(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
African Hope ('African hope') has, since it came out in September, sold very well in Italy. After many weeks at the top of sales, it is still among the ten best-selling non-fiction titles in the country. I think it's sad, but understandable.
Understandable because the author, Federico Rampini, is well known in Italy. He has been a foreign correspondent for many years for Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, the largest newspapers in the country. He has taught political science at universities in Europe, America and Asia. He is involved in various American and European think tanks and speaks fluent French and English, in addition to his native Italian. For the past twenty years he has lived in New York and made a living from writing. And he must have lived well – in 2019 he published six specialist books on three different Italian publishers. And it's probably this last one that I think is shown well again in this as well African Hope – that he writes so quickly that it becomes superficial, uninformed and stereotypical.
Rampini's intention was to write about Africa as the continent of hope – he fails miserably.
And it is sad, even sadder because in countless interviews, and on the book's laundry sheet, he promises that this book is a showdown with the stereotypical Africa where hunger and poverty, conflict and corruption are written about. But that is exactly what the former communist does. Apart from a few pages about the creative Africans who write good novels, make cool music and play creative theatre, the book is packed with the author's reflections from his own travels in Africa.
Rampini says in an interview that he has traveled a lot. Especially since he was a child and had to accompany him to Brussels, where his father got a job in the EEC, he has traveled and lived in various places in the world. He is now 66 years old and has thus lived in the USA for a third of them.
The same stories
This book is based on interviews with African friends and travels in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa. "These three countries are representative of Africa", writes Rampini, and I am already losing faith that the book can be particularly good. He does indeed write about other countries as well, i.a. one chapter on Benin and one on Nigeria. But they are based on conversations he has had with some of his friends from these countries, interspersed with some statistics and quotes from a newspaper article or two. The references to specialist books or articles he has used in the book can be counted on two hands. And it's sad. Because if Rampini's intention was to write about Africa as the continent of hope, as he indicates at the outset, he has failed completely. The people he meets on his travels mostly tell the same stories we hear all the time. Even when it is mentioned that the continent is full of young, dynamic people, that fertility rates are many times higher than in Europe, that natural resources abound both above and below ground, and that creativity abounds, this is always only mentioned before being followed by a long ' but'. And this 'but' tells of violence and uncertainty, of murder and injustice, of corruption, inequality and poverty.
Nigeria
Take some concrete examples. In the chapter on Nigeria, the main source is a journalist colleague, originally Nigerian but now an American citizen who works in the well-established think tank Council on Foreign Relations. After some introductory remarks about the success of the musician Burna Boy and the wealth of the sugar and cement tycoon Aliko Dangote (which is good for 16 billion dollars and Africa's richest man) – and a sentence about a Nigerian winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, without Rampini saying who it was (Wole Soyinka), or when (1986) – the rest of the chapter is about Boko Haram, violence and rape, corruption and how much of Nigerias oil production that disappears into the pockets of thieves (10–30 per cent). But the Pentecostal movement in Nigeria also gets its passport signed. Nigerians like Pentecostal movementn as well because they never ask where your wealth comes from: "If you have become rich, it is because God has wanted you to be rich." Thus, Nigerians turn a blind eye to corruption and poor public governance.
"If you have become rich, it is because God has wanted you to be rich."
One of the chapters on South Africa is called "Criminal violence and Scandinavian aid". Here, Scandinavian aid to the country is praised to the skies. Not for aidone the country got under apartheid; it is not mentioned at all. But because we support a voluntary organisation, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), which works to understand the violence in the country and which also tries to reduce it. Nothing more is said about the Scandinavian aid. The rest of the chapter is based on an interview with one of the managers of ISS who works in Johannesburg. And who says that "violence is the biggest obstacle to development" in South Africa, before Rampini points out that almost all those killed in Johannesburg are young men. And that six times more people are killed annually in South Africa than in the United States, taking the population into account. And that some quarters in Johannesburg are so dangerous that the police dare not patrol them without the support of private security companies.
Annually, six times more people are killed in South Africa than in the United States, taking the population into account.
It is not easy to find hope in the book African hope. It's a bit of a shame since we were promised it on the laundry bill. But the saddest thing is that loads of Italians are served this stereotypee and eclectic image of Africa, which is neither based on good empirical data nor thorough analyses, but on who Rampini knows, and where he himself has been.
