Senegal v. America

After posting the last post, I realized that I didn't really include any type of conclusion, so here is a post that can act as that conclusion.  It is sort of along the same lines as the previous one.

Since being in Fatick, I haven’t had a lot of time to keep up with Senegalese news, but I know from my experiences in Dakar that Senegalese news tends to be filled with more interesting and pertinent stories than American news.  These points include new laws, political meetings and decisions, elections, and local goings on that impact the viewing audience.  This exists in America, too, of course, but American news is often littered with stories like the aforementioned, that are of little or no importance.

 A big reason that these exist in America and not here is because here, that extra space is filled with international news stories rather than junk.  In “the good old U. S. of A.,” we are embarrassingly ignorant of the world outside our borders.  It takes a significant amount of effort, further than following the news and reading the paper, to be adequately informed of the outside world.  This is true for even students, like me, who are actively engaged in the international community. 

However, people here know about America.  They learn about America in school, they hear about America on T.V., they even watch American T.V. shows and listen to American music.  To explain the contrasting situation in the States, I give you my blog title, “That’s in Africa, Right?”  This was the chosen title, because more times than not, it was the response I got when I told people that I was going to study in Senegal.  I, myself, didn’t even know very much, if anything, about Senegal until my freshman year of college, when Petra Tschakert suggested that I look into studying here.

Now, I will point out the problems of both countries in terms of their interpretation of each other.  For the Senegalese, America is paradise.  I say this because this sentiment has been explained to me many times, especially since being in Fatick.  My host brother wants to go to America just to see what it is really like, because he knows that the popular idea of it cannot be true.  When I talk to Senegalese about America’s problems, they are shocked. 

America is marketed as a land of opportunity, whereas in reality it is a place of expenses, of political disputes, of educational problems.  Right now, America is very much in a crisis – economically, politically, and socially.  We are suffering the consequences of the many mistakes of the previous presidential administration, and the time that reversing these consequences is taking is provoking unhappiness among the opposition to the current president.  America has long been home to many social problems, including, but not limited to, racism, lack of teachers, unemployment, drugs, and violence.  What I have learned from being in Senegal is that America is largely known as being free of these problems. 

For Americans, Senegal is largely unknown.  Some may make a lucky guess that it is in Africa – a continent which even political figures may refer to as a country.  Since Americans tend to think of Africa as one single entity, rather than a continent made up of 53 individual countries, I will address the American idea of Africa, rather than of Senegal.  Africa evokes, in the minds of Americans, images of safaris, lions, giraffes, rhinoceroses, The Lion King, Blood Diamond, child soldiers, drug trafficking, political corruption, civil war, starvation, disease, and, more recently, the World Cup.  (I realize that I have just made a generalization, just keep reading)

Granted, thanks to recent criticism of these broad and imprecise generalizations, people, especially generation Y, are beginning to realize that these stereotypes are largely inaccurate, and they have become a way to mock popular ignorance.  However, even though people may recognize that these stereotypes do not accurately describe individual African countries, they continue to be ignorant of the realities of African countries.  In terms of Europe, Americans at least have different stereotypes for each country (although I have to admit that even I am pretty ignorant when it comes to Eastern Europe).

In all, both America and Senegal suffer from their interpretations of each other.  In terms of the international community, I think that, because despite efforts to ameliorate this situation, misinterpretations will always exist, this is something that happens often around the world, and it is something that will continue to impede the progression of international relations.  I will close by citing a well-known Oscar Wilde quote, which I think pretty much sums up my feelings on all of these mislead interpretations, “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.”