Afro-pessimism (Africa)

In African studies, Afro-pessimism refers to a view popularised in the 1980s and 1990s which expressed doubt about the possibility of sustainable peace, democratization, and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the American policy analyist David Rieff, the view held that "while Africa's promise remained undeniable" in view of its natural resources, "the continent was seen as the one part of the world for which the future was likely to be far worse than the past" after the decline of initial optimism following decolonisation in the 1960s and the sharp fall in living standards in the 1970s.[1]

Rwandan refugees pictured in eastern Zaire after fleeing the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

Afro-pessimism was coined by Michel Aurillac, French Minister of Cooperation, in an article for the Xinhua News Agency in 1988 as a pejorative term to criticise the pessimistic views of Africa's Western creditors. Pointing to the influence of Western media perceptions in cultivating the stereotypes, David F. Gordon and Howard Wolpe wrote in 1998:

Afro-pessimism is rooted, in part, in the negative realities of such failed and failing states as Liberia, Somalia, and Nigeria; in a raging AIDS epidemic that threatens to eliminate an entire generation of Africans; in the searing images of the brutal genocide in Rwanda; in the continent's runaway population growth. But it is also rooted in the tendency of the media to focus almost exclusively on this negative side of the African experience and to neglect the quieter stories of economic and democratic renewal.[2]

The term was largely repudiated by those considered to be adherents who instead preferred the term Afro-realism claiming to recognise genuine contemporary problems in Africa while also rejecting any suggestion of the impossibility of resolution or progress. Those who rejected Afro-pessimism sometimes embraced the label Afro-optimism.