This book in many ways is a personal narrative of one man’s journey into the murky waters of the past. It is simple enough, yet amazingly clear. The subject of this work is obvious; it is the invention of Africa. This book details how western mediums of influence created and propagated the images of Africa which continue to resonate into the present. It reveals the shocking ignorance, the appalling laziness and the ever present paranoia that have characterized media images of Africa for the past 2 centuries.

In this work, Milton Allimadi shows that in order to justify the hypocritical underpinnings of colonialism; Africa had to be invented. It had to be invented as a land full of exotic beasts, fantastic creatures and epinormal humans. It had to be invented as the “other” by which the west could reference itself, an antithesis of sorts – a opposite who had to be “put down” in order to grant the construction of occidental identities any legitimacy.

From the work of New York Times, Time and National Geographic correspondents, Allimadi shows, using delightfully simple sentences the very impulses driving the conceptualization of Africa in the western world view. At loss for Cannibals, these adventuring white men invented them. Where pygmies could not be found, they had to be cooked up and statements ascribed to them which they never made.

One gets the idea from Allimadi’s book that a strange mix of fantasy, fear and hatred undergirded much of Europe’s mission. He documents opposition to independence, he documents the irritation western institutions felt at the thought of Africans governing themselves and he documents the complicity of the west in the incitement of much of the violence that these institutions sought to portray as typical of the African condition.
From Herodotus to Stanley and from Huxley to Bigart – Allimadi shows using excerpts that racism is indispensable to the west, for it was the foundation upon which western identity was built.

Fallacy, Fabrication and Falsehood is the name of the game when Western media confronts Africa and Allimadi shows as much – but this is not all. He also tackles the “tribalization” of Africa; where civilizations and cultures that existed on several planes were reduced to mere “tribes” – the tribal appellation being more a badge of primitiveness than anything else. Today, one still hears of “African tribes” at home and in the diaspora – evidence of another issue that Allimadi deals with which is the Eurocentric paradigm. Not only have people of African descent come to view themselves through occidental lenses, they reaffirm the validity of such faulty instruments by a pathetic and all too telling ignorance – typified, Allimadi informs us by apologists such as Keith Richburg who closes his eyes to death in Brooklyn and opens them to corpses in Tanzania – believing quite naively that “whiteness” has saved him.

For sure, this is no encyclopedia. This work is relatively small in volume however it is chocked full of extractions that serve as elemental examples of a far reaching disease.

Allimadi’s personal experiences as detailed in this book are also worthy of note. This work arose from a thesis he published as a master’s student. However, none of the so called channels of progressive journalism would so much as give his work a space in their publications. His manuscript was rejected several times and in one instance maliciously edited – the excuse? He was engaged in a foray into the past; as though the past had stopped having meaning or as though the continued projection of past conceptualizations of Africa in today’s media were of no consequence.

I heartily recommend this book. It is short, brisk and succinct. It presents an excellent overview and an introduction to all who wish to continue in this line of study.

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