Foreword

One should be thankful to Julia Gallagher for this project on Image and Africa. The title is a programme on the creation, negotiation, and subversion of images. The introduction dwells on the complexity and politics of image, collectively known in the profession as ‘imagology’, a strange concept that refers to the technique and aims of representation. What is an image? It brings to mind the concept of representation. Should one consult everyday dictionaries, to represent is to picture, to portray, and to delimit by rendering an image. But, in actuality, the representation is a symbol of something else. It stages something, and describes, in words and symbols, a projection, deliberately created. The questions that recur throughout the book are: how has it been created, and by whom? This book presents a critique of a more traditional approach, represented for example by my own book, The Invention of Africa (1988). Its key argument is about the significance of ‘the outside world and African images’ and the idea of images as spaces of motivation in dialogues. It does this, first, by presenting, across its contributions, a critical ethnography of the processes that produce images, from within news offices to state houses, from party headquarters to artists’ studios. In doing this it provides an analysis of representations motivated by local policies and their structural references, and the complexity of the African presence in the world, revealing how images of Africa are inscribed internationally. The contributions themselves come from a remarkable variety of disciplines, and the international dimension of the project can be seen from the list of contributors. One could regroup them into three sections. There are, after the introduction theorising the very concept of image by Dr Gallagher, contributions that dwell on the process of imaging. These conceptual contributions include a chapter by George Ogola on what it would mean to construct an image of the continent of Africa; one by Mel Bunce about the struggles between African and foreign journalists over the representation of images of Africa, which qualifies itself