RRR: Chinyere Ohuoba "The Perception of Africa"

In the short essay “The Perception of Africa” (2016), written by Chinyere Ohuoba she explores how the media influences a certain perception of Africa as a whole and doesn’t represent each country individually. Ohuoba tells a story about a student from Africa who despises social studies class because of the negative perspective they have about Africa. Ohuoba also tells a story about her first trip to Africa in order to show the audience that even though she is the child of two Nigerian parents the perception that she received from media outlets of Africa was wrong. Ohuoba writes this to a global audience to clear up misconceptions people may have of Africa.
After reading the piece I felt it was very informational. The way the author used examples and elaborated on her ideas really stood out to me. It help me relate to many of the things she was talking about. One of them, being teachers butchering my name, and would make me feel bad. Another, was living in a society in which stereotyping is greatly accepted. Me being apart of the African American community I feel stereotyping is a really big issue for African Americans. In which we experience situations such as police brutality, the media only reporting the bad things, despite the amount of good, and all colored people being portrayed to be living in poverty, which is certainly not true  but commonly mistaken.
In this story, the author shows and explains how the use of mass media and stereotypes have shaped and procured an image of Africa that is true to anyone who has never experienced or been exposed to Africa. For example, "Everyone in Africa is starving and poor." (paragraph 3, page 172) This is an example from the text that shows the kind of false stereotypes that have been accepted by people and spread through the media. According to the text, "Whoever controls the media, controls the mind." (paragraph 5, page 173) This is another example of how the use of media affected so many with the false image of Africa that is widely accepted. Overall, this story showed how mass media and stereotypes can cause unintentional ignorance to things, in this case Africa, that people are

Work Cited

Chinyere,Ohuoba. "The Perception of Africa." Connections: Guide to First Year Writing @ Clayton State University. Ed. Mary Lamb. 6th Edition. South Lake: 2016. 203-213 print