infundibulum

Here’s a link to a rather old article I ran across (from last April) from the Washington Post:

The Africa You Never See

Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent’s booming stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper financial pages. How often is an African country– apart, perhaps, from South Africa or Egypt or Morocco — featured in a newspaper travel section? Even the listing of worldwide weather includes only a few African cities.

The result of this portrait is an Africa we can’t relate to. It seems so foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we can’t relate to it, we ignore it.

Blogs are one force chipping away at this unfamiliarity: there are more every day.