{"id":4561,"date":"2011-11-07T05:00:18","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=4561"},"modified":"2011-11-06T13:20:27","modified_gmt":"2011-11-06T18:20:27","slug":"they-had-to-go-there-didnt-they","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/4561","title":{"rendered":"They Had to Go There, Didn’t They?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of us development folks work very hard to dispel the notion that Africa is the so-called “Dark Continent,” and that not all news coming out of Africa is bad. As Binyavanga Wainaina\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0very sarcastically some time ago in Granta<\/em> magazine:<\/p>\n

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.<\/p>\n

According to Wikipedia, the expression “dark continent” comes to us from the 19th century, when it was “used to describe\u00a0Africa, particularly\u00a0Sub-Saharan Africa. As Europeans knew little about the continent’s interior geography, map-makers would often leave this region dark.”<\/p>\n

I was thus very surprised that the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0— of all newspapers in the world, perhaps the one that cares most about development — would publish<\/a> the following map to illustrate the 2011 distribution of the United Nations’ human development index:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of us development folks work very hard to dispel the notion that Africa is the so-called “Dark Continent,” and that not all news coming…<\/p>\n

Continue readingThey Had to Go There, Didn’t They?<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-development","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-1bz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4561"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}