‘Big changes on a human scale’: Ryan Lenora Brown on reporting a continent (audio)
True or false? Africa is not a country.
Easy. Of course it’s not a country; it’s 54 of them, in fact. But think of the images that come to mind when you hear the word “Africa,” and it’s not so hard to see why people think that it bears repeating that the continent is home to 1.3 million people, hundreds of languages, and countless cultures. But historically, the snippets of Africa that flash across Western screens and pages have too often boiled down to a simplistic set of tropes: hungry schoolchildren, violent warlords, endangered species.
Dispelling the shadow of those stereotypes is central to the job of a foreign reporter in Africa today. It’s not that poverty and conflict don’t exist – but that the issues are so much more complex, and only part of the picture.
Ryan’s writing has a way of wiping away the one-dimensional; of bringing the people who entrust their stories to her, and the places they live, into full-color life on the page. Frequently, they’re corners of the world most of us will
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