The Western world view has no room for inconvenient facts like the continuing legacy of the slave trade and colonialism as well as that Africa is actually a net creditor to the rest of the world - a 2014 analysis of 39 African countries found that what had been extracted from them between 1970 and 2010 and parked offshore was more than four times as much as they owed in external debt, and nearly equal to what they had received in foreign direct investment and aid combined.
It also drives what author Teju Cole called the White Savior Industrial Complex, which prioritises "having a big emotional experience that validates privilege" above justice and addressing the racist systems of oppression and extraction that buttress that privilege at the cost of immiserating a large proportion of the globe.
According to the Suffering in Silence report produced annually by CARE International, nine of the 10 most under-reported humanitarian crises of 2019 were happening in Africa, the sole exception being North Korea's malnutrition calamity. It cites the European Commission's definition of forgotten humanitarian crises as those that "receive insufficient international aid and attention, notably in terms of media coverage".
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