Evolutionism and the Africanist Project

Abstract

On June 20, 2006, the American actress Angelina Jolie did an interview with Anderson Cooper on the CNN current affairs program AC 360. The occasion was World Refugee Day, and as “Goodwill Ambassador” of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), Angelina Jolie wanted to raise awareness about the plight of refugees worldwide. However, the interview also focused on her personal life and her acting career, as well as her “humanitarian” work for the UNHCR. She had just returned from Namibia (or “Africa”) where she had given birth to her first biological child. In the conversation that followed, we learned that she had undergone a “remarkable transformation” that was touching lives in a world troubled by war and humanitarian disasters; that she has three adopted children, one of whom, Zahara, comes from Ethiopia (or “Africa”); that she became aware of problems of global poverty and humanitarian disasters for the first time when she was filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Paramount, 2001) in Cambodia; that she contacted the UNHCR about ways in which she could intervene and help shortly afterward; that her love affair with Africa began after a “life-changing” visit to refugee camps in Sierra Leone on behalf of the UNHCR in 2001, where she “discovered” herself and came to realize the privileged life she was living!

To be sure, the stereotypes that structure discourse about Africa mutate, but each mutation carries with it past discursive genes and the prevailing social rhetoric always sets Africa up against the current conceptions of Western Modernity.

—Paul T. Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises