Time Magazines Africa

University of California UCOP | Time Magazines Africa [MUSIC PLAYING] OK. What I would like to do today is talk to you about what I would probably describe as Time magazine's Africa. Time magazine, for much of the 20th century and certainly for an early part of the 21st century was probably one of the mainstream media publications that many, many people read. As a kid growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s, my parents had a subscription to Time magazine. It's what I would read if I wanted to find out what was happening in the United States and what was happening in the rest of the world. It has less significance now to many of us, because it's become either an online publication or a less-frequently published hard copy. But Time magazine, for much of the 20th century, as they say, gave you insight into what America thought about the rest of the world. One particular example I'll give is of anyone who took the State Department exam in the 1980s had to take a test, and that was based on the knowledge of information that they had derived from reading Time magazine. Even though the State Department didn't say that explicitly, that's how the exam was constructed. So what I want to do today is go through a series of slides that show Time magazine cover pages of Africa from 1925 to 2014. This is all of the cover pages that are identified as being about Africa. You might well go on the website and find more. And I would encourage you to do so. And we'll talk about that in class. But what I want to do is go through these, and as we go through them together, I want you to think about any patterns that you might see in the images, any sort of themes that might appear that tell you something about the way in which the West views Africa, how it compartmentalizes it, perhaps, how it stereotypes it, how it understands it. So let's get started here in 1925, the first image of Africa, or at least that's listed as Africa on Time magazine. And this is a portrait, JBM Herzog, the prime minister of South Africa, the leader of a political party in South Africa that was committed to white rule and white supremacy and in particular to the protection of the rights of the Afrikaner people. The name Afrikaner refers to a particular group of whites in South Africa who took on the wood Afrikaner to suggest that they were in fact, African in origin, not in terms of color but in terms of ownership of the land. So this is the first cover from 1925. And I'm going to go through them relatively quickly, just so you can return to them and look at them later. But let's look at the second one that appeared, Abdul Okhrim. This was a leader of resistance in Morocco to Spanish rule. Here he is, this is in 1925. He'd lead a rebellion against the Spanish in 1921. He in fact established a republic. He had grown up as a young man in Spanish-ruled North Africa. He'd become a journalist. He became concerned that people should rule themselves and not be ruled others. Here it in 1925. Abdul Okhrim's forces were defeated that same year. And he was sent into exile. He spent the years from 1926 to 1947 exiled from Africa. He only returned, in fact, to North Africa in 1963, at a time when Algeria became independent. But in a sense, the image captures the fate of resistors to European colonialism in the early 20th century, none were successful in overthrowing European colonialism. Next image, here's Haile Selassie, the leader of Ethiopian resistance forces, or the leader of Ethiopia or in fact, in 1930. We have another Time magazine cover of Haile Selassie in 1936. Man of the year at that time, when he was leading resistance against the Italians but ultimately was defeated by the Italians as they returned to Africa to take a colony that they had in fact not been able to conquer in the late 19th century. So here we have Haile Selassie, 1936. Who's next? OK, Jan Christian Smuts in 1944. He at that time was the prime minister of South Africa. He had succeeded JBM Hertzog who had not wanted to into the war on the side of the Allies but in fact had been more favorably inclined to support the Germans who had supported the Afrikaners earlier. JC Smuts, himself an Afrikaner but he believed in working with the British. He is one of the founders of the United Nations. He's defeated actually in 1948 and replaced by the government that we would now call the apartheid government in South Africa. Another person, this is a person that I, as a person growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I remember, Albert Schweitzer. He's a medical missionary in Africa working in French equatorial Africa. I in particular remember reading news stories about him as having been involved in the fight against leprosy, which we would now call Hansen's disease. And it conjured up an image in my mind of this European medical missionary fighting disease in Africa. On the other hand, we have the famous African author Chinua Achebe, who unfortunately died late last year, who said that the thing that he always remembered about Albert Schweitzer was Albert Schweitzer made the statement the African is indeed my brother but my junior brother, capturing that sense of here we have the medical missionary who goes but the paternalistic European. OK. Here's the Time magazine cover though, 1949. This cover is from 1952, DF Malan, the prime minister of South Africa in that year, the man who'd been elected prime minister of South Africa in 1948. A government that ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994. DF Malan was a white supremacist, believes that Africans should not be South Africans. He didn't believe that Africans were civilized. Here he is at that time. This is early 1950s. This is the period of the thoroughgoing establishment of apartheid in South Africa, at the same time that we have a rising civil rights movement in the United States. But other changes are going on in Africa. It's a period when Africans are demanding independence and succeeding in gaining it. In this case, we have a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of a nationalist movement in the Gold Coast. Think of that, it's the name. The Gold Coast was called the Gold Coast because that's where gold came from. Later on, it's known as Ghana, it's present day Ghana. It becomes an independent state in 1957. But this is an image of Kwame Nkrumah in 1953 representative of a new and young generation of African leaders bringing independence to the country against the wishes of the colonial powers and often having to do so through armed struggle in a number of cases. Another man, in this case, this is Secu Turei who leads Guinea, part of West Africa to independence also at the end of the 1950s into the 1960s. And here you get the little image there at the time, black Africa, the dawn of self- rule. There is a huge sea change as of around about 1957, '58, '59, '60. Nothing was independent almost at all before that time. Pretty much all of Africa becomes independent after that except for the white-ruled areas ruled by the Portuguese colonialists or ruled by the white imperialists in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Another young independent African leader, in this case it's Tom Mboya, a nationalist leader in Kenya. This image is also from-- this one is from 1960. ' Again, he was seen as one of the hopes of an independent Africa who unfortunately died young. Another image from 1960. This is Dag Hammarskjold. He was the Secretary General of the United Nations. The big issue in which he was involved around about 1960 was political instability in what had previously been the Belgian Congo but had become the independent state of the Congo, the Democratic Republic, and as we would know, it would later on be called Zaire. This is the image that Time magazine used. What's interesting about this image is to look at the background that they've got and to think about why they chose to put Dag Hammarskjold's picture here. It goes with the subtitle, "The UN in the Congo, Out of Chaos, A Legal Precedent." The issue arising at this time was the United Nations needed to be involved in what was becoming an internal civil war in the Congo. But as we have discovered since, the internal civil war was pushed by Belgians who had not really wanted to get out of the Congo, also pushed by South African mining interests interested in the vast resources of the Congo. This is the cover that time magazine didn't use. They originally got an image, a portrait made of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of independent Congo. And as you can see, the same background is there. That's the background they used for when they just substituted and flipped it out and used Dag Hammarskjold's instead. Lumumba was murdered in the early part of 1960.

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