Media representation: decoding the Western media representation of Africa

This paper examines how Western media and writings depict Africa and Africans over time, emphasizing the ideological and discursive nature of these representations. It reviews historical sources, including travel accounts, scientific publications, and selected Western media reports on Africa and Africans, to analyze how they frame and represent Africa. The study uses a systematic qualitative analysis. The review includes two books, four book chapters, 10 media studies journal articles, and 24 media reports from eight outlets, for a total of 40 samples. The study shows that Western media reports have historically been episodic, simplistic, and negative when covering Africa and Black people’s issues. Although perceptions are gradually shifting, coverage of African topics remains largely negative. Dehumanization, racialization, and categorical commodification of Africans are the main frames used in media reports. The findings also reveal shared framings between Social Darwinism-based racial classification of Black people and the Western media’s ongoing representation of Africa. The media, either intentionally or unintentionally, used or reinforced negative and racist portrayals of Africans that were predominantly promoted by Social Darwinist discourses. The historical trajectories of Western media representations of Africa have revealed four major shifts over time. Representations evolved from the racialization and commodification of Africans (1820s–1960s) to framings of crisis, conflict, poverty, and dependency (late 1960s–2000s), which transformed colonial justification into humanitarian discourse. Conversely, since the 2010s, representations have shifted from the ‘hopeless continent’ to ‘Africa rising’. In contemporary portrayals of Africa and Africans, older representations persist in subtler forms rather than being completely replaced by more hybrid, competing, and complex representations. From the discussion, dominant themes and framings, such as the dehumanization, exoticization, and victimization of Africans, and the silencing, homogenization, omission of agency, and selective contextualization, have been identified as discursive elements in the persistent representations.