The Myth And Stereotypes Of Africa - 883 Words

The myth and stereotypes about Africa are not anything new and they are very present in our daily lives and the way Africa is portrayed. For example the reason why many people today think that Africa is bleak land of poverty and diseases is because early writers, historians, and geographers talked about Africa in that way. Because these stereotypes are so readily available, they infiltrate people’s daily thinking. Furthermore this makes people less likely to actually seek to really learn about Africa because they feel that their [inaccurate] suffice for their worldview of Africa. This is in turn leads people completely ignoring anything that contract their already established ideas. This chapter in Africans and Their History by Joseph Harris presents some of the roots of the stereotypes and myths about Africa in the past and for the most part are still held today. Harris discusses how the â€Å"greats† of history, geography, and literature starting a path of devaluation of Africans that writers after their time followed. Harris also denounced the language that these â€Å"greats† used to describe and talk about Africans. He asserts that this language inherently painted Africans as inferior and subhuman. The simple fact that it was these renowned scholars who were writing about Africans in a denigrating manner made racial prejudice very deeply engraved in European. For someone in Europe during the classical and antiquity era, if worshipped writers said that Africans are strange wildShow MoreRelatedThe Increased Misinterpretations of Africa Essay594 Words   |  3 Pages Africa, compared to other continents, is probably the most misrepresented of th em all. Little is known about Africa which results to stereotypical descriptions of the continent. 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Three important myths are that Africa is a land of cannibals, it is backward and very uncivilized, and that it is one country where everyone and the climate are the same all over. These will be explained, refuted, and the detriment to the people of Africa will be discussed. Through outdated travel writings, general myths, and false truths many had come to believe the stereotype that many people