The Savagery of Africa

I strongly recommend reading in full this France 24 article about hoax images shared on African social media (link). It's about how various images have been misrepresented and used to advance political agendas of various kinds on social media.

To be fair, I think I even used one of these images myself on a previous blog to make a claim about Muslims massacring Christians. (Turns out it was the result of an accident with an oil tanker).

But the most striking thing about most of these images is that they are genuine. They really do depict scenes of utter savagery. And they are then presented in future as illustrations of some other kind of real or imputed savagery. If Europeans wrongly attributed this kind of savagery to Africans, they would be called racists. But when Africans do it to their fellow Africans, it's just an innocent mistake.
There's also plenty of amusement value here. One of the images sparked off rumours that HIV-infected blood had been injected into oranges.

Negroes also apparently believe that some men can turn into snakes and swallow women.

In November 2013 in the Cameroonian city of Buéa, residents attacked a hotel because they believed a “Mboma” – a sorcerer with the ability to transform into a snake – had swallowed a girl there.

Remember: The population of Africa will quadruple in the course of this century. There were 133 million Africans gracing the world with their presence in 1900. By 2100, according to UN projections, there will be 4.4 billion.