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Shifting African Narratives
  • ISSN: 2040-199X
  • E-ISSN: 1751-7974
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Abstract

This article examines the constructions of Africa in COVID-19-related stories that were produced by African news media. Dominant scholarship indicates that western media generally reproduce and perpetuate harmful stereotypes on Africa. Given that there is scant literature on how African media covers Africa, this article uses the COVID-19 pandemic as an entry point to explore the disease narratives on Africa. Drawing on Afrokology as decolonial perspective, this article examines the discourses and narratives on Africa that were produced by African news organizations. Data were drawn from ten news organizations from Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Egypt. A quantitative corpus analysis and a qualitative critical discourse analysis were used to analyse the COVID-19-related stories. Findings demonstrate that harmful disease stereotypes about Africa as a place of danger, darkness, tragedy and human rights abuses were reproduced by the African media.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • 2021–22 Africa No Filter Academic Fellows Program
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Intellect Ltd.
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The CC BY licence permits commercial and noncommercial reuse. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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2023-08-17
2026-04-22

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COVID-19 and the constructions of Africa in African news media
Journal of African Media Studies 15, 179 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/jams_00099_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jams_00099_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jams_00099_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): African narrative; Afrokology; corpus linguistics; critical discourse analysis; disease narrative; stereotypes

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