Transcriber: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
I'm here today to talk about finding African stories.
It's a topic that's very close to my heart,
and it's actually defined a lot of things I've done in the last couple of years.
I want to start off with an example, or a theory,
that was told by a South African journalist called Max du Preez.
He created this theory
to explain why journalists
don't often dig deep into stories,
and don't come back and report the deepest aspects to stories.
And the theory is called: "The Masturbating Monkey."
(Laughter)
And basically it goes like this: there's a zoo somewhere,
and in that zoo there are many beautiful animals,
the environment is wonderful.
But, as you go through the doors of the zoo,
the first cage that you see has got a monkey in it,
and that monkey is doing its business.
And it does its business all day,
so when people come into the zoo the first thing they see is this monkey.
And they're so transfixed by what it's doing
they don't actually go any further.
So they never get to see the beautiful animals,
they never get to see the wonderful environment that this zoo has.
And when they leave, they go back out
and they tell all their friends about the monkey and what it's doing.
So their friends come, they don't go any further,
they stop and look at the monkey.
And the reason why I use this analogy or why it became so powerful to me
was that, to me, the zoo represented Africa.
There's so much beauty in our continent,
there are so many amazing things, so many amazing things happening,
but there's this damn monkey that everybody keeps looking at.
(Laughter)
And this monkey represents war and famine,
corruption, poverty, AIDS,
and this is what our continent has become defined by.
And it pisses me off!
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thank you.
Just to put Africa into a little bit of perspective,
I'm not saying there is no war, no corruption, no poverty, no AIDS,
I'm not saying that.
What I'm saying is it can be put into perspective,
and it's not the only vision of Africa.
If you look at conflicts in Africa, apparently there are supposed to be
about 15 to 17 happening in countries right now.
In a continent with 55 countries,
that means there are at least 40 countries at peace right now.
But we don't hear about them in the media.
When you talk about poverty, there are various figures abounding around
about the amount of poverty there is on the continent.
A figure I picked up was 300 million,
and that's a huge number of people to be living in poverty.
But in a continent of a billion people, that means there are 700 million people
who are living a relatively prosperous life.
And we need to focus the attention more on them.
Obviously, everybody complains about the western media,
and the fact that they're always depicting Africa in a particular way.
And, yeah, that's their job.
I'm not here to knock CNN or BBC, or any other of the news organizations,
because that is what they do.
And also, it is our job as Africans to present our best foot,
and to tell the positive stories,
so that those news stations can actually pick up those stories.
I don't know how many of you have seen this very famous TED talk
by Chimamanda Adichie, the author.
It's called "The Danger of a Single Story."
The reason why I like her speech is that it actually sums up
this danger that we keep hearing about Africa,
the danger of the single story that keeps coming out of Africa.
And it's up to us to change it.
Martin Luther King said,
"Our lives begin to end when we stay silent about things that matter."
I had a light bulb moment a few years ago,
and I just decided I didn't want to stay silent anymore.
I wanted to do something.
To be honest, I didn't know what I was going to do,
and I remember speaking to a coach, an executive coach,
and he said, "In order to find what your true purpose is in life,
you've got to take something that makes you incredibly angry
and combine it with something that you're incredibly passionate about,
and then you've found what it is you've been put in this world to do.
So I tried the exercise.
I used to get really angry about the image, about Africa,
the fact that people thought somehow they were better than me
because I lived in Africa and they lived in what we term a developed country.
I just thought it was unfair.
And it really did work me up, I have no idea why.
But, again, I was really passionate about telling stories.
I'd left the corporate world and I'd stumbled into the media,
and I was working on a show called Carte Blanche in South Africa.
All of a sudden we had to tell stories, we had editorial meetings,
we were looking for stories.
I remember at the time that if I could somehow combine those two things,
the passion and the anger,
then maybe that's what I was put here to do.
One of the first things I did actually,
because I knew I couldn't change Africa's image just like that,
was I decided to start a website, because I could control it.
I realized I didn't know everything positive about Africa.
The website is still up, I did it about six years ago: africaourafrica.com.
Anyone with iPads here, please don't go to it because it's been hacked,
so it's a bit of a mess.
But the idea behind it, it's like a Wikipedia-type site.
The idea was that Africans can contribute content,
positive things about Africa that somehow always stayed in our heads
and wasn't out there for the media to see, for us as Africans to see, to inspire us.
The website's very simple, a couple of categories
like interesting people, interesting websites,
interesting images, interesting books from Africa,
and the only criteria I ask people to consider is that it has to be positive.
And I was trying to build this repository
of positive information and knowledge about Africa.
But then another thought struck me:
if you want to change a message or tell somebody something,
the best way to do it is to tell them a story.
I'll give you an example:
if I wanted to stop you all smoking,
various governments and medical authorities have been trying to do that,
I can tell you all day, "Don't smoke, don't smoke,"
or I can tell you the story of somebody with a similar background
who smoked as much as you did,
who died a horrible, painful death of lung cancer, caused by smoking.
You're far more likely to react, far more likely to absorb the message
than if I told you to just stop smoking.
With that in mind, I set out to start telling stories.
One of the first projects I did was a book called "Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs",
and that was a book where I told the stories
of sixteen people I believed were some of Africa's greatest entrepreneurs.
They were from 11 countries across Africa.
People often ask me, "Gosh, it must be really difficult finding these people."
And I said, "Well, no.
It's like you come to the UK and ask who's one of the top entrepreneurs here.
You go to America, people will say Richard Branson or Donald Trump."
They're not hard to find.
What was hard was:
a) getting them to tell me their story, and b) making sure that people realize
that I wasn't there to raise their image,
and I wasn't being paid for this as a lot of people thought I was.
I was trying to get people to tell their story
so it could inspire other people.
The key thing for me was the people featured in the book built their empires,
made their fortunes in Africa,
and that it was possible to do it.
The book went on and it became quite a good-selling book.
I wouldn't say it was a best-selling book,
and that touches on a subject which I'll talk about later
about the number of people who buy books by Africans, on Africa.
The second project I did was a book called...
it's not a book - sorry, I'm looking at the time here,
was a reality series which I did, called "Lifestyles Africa";
actually called "Living it", I called it "Lifestyles Africa",
loosely, or entirely based on an American series called
"Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."
So the series went out and it went out across Africa
and it did relatively well.
People said to me, "My God, I didn't know they had rich people in Botswana."
You know Nigerians, they say that!
(Laughter)
And then shortly after that
I got approached to be in a drama series called "Jacob's Cross",
which some people may recognize me from.
I always say that I'm not an actress,
but at the time of Jacob's Cross when I saw the script,
it was about this amazing family, oil dynasty, it was like Dallas,
but it was Africans, we were controlling an African business across the continent.
In it I had a private jet - that was very exciting!
(Laughter)
I did it, not because I wanted to act, but because I thought,
"You know what, it's a positive image about Africa, and I'll do it."
Shortly after, I started a publishing company
and produced another book: "South Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs",
and then a series of books called Nollybooks.
I did that because I realized that all these books we put out,
Africans actually don't read that much.
I remember, I have to confess
I read "Mills & Boon", that's how I became a reader.
It was like Blade and Rebecca, and some fictitious place,
but it was not a place I identified with.
I thought, "What if we could create romance stories with African characters
and based in African locations?"
That's how Nollybooks started,
and those books are very low-cost books available in supermarkets in South Africa.
The idea is maybe to broaden that out.
But it's about getting young people to read
and creating heroes - fictional in this case -
that could inspire, because all my heroines were clean,
they never had sex with people before, in the book anyway.
(Laughter)
So I was creating fictional heroes and trying to inspire young people.
The reality is, with all these efforts that I feel were my efforts
to try and change perceptions,
the West is actually not ready to see this new vision of Africa,
and I'll tell you why.
When I did the series "Living It", I took it to an agent in the UK
and I tried to sell it onto European and American TV stations.
And do you know what she told me?
"You know what?
Europe, Americans, they're not ready to see Africa like this,
a) they don't believe it, and b) they'll feel a little bit disgusted
that there are people living like this in Africa with so much poverty."
So she said, "Sorry, I can't help you. We just won't sell this."
Same thing with Jacob's Cross.
The guy who sells Jacob's Cross at M-Net, the station that commissioned it,
said there was a European country that would not take the series
because they said, "Well, it's not a very realistic depiction of Africa."
So the reality is, the West actually is not ready.
Another reason why probably we don't have as many stories out there about Africa,
is that Africans are very secretive about what they do and why they do it.
(Laughter)
I know when I was trying to look for only 13,
we only needed 13 characters to feature on Living It,
I struggled.
I remember we were already on air
and I had like a couple of weeks to finish the last episode,
and I remember I was watching this episode of Doctor Nilo 210,
I don't know if you've have seen it,
and there was an episode where a woman was having a labiaplasty.
I don't know how many of you know what that is, but it involves this area,
(Laughter)
and this woman lay back on a bed with a camera right up her...
you know, open legs,
filming the whole procedure, with the necessary bits clouded out.
I thought, "My God, in America they can get a woman to open her legs on camera
and I can't get an African to allow me to show their lifestyles
to other Africans for just 30 minutes."
And it just struck me that we need to, as Africans, open up a little bit.
(Laughter)
Oh, OK.
(Laughter)
I didn't mean that!
The reason why I think it's important for us as Africans to tell our stories,
and to just get out there a bit more,
is a story somebody that I featured in my book told me.
He's a very wealthy businessman who created a business.
When I wrote the book his pretax profits were over 60 million US dollars.
He's a wealthy guy, he travels a lot, but he has an African passport.
And he says every time he goes to America,
he almost gets strip-searched, looking for drugs
because they can't understand how a young guy can travel so extensively,
have so many visas in his passport, that he must be a drug dealer.
(Laughter)
He said to me, "I've just given up, I just allow them to do whatever."
And I imagined the situation where Mark Zuckerberg, for example,
came to Nigeria, or wherever.
He's a young guy who runs Facebook
and they decided, "You're too young, too many passport stamps,
we're going to strip-search you, because you must be a drug dealer."
It doesn't happen that way round, but it constantly happens to us Africans.
The other reason I believe we need to tell our stories more
is because we need to inspire each other, we need to inspire ourselves.
One of the big things for me when I wrote the book
were people who'd say,
"My God, that book really inspired me, I'm going to start my own business,"
or "I'm definitely looking at doing something,"
or "I just can't believe that all of that stuff came out of Africa."
So it's important that we do it.
Everybody can play a role; I mean part of today is for us to come out inspired,
and actually want to do something.
There are two things that we can all do in this room:
one is that we can demand more African stories
and support the news organizations, the authors, the writers,
the filmmakers that are telling the right kind of African stories.
And the other thing is that we can actually tell more of our own stories.
If you go to an American bookshop, there's a lot of biographies,
a lot of books written by people for no other reason than they think they can.
We as Africans need to do that more,
because until the publishing sector, for example, becomes a viable business,
no one's going to be producing books because it doesn't make sense.
Over the last couple of years, my husband has called the things I've done a hobby,
because clearly we haven't made any money.
(Laughter)
I never set out to do that, I set out to pursue my passion, and I did that.
But the one important thing for me
is that we need to tell more stories to inspire ourselves.
If you ever receive an email from me,
my email signature is an African proverb which is very meaningful to me,
and it says, "Until lions learn to write, hunters will tell their stories for them."
I don't want to be seen as the masturbating monkey,
I want to be the lion that writes.
Before I go, I'm going to show a little video
of a promo of the show that we did, called "Living It."
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
(Applause)
(Video)
(Music)
(Video) Moky Makura: I'm in Lusaka, in Zambia,
in fact, I'm in Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.
I'm in Maputo, in Mozambique.
I'm in downtown Nairobi,
in fact, I'm in Lagos
and I'm here to meet one of Africa's most passionate polo players.
Atedo Peterside: I always told myself that if I was successful in life,
I would not allow myself to become a slave to money.
MM: There's a popular saying here
that a Ugandan is a poor man living a rich man's life.
That's because Ugandans love to party.
I went looking to meet the elite
and was directed to the inimitable Gordon Wavamunno.
Gordon Wavamunno: Sometimes we visit our islands,
we bought a number of islands on the lake.
MM: Botswana is number one money spinner of these diamonds.
For heiress Nicky Nchindo,
it's a case of diamonds and daddy are a girl's best friend.
Her dress had 2,500 Swarovski crystals,
6,500 diamond carats worth a few million dollars.
Most people move around in Lagos like this and I must say it's hair-raising.
But there are other ways of travelling and other ways of living.
Now six flights of stairs later,
it was well worth the effort to meet Erelu Kuti IV.
She's the queen regent of Lagos, and her penthouse, when we got there,
was certainly fit for a queen.
Erelu Kuti: I think I'm somebody who just loves life.
MM: The new Mozambique is a hot, happening land of opportunity.
Hmmm! It's OK!
Entrepreneur: I'll tell you it's cars, I love cars.
The only thing I want to do more, and why I'm working more
is to build tomorrow a better future for our country.
[When people see Africans on TV it's usually when they are broken,
but most Africans don't have broken lives]
[Livingit. A different perspective on Africa]
(Videos ends)