Where do we begin the conversation about the extraordinary contemporary dance movement afoot in Africa and some of its stellar young leaders? Will entrenched biases distort even fresh discussions about the continent? Better to be frank.
Disaster‐driven Western media rehearses distortion nowhere more consistently than in its coverage of Africa. If reported on at all, the media depicts the continent most persistently by a faceless humanity who consumes aid and offers little in return, ever engulfed by poverty, illiteracy, war, environmental degradation, HIV/AIDS, and/or political turmoil. Let’s face it: the disaster‐bias takes its toll. While neither intentionally malevolent nor without basis, these images do harm. It is not because negative images are presented, but that they are repeated over and over as if disaster were the only story worth telling about Africa, to the exclusion of the myriad of untold African stories. The economic and social penalties to the continent embed themselves broadly, for example: in approaches to international aid, formulation of foreign policy, business investment, even artistic exchange. Of further consequence is that the negativity numbs the curiosity—for many—about this vast and diverse continent, further perpetuating the endemic Western ignorance about Africa.
Foreign and internal views of Africans as keepers of unchanging traditions—except for political expediency as in the case of the former Zaire’s Mobutu—have, on some occasions, combined to undermine recognition of African artistic agency. The very notion of African experimentalism has been rendered an oxymoron, if not downright “un‐African.” It is such a view that some African governments have used to foster an “authentic” Africanity in service of ideology, most recently in post‐apartheid South Africa, for example when choreographer Gregory Maqoma’s work was rejected for a public ceremony because it did not adequately project the governmentally constructed African ideal. Such thinking is not dissimilar to the outsider’s view that African artistic innovation must mean the destruction of “real” African culture. If African culture is to be determined by cheeky foreign critics, as occurred in the cases of Faustin Linyekula (Democratic Republic of Congo), and others, some continental choreographers’ work is simply judged “not African enough.”