AFRICA IS NOT ONE

I can’t ignore the fact that most people around the globe, especially those in the United States tend to consider my beloved Africa as a country. I know Pan-Africanism ideas might be subject to blame since we tend to emphasize the importance of unity as a tool for overcoming some problems we faced in the past. But even with this, I beg of you not to commit the mistake of thinking Africa is a single country like let’s say Italy. I am thus left with no option than to hold a small geography lesson in today’s article.

First of all, Africa is a continent made up officially of 54 countries. It’s actually the second largest continent and the second most populated. Now even the countries that make up the continent are made up of different ethnic groups, with the continent’s total ethnic groups numbering thousands. If you find that hard to believe then know this as a fact, that even in Ghana (the country in Africa where I am from) alone, over 50 ethnic languages exist. And Ghana’s population is just about 24 million, a tiny bit of the estimated 1.1 billion people living on the continent.

Even if you decided to ignore these demographics and use only the skin colour of the population, you encounter the North Africans of Berber Heritage and the white South Africans. You therefore tend to realise that the continent is so diverse, you just can’t just bundle up all of us and refer to us as same.

Don’t misunderstand me here, for I am not trying to imply that the continent united is bad or something, please it is actually important. The issue here is this, how do you think a French man would feel if I said Europeans are to blame for ‘The Holocaust’ just because Germany is in Europe? Exactly! He would strongly object because He is from France, a totally different country from Germany.

Now this is how it relates to the misconception about Africa; just because there are pirates in someplace like Somalia does not mean the fishermen in Ghana are pirates. And also, the fact that Boko Haram is raising hell in Nigeria doesn’t mean there are militants in Botswana doing same.

All I’m trying to say is that one should not hastily generalise Africa as a place of poverty, sickness, etc. just because you hear them happening in some countries on the continent. So the next time any of you guys out there feel you need to say something about whatever you think is going on somewhere in the continent, please go through the trouble of actually finding out where in AFRICA???