Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent

by Dipo Faloyin

Overview

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2022

An exuberant, opinionated, stereotype-busting portrait of contemporary Africa in all its splendid diversity, by one of its leading new writers.

So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa’s rich diversity, communities, and histories.

Starting with an immersive description of the lively and complex urban life of Lagos, Faloyin unearths surprising truths about many African countries’ colonial heritage and tells the story of the continent’s struggles with democracy through seven dictatorships. With biting wit, he takes on the phenomenon of the white savior complex and brings to light the damage caused by charity campaigns of the past decades, revisiting such cultural touchstones as the KONY 2012 film. Entering into the rivalries that energize the continent, Faloyin engages in the heated debate over which West African country makes the best jollof rice and describes the strange, incongruent beauty of the African Cup of Nations. With an eye toward the future promise of the continent, he explores the youth-led cultural and political movements that are defining and reimagining Africa on their own terms.

The stories Faloyin shares are by turns joyful and enraging; proud and optimistic for the future even while they unequivocally confront the obstacles systematically set in place by former colonial powers. Brimming with humor and wit, filled with political insights, and, above all, infused with a deep love for the region, Africa Is Not a Country celebrates the energy and particularity of the continent’s different cultures and communities, treating Africa with the respect it deserves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393881547
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	337,185
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dipo Faloyin is a senior editor at VICE, where he focuses on race, culture, and identity around the world. His writing has appeared in Dazed, Prospect, and HuffPost. Born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, he now lives in London.
Dipo Faloyin is a senior editor at VICE, where he focuses on race, culture, and identity around the world. His writing has appeared in Dazed, Prospect, and HuffPost. Born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, he now lives in London.

Table of Contents

Identities 1

Part 1 Lagos 11

Part 2 By the Power Vested in Me, I Now Pronounce You a Country 19

Part 3 The Birth of White Saviour Imagery or How Not to Be a White Saviour While Still Making a Difference 67

Part 4 The Story of Democracy in Seven Dictatorships 111

Part 5 There Is No Such Thing as an African Accent and Binyavanga Wainaina Is Still Right 185

Part 6 The Case of the Stolen Artefacts 223

Part 7 Jollof Wars: A Love Story 281

Part 8 What's Next? 307

Acknowledgements 353

Notes 359

Editorial Reviews

08/15/2022

Vice senior editor Faloyin debuts with a spirited critique of Western misrepresentations of Africa. Aiming to puncture the myth that Africa is “a place where nothing but misery grows,” he links the 1884 Berlin Conference, which created arbitrary borders that disbursed ethnic groups across multiple countries, or, conversely, forced rival groups together, to more recent foreign interventions to “save” Africa from poverty, disease, and civil war. Noting that less than 10% of Africa is under authoritarian rule, Faloyin highlights grassroots efforts to hold governments accountable and argues that “the further the continent gets from the damage wrought by colonialism and the early ethnic battles and civil wars following independence, the more each country’s attention will be focused on developing the common good.” He also examines how Live Aid concerts and other fundraising efforts reveal the “complicated balance between making a difference in the world and doing more harm than good,” rehashes the controversy over a documentary about Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, and highlights how the film Black Panther revealed audiences’ hunger for “a richly depicted Africa.” Flashes of joy and humor—including an account of British chef Jamie Oliver’s ill-fated attempt to create a “hybrid verson” of jollof rice—enliven the proceedings. The result is an exuberant and informative introduction to one of the world’s most diverse continents. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Warm, funny, biting and essential reading."

Adam Rutherford

"Powerful and heartfelt…Faloyin has written a book inspired by love and hope for a much-abused and maligned continent, whose future, he insists, is filled with promise."

Guardian - PD Smith

"A brilliant, prescient exploration of a richly complex continent. An antidote for our times."

Irenosen Okojie

"A triumph of a book. A charismatic and hugely enjoyable read packed full of essential information—revealing a huge, vastly diverse set of stories, situations, and histories that really do pop the balloon of lazy stereotyping of Africa. You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t read this book."

Nels Abbey

"[An] acerbic debut…Faloyin is bent on examining and demolishing [stereotypes about Africa], a task he carries out with verve."

New York Times - Michela Wrong

"Faloyin [is] a smart, often scathingly funny writer…While much of the history of Western involvement in Africa is sordid and depressing, Africa Is Not a Country is not. It brims with the sort of outrage that speaks of hope, of change."

Bookpage (starred review)

"This book should be on the curriculum."

Nikki May

"With clarity and incisive wit, journalist Faloyin explores the origins of the 54 countries of Africa…Africa Is Not a Country [is] a forceful rebuttal of erased histories and simplified imagery as well as a celebration of a continent already living its dynamic future."

Booklist (starred review)

"An impeccably researched work, brimming with humor and intellect. A necessary read for 2022."

J K Chukwu

"This book is hilarious, ferocious, generous, and convincing. It made me reconsider almost everything I thought I knew about Africa, which is somewhere we often hear about, but far too rarely hear from."

Oliver Bullough

"A necessary book that deserves its place in the canon as essential reading for anyone seeking an introduction to this vast continent—as well as the rest of us, who need to be regularly challenged on what we think we know about Africa and the damage done by that."

Sally Hayden

2022-07-09
A trenchant study demolishes stereotypes about Africans as a product of colonial history.

Faloyin—a senior editor at VICE who was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos until age 10, when he moved to the U.K.—opens his stern and vibrant narrative with the secret 1884 “Scramble for Africa” meeting in Berlin by European powers. “In an attempt to avoid all-out war over who got to wage war on Africa,” writes the author, “the mighty colonialists decided to meet and hash it all out, to come to a communal understanding as to how they could perfectly calculate their siege.” While many nations had already embarked on expeditions into the continent to seize natural resources and quell Indigenous uprisings, by the beginning of World War I, “90 per cent of Africa would be controlled by Europe.” The establishment of arbitrary borders often divided ethnic groups, some of whom later went to war with each other. Throughout the book, Faloyin diligently chronicles the inherited tropes that many in the West harbor about African nations. “The narrative,” he writes, “suggests there is something fundamentally ungovernable about this place and its people; something extremely uncivilized about their unhealthy relationship with power.” This “silent bigotry” involves the concept of White savior syndrome—yet another form of paternalism—as evinced by the Invisible Children project in Uganda and such celebrity charity campaigns as We Are the World and Live Aid. The author examines a series of dictatorships that resulted from colonial systems of divide and rule and forcefully calls out glaring cultural stereotypes about Africans in popular culture. He also addresses the alarming fact that “90 per cent of Africa’s material cultural legacy is being kept outside of the continent.” Faloyin weaves in his personal story as a Nigerian, using the making of Jollof rice as a unifying theme, and ends the book with forward-looking ways that African countries are managing gender and sexual violence, climate change, and other pressing matters.

A well-researched, cleareyed deconstruction of highly flawed conventional wisdom about Africa.

Kirkus Reviews