There is No Country Named Africa
FACT: The African Continent contains 54 sovereign nation states and numerous independent territories
Africa in not one big country. It’s the second largest continent on the planet. The largest country in Africa is the Sudan, which is roughly the size of Mexico and France squished together (Mmmm … turtle fajitas). The most populous nation is Nigeria which houses about as many people as Japan. I’m not going out on a limb when I say that Sudan, Mexico, France, Nigeria, and Japan have nothing to do with each other. It took a contrivance of epic proportions to even fit all five of those countries into the same paragraph.
I don’t know much about either Nigeria or Sudan, but I’m fairly confident that studying one would give me no useful information about the other. Even if I studied both, I’d still have about 52 more countries to research before I could even pretend to say anything useful about the politics or the economies on the African the continent. Since we have a word for continent and we have a word for country, I don’t really see the harm of trying to make appropriate use of them. Using words properly is pretty cool to me.
Calling a thing by its appropriate name is not only a basic requirement of intelligent life forms, it is also a good indication of respect. My name is Elie. I liked to be called “Elie”, and I also accept “man,” “human,” “big guy,” and “sunshine” (long story). All else being equal, I prefer not to be called “bitch,” “monkey,” or “republican” because I am none of those things. Call me crazy, but when people refer to me as something I’m clearly not, I tend to think it intentional and thus, insulting.
This incorrect naming convention seems to cross all bounds of race and creed. Dave Chapelle did not run away to Africa no matter home many times he tells James Lipton he did. He went to South Africa and stayed there. It's not like he backpacked throughout the continent, he took an extended vacation to one distinct and sovereign nation. South Africa is a real country; North Africa is not. If that is confusing to some people they should start a movement to rename the state of Maryland “East Virginia.”
The first step in starting to fix our backwards foreign policy towards Africa is to recognize the continent as an amalgam of nations, each with distinct problems and resources. It's simply idiotic to have an "African" foreign policy as surely as it is stupid to treat Great Britain and Poland as if they were almost the same place. You can’t intelligently address economic development in Africa by using successes in South Africa and applying them to Chad. You can’t tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic without understanding the various political divisions present in Somalia that aren’t present in the Ivory Coast. Lumping 54 countries together as one will (and you know, pretty much has) result in a foreign policy that is doomed to failure. Remember, it was the insistence on treating African peoples as interchangeable that lead to random country divisions that grouped different (and sometimes hostile) ethnicities together in the first place.
Media outlets greatly exacerbate the problem. There is a civil war in the Sudan right now. That’s very different from an “African Civil War.” If there ever was a continental civil war in Africa it would probably quickly escalate into World War III. The civil war (genocide really) going on in Sudan is completely distinct from the atrocities that happened in Rwanda or the long civil war that gripped the Congo, or whatever other conflict we may have heard about. Moreover, while things are unimaginably horrifying in Darfur (which is a region in Sudan, not a city) there are many many other African countries that are politically stable and economically viable. We don’t hear about these places, mainly because they get lumped into some large pan-African news cycle.
When you are talking about global geography, it makes sense to talk about Africa as a continent. But when you want to say something about politics, or economics, or culture, or really anything meaningful, go on and use a country's name. Not only will you sound more intelligent, you’ll also have a fighting chance of making sense.