African pride: countering negative perceptions.

Many thanks for Anver Versi's editorial 'African and Proud of It' in the November 2004 issue of African Business. It is one of the best analyses I have read on the Western perception of Africa and Africans--and their obsession with the negative.

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This fixation (as you rightfully describe it) of the Western media that believes that Africans are exclusively poverty-stricken and incapable of excelling in anything other than sport, music, dance and corruption, has to be addressed. It not only hampers Africans' development, but also world development.

The inability of Europeans and Americans, despite all the extensive research and departments of African studies, to mature psychologically and become educated about the people of Africa--with whom they have had contact for more than 500 years--reflects a certain strain of underdevelopment yet to be researched!

I am also involved, as was my great grandfather, Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) in trying to stem this tide of ignorance and misinformation on Africa.

E.W. Blyden travelled from the then Danish West Indies to Liberia at age 18. He completed the Alexander High School in Monrovia in two years and became headmaster of the school. He was a regular contributor to the Liberia Herald in the 1850s, and then its editor. In the 1880s, while in Sierra Leone, he founded a short-lived newspaper called The Negro whose focus was West Africans' achievements, news content and other issues. In the mid 1880s, with T.J. Sawyerr, a Sierra Leonean publisher and editor, he developed The Sierra Leone Weekly News. The newspaper ceased to circulate toward the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. Blyden's premise in his books is that Africa's contribution to civilisation is enormous and that Africans should be proud to be African. He was to influence many African thinkers and activists among whom are: Marcus Garvey (The Back to Africa Movement), Nnamdi Azikiwe, William Dubois and Kwame Nkrumah. Ngugi Wa Thiongo admits to having been inspired to write in his native Kikuyu after reading Dr. Blyden's works. My creation, WABC-AFRICA Productions Ltd, (dedicated to my great-grandfather), develops radio and television documentaries that promote West African professionals in the modern and traditional economic and socio-economic sectors of this sub-region.

We are new kids on the block and have aired in Sierra Leone and Nigeria and, during the pilot phase, on shortwave. We promote only what positively contributes to change and development in West Africa--which we call a country.

Thank you once more for a thought-provoking analysis in response to the BBC's most recent 'discovery'.

I Espadon Blyden

Freetown, Sierra Leone