I often get bemused when people, mostly use blanket terms to define Africa, the cradle of civilisation. It is not uncommon to hear even the most educated academics talk of Africa as though it is a hut in the middle of small village under the rule of a chief.
It is equally annoying when people who have visited parts of Africa claim to be experts yet fail to recognize the extreme differences within a village of less that 2 km square. They persistently insist that the population within the village conforms to a unified community working for the common good of their society! Is this so?
When such generalizations are used to define Africa, they become fodder for the use by those in development, to at times justify a persistently failed model of human advancement!
The new face of Africa is far from that “romanticized dream of wild animals and villagers lead by chiefs”, Africa entered the era of individualism the day Democracy knocked on its doors!!
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There are those who generalize everything based on very little data.
Then there are those who think they see the world as they travel… but never notice that they have always stayed within the priviledged conditions and controlled forays into the surroundings, thus getting the unwitting impression of the whole world as such a place, where only those controlled circumstances exist, wholly puzzled if any rarely encountered member of the wildly diverse conditions of the majority of peoples exist in, tries to tell them that many peoples live in very different conditions than what they have seen in priviledged expeditions.
Then there is the almost automatic elevation of social feel and status of self importance “I was there… I surely am an expert ! I surely must defend and declare my important worthiness by explaining how expert I am”.
These phenomena may explain some of the generalizations about the diverse areas and community conditions on the African continent also, even they are by no means limited to this field of knowledge and understanding (or creating a hollow and charismatic facade of understanding…).