We are missing the story on a country called Africa

A plane goes down in Ukraine. We seem to kind of sort of know where that country is.  A plane goes down somewhere in that area bordering Mali, Algeria, Burkina Faso and, as the friend alerted me, even the Los Angeles Times then produces map about the country of Africa!

“AFRICA" pic.twitter.com/Yv2Oj0aNfq
— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) July 25, 2014

Of course, this is not the first time it has ever happened--if I had been paid a dollar for every time I corrected a student who incorrectly referred to Africa as a country, I would be a very rich man by now.

Whether it is students or reporters or the general public, the continent is nothing more than a big blob to most of us. A messed-up "country" out there somewhere.  Clueless we almost always are!  We do too little for the place we should all call home, right?

Plenty has been said and written about this atrocious marginalization of the vast geography and its people.  Anjan Sundaram adds to that commentary and he understates it when he notes:

Our stories about others tell us more about ourselves.

Yes! :(

A few weeks ago, NPR reviewed Sundaram's book, which was my first ever introduction to his work.  In his op-ed, Sundaram writes about his background, which I recall from that NPR report and this interview with Jon Stewart.

As a student in America, where I was considering a Ph.D. in mathematics and a job in finance, I would read 200-word stories buried in the back pages of newspapers. With so few words, speaking of events so large, there was a powerful sense of dissonance. I traveled to Congo, at age 22, on a one-way ticket, without a job or any promise of publication, with only a little money in my pocket and a conviction that what I would witness should be news.

I am always way impressed with people like Sundaram, who choose to walk away from the safety and comforts of the well-traveled roads--especially in his case after an undergraduate degree from the IIT at Madras, a graduate degree from Yale, and a job offer from Goldman Sachs.  Next to people like Sundaram, I am nothing but a facade, if at all. Always lacking his kind of a drive, determination, and dedication, it is no surprise that I am forever wondering whether I coulda been a contender!

As Sundaram writes about the news organizations and his life as a stringer for the AP:

Reporters move like herds of sheep, flocking to the same places at the same times to tell us, more or less, the same stories. Foreign bureaus are closing. We are moving farther away.
News organizations tell us that immersive reporting is prohibitively expensive. But the money is there; it’s just often misallocated on expensive trips for correspondents. Even as I was struggling to justify costs for a new round of reporting in Congo, I watched teams of correspondents stay in $300-per-night hotels, spending in one night what I would in two months. And they missed the story.
Parachuting in with little context, and with a dozen other countries to cover, they stayed for the vote but left before the results were announced. A battle broke out in Kinshasa after they left, and I found myself hiding in an old margarine factory, relaying news to the world, including reports to this newspaper.

And after he left?

For years after I left Congo, my position with The A.P. remained — as it is now — vacant. The news from Congo suffers as a result, as does our understanding of that country, and ultimately ourselves. Stories from there, and from places like the killing fields of the Central African Republic, are still distant, and they are growing smaller.

The vast "country" of Africa is getting more and more distant and smaller even as we talk about how the world is shrinking thanks to all the interconnectedness.  "Our stories about others tell us more about ourselves." Indeed!