Africa Is a Country

Clichés and Social Truths

Clichés and Social Truths

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkTVDDrUS4Y&w=500&=307&rel=0]

I’d be interested in people’s reading of this short video spotted on Youtube, above, which claims to educate Nigerians about their “perceptions” of each other. Since I am no expert on things Nigerian, I asked Jeremy Weate of Naijablog what he thought of it. On his blog he posted the following: “… For me, no matter that it is well done, it does little other than repeat the cliches that everyone knows. That doesn’t mean to say the interviewees are not dealing in social truths: the Yoruba thrive on complexity and ambiguity, the Igbo universe centres on trade and money and the Hausa live in a world structured by Islam. But there is so much more to be said than this. It would have been more interesting to interview members of smaller ethnic groups, rather than rigorously enforce the triangulation.”

Further Reading

Writing while black

The film adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel ‘Erasure’ leaves little room to explore Black middle-class complicity in commodifying the traumas of Black working-class lives.

The Mogadishu analogy

In Gaza and Haiti, the specter of another Mogadishu is being raised to alert on-lookers and policymakers of unfolding tragedies. But we have to be careful when making comparisons.

Kwame Nkrumah today

New documents looking at British and American involvement in overthrowing Kwame Nkrumah give us pause to reflect on his legacy, and its resonances today.