Africa Analysis - Cry the Beloved Continent

Noah Ryan

Ms. Trofimovich

AP/IB Lang/Lit

22 October 2015

Cry the Beloved Continent

Binjanvanga Wainaina uses a satirical tone to communicate the myriad of cliché ways foreign people write about Africa.

Africa is a large, rich continent, filled with many people of many ethnicities, cultures, and sub-cultures. The continent contains many different countries and regions. This text contains a lot of stereotypical depictions of Africa that are commonly heard of in our day to day lives when we hear about any news that happens in the content, in any documentary film or feature length Hollywood production, or even any book on the continent. The tone of satire is key in understanding the context and underlying meaning of the essay. The objective of this text was to communicate the many ways in which Africa has been portrayed in the media in a sarcastic way. Wainaina tells the reader what to include in their stories which can include some of the many stereotypes that are always used in some way in every story written on Africa. The essay format emphasized the many details of the author’s sarcasm in the text through the list of stereotypes by which Africa has been historically mentioned by people in the media.

The media is the target audience in this essay. Many stories about Africa that Wainaina lists share common themes like outbreaks of disease, hunger, war, or how a celebrity has traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to rebuild someone’s house. There’s another sort of audience that Wainaina is representing and that audience is the entire people of Africa who are tired of how they are portrayed in movies and how nothing in this day and age is truly an authentic representation of the many African cultures. Today there are