Africa as a country

May 20, 2009 12:53 PM

I'm looking for instances of Africa being referred to as a country, or at least as culturally/nationally homogeneous. Pictures/diagrams/video clips would be ideal.
posted by Dr. Send to society & culture (15 comments total)

The Palin debacle comes to mind.
posted by nitsuj at 12:55 PM on May 20

The term "African American" as coined by Jesse Jackson based on what he saw as an equivalency between a term like "Italian American" and "African American" seems to fit your requirements.

See also "Kwanzaa."

And "sun people" versus "ice people."
posted by ethnomethodologist at 1:02 PM on May 20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Q10g_Mov4

Whose line is it anyway, first thing that came to mind.
posted by mattdini at 1:05 PM on May 20

Gonna take a lot to drag me away from you ...

Also, African clothing?
posted by jbickers at 1:14 PM on May 20

Google.

Following up on the Palin debacle (noted above), this TPM post made an interesting observation about Palin's response:

Sarah Palin is defending herself from the allegation that she thought Africa was a single country, and not a continent: "If there are allegations based on questions or comments I made in debate prep about NAFTA -- about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there -- then those were taken out of context." Note: There is no such country that is simply called "Africa."

posted by Jaltcoh at 1:19 PM on May 20

Just a small side point...much to my embarrassment, I get countries and continents and cultures mixed up ALL THE TIME. It sucks, but I'm pretty sure it is not an indicator of my cultural awareness or intelligence.

My guess is that this has to do with the way I organize conceptual frames and taxonomies in my head, because I tend to do this for other adjacent hierarchical or ordered labels, especially where the two items in question are phonologically similar in some way...country/continent, table/teaspoon, Saturday/Sunday, June/July.

I'm not sure what you're using these examples for, but keep in mind that there may be other factors influencing why this blunderoo occurs.
posted by iamkimiam at 1:28 PM on May 20

The term "African American" as coined by Jesse Jackson based on what he saw as an equivalency between a term like "Italian American" and "African American" seems to fit your requirements.

No, it doesn't.

First of all, the term wasn't "coined by Jesse Jackson"--it existed before he was born.

Second of all, Jesse Jackson promoted the use of the term not because he believed that Africa was a country, or a culturally homogeneous continent, but because most of the people in the US who are the descendants of enslaved African people don't have genealogies at a fine enough level of granularity to know which African country their ancestors were abducted and sold from. Oddly enough, slavers didn't really keep good records of that stuff.

You are pointing out something that is a feature--Jackson's underscoring of the historical fact that the descendants of enslaved people don't have access to their actual genealogy--and suggesting that it's a bug.
posted by Sidhedevil at 1:50 PM on May 20 [2 favorites]

You might find these posts on Sociological Images about "Africa-inspired" clothing of interest.
posted by peacheater at 2:52 PM on May 20

Summer between my junior and senior years of college I worked at Wall Drug in beautiful Wall, South Dakota. I will now copy and paste a LiveJournal entry from June 29th, 2004:

I had to inventory our Precious Moments dolls today. [...]

So there are, by my count, eight different Asian dolls:
Thunhi (Vietnam),
Yoshika (Yoshiko?) and Kyoto (Japan),
Mei-Mei (China),
Lumen (Phillipines),
Sunisa (Thailand),
Yoim (Korea), and
Lily (Singapore).
There is one doll for "Africa." Her name is Aisha and she has straight hair.

I have no idea if these dolls are still being made or, if they are, if they're marketed in the same way. The idea of Googling this makes me queasy but maybe later I'll look into it...

They were pretty horrifying little dolls, as Precious Moments dolls tend to be.
posted by Neofelis at 3:22 PM on May 20

More anecdotal, but I live in Chile and have many friends and acquaintances that form part of an alternative crowd that includes many hobbies and interests with African influence. In the way its talked about it very much seems to me that many people consider "Africa" to be like a country without taking all the individual country or culutral differences into account. When someone comes to teach a djembe workshop most of my friends find what country he is from irrelevant. With the majority of instruments as well the specific origins in Africa are overlooked. In many cases I think some things involving some of the eastern countries with more similarities with the Middle East would cause a mental conflict in their concept of what is "African"
Also many friends practice "African dance", which, where I live seems to be one specific style with a large number of varied moves yet a very specific style (Check it out to see if it might be an example of what you're looking for). Though everywhere may interpret the term differently. Presenting some videos of a different styles of dance originating in Africa (that I filmed at a cultural festival in the US) was somewhat rejected by friends as not the real thing.
posted by nzydarkxj at 4:48 PM on May 20

Many years ago the intro to the show Globe Trekkers flashed different countries across the screen... Italy, China etc.... one of the "countries" was Africa.
posted by chrisalbon at 7:41 PM on May 20

In this episode and entire story arc about Denise going to photograph pygmies, the Huxtables only ever refer to it as "Africa." They never specify which African nation she went to.
posted by Oriole Adams at 11:05 PM on May 20

This recent guest post on Stuff White People Do addresses that directly, albeit anecdotally.
posted by smartyboots at 11:07 PM on May 20

One other thing about the Precious Moments dolls: it wasn't just a pile of Asian dolls + "Aisha." There were many, many European dolls too--and some Latin American, etc. Most of the European dolls, plus the US dolls, came in boy versions and girl versions.
posted by Neofelis at 7:25 AM on May 21

Thanks everybody, these are great.

Peacheater, I remember reading those posts, those are almost exactly what I'm looking for.

Neofelis, I noticed a similar thing in a cartoon depicting Obama as if he came from various different countries, so they showed what he would look like if he was from China, Japan, Mexico, Austria and so on. One of the ones was "Africa," and if I remember correctly, the title it was something like "Obama from different countries."
posted by Dr. Send at 12:53 PM on May 21