Africa is a Country contributor Kathryn Mathers has a piece in the latest issue of Transition, the Harvard creative writing magazine. The theme of the issue is “Blending Borders.” Kathryn’s has a provocative title, “Mr Kristof, I Presume.” (Hers you can read in full. The link takes you a PDF of the article.) Here, before you click away, is the first page of Kathryn’s article:

I do not want to write about Nicholas Kristof. The sheer banality of his representations of Africa paralyses me. His columns and blogs about Africa in the New York Times are repeatedly under fire for their poor research, careless reading of studies on Africa and blatant generalizations. This allows him to repeat troubling and problematic tropes about Africa and about how Africans need foreign help. Yet student bodies across the country culture frequently invite him to speak on their campuses. Saving Africa has become a favorite hobby for celebrities and ordinary Americans alike. And journalists like Nicholas Kristof who write endless stories about Americans doing good in Africa are central to this shift. Kristof even got to bunk down with actor George Clooney in Chad so that they could report back about the conflict in Darfur across the border.

Kristof’s representations of Africa in the New York Times, therefore, seem more in tune with those media outlets not known for good journalism or social critique. Yet my global development classes are full of students who believe that he speaks to their concerns and it is his writing that shapes their goals for doing good in the world. All of the copies of Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky were checked out of the libraries of nearby universities last summer. My students know that there are problems with the development and aid industries and can even offer biting critiques of celebrity interventions in aid programs in Africa. But they believe that they can do it better, that their generation understands the failures and can solve them, and that their intentions are pure enough to overcome the cynics. Their confidence is made possible in part by the examples of individual young Americans just like them establishing and running educational, health and technological programs in Africa trumpeted by a serious journalist like Kristof in a serious newspaper like the New York Times. Kristof’s writing about humanitarianism in Africa makes possible a very limited but accessible form of aid by asking his readers to focus on what they can do and the importance of one individual saving another. So no I do not want to write about Nicolas Kristof. But I must because he has claimed such an authoritative voice in conversations about Americans’ relationship to Africans that he has somehow made the act of writing about them an actual intervention in the lives of poor people in the world …

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