The African Middle Class: Responding to Amber Rose

Amber Rose recently said this on her first visit to Ghana "what I’ve noticed about Africa since I’ve been here is that there’s extremely rich or extremely poor, there’s no middle class at all" she goes on and says "I’ll like to speak to the rich people and be like, what are you guys doing? help out a little bit" (notice she said ‘noticed about Africa', not Ghana, we're back to this notion of Africa as a homogenous block. How ridiculous would it sound for me to visit Portugal and say, 'what I've noticed about Europe is that')

I question her observational skills for one, she’s been in Ghana a few days, observing it mainly from tinted windows of a 4X4, and yet she feels she is in possession of enough social information to make such a statement as that.

But it doesn’t surprise me, I’ve read and heard many westerners make statements like that. I’ve heard people who are about to visit an African country for the first time say stuff like ‘I wanna visit the ‘real’ Africa’, 'real' is just code for poor. I think to myself, “but you’ve never been to Africa before, how do you know what is real and what isn’t” They have a prejudged script of how Africa is supposed to be, and in their heads they divide Africans into ‘authentic’ (a.k.a poor) Africans and 'inauthentic’ (middle class/rich) Africans. Poor Africans to them are the authentic ones, the ones that don’t challenge their views of Africa. When they see an African in a new German car with an iPod they just can’t compute that the wealth could have been acquired in any way but through a direct exploitation of the poor people they see. So the image of a wealthy African becomes offensive to them because they have come with their colonial/charitable mindset and here are Africans living in big houses not seemingly as worried about the poor as they (Westerners) are. Some travel to African countries to (temporarily) relieve their sense of guilt for living in a materialistic Western society, and the image of an African just as materialistic as they are challenges their views in what was supposed to be a trip about moral self flagellation and finding oneself (as you know, you can't find yourself around shiny cars and flat screen TVs, there have to be poor faces around, with flies casually perched on them, only in the midst of the less off can one realise the purpose of life.)

The problem is many Western amateur social critics, like Amber, never ask these questions about their own countries, Amber Rose can say to a rich Ghanaian, "why are you rich? and why don’t you give that naked kid clothes" as though a comparative disparity doesn’t occur in her country, the USA of all places, we all saw Katrina, we saw America’s underbelly, and it could rival this so called brand of African poverty.

So I can understand the frustration a lot of Africans feel when a Western lens goes to an African country and only records destitution, what they are doing is de-legitimizing the African middle-class, de-legitimizing our stories and histories, they are effectively saying we are traitors to our people because we've risen above what they percieve the standard of African living to be.