders, straight lines drawn haphazardly on maps with little consideration by “White men in Khaki” grouped rival communities together, split ethnic groups apart and laid foundations for future conflicts. He pushes readers to ask why some African countries are treated as naturally chaotic, when it is actually the end result of centuries of meddling from the west.

There is a whole lot more I could write about and I could sit here typing away and singing this book’s praises all day. I mean I didn’t even mention how Faloyin uses the book to advocate for the return of looted artifacts from western museums to their countries of origin, or how he devoted an entire chapter to jollof rice. This review would start to become unwieldy in its length though, so I’ll draw things to a conclusion instead. If I’m honest, I still don’t know enough about Africa, I know more than I did, but there’s always more to learn about any subject. There is always new information, history, and perspectives like the ones in this book. I hope the day when I decide I know enough never happens because that would be a sad day indeed. Ultimately, I would easily recommend this book be read as widely as possible. Africa Is Not A Country, is a book which combines history, humour, and political analysis to challenge the colonial stereotypes that continue to shape our perceptions. It reminds us of the importance of accurate real representation, and that misrepresentation does a disservice to everyone.