I carried out a little exercise on Google. I searched “Africa”, and then “African countries”. Top among the 3.4 billion results in the first search and 272 million in the second were stories about the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 and bans on African countries. Then about wars and conflicts, and some sporting stories.
For a long time, the dominant narrative about the African continent has been one long tale of gloom and doom. The world’s epicentre of poverty and disease, a stain on the conscience of the world. A continent desperately in need of aid, and to which the rich and powerful countries must urgently stretch a helping hand of benevolence.
