Women selling new and used phones in downtown market in Hargeisa, Somaliland. Photo by Mustafa Saeed @themustafasaeed

The late Stuart Hall spent most of his years articulating the ways in which mass-mediated depictions transform ideologies and imageries of specific races, cultures and locations outside of the western hemisphere. In his 1995 piece, The Whites of Their Eyes, he coined the phrase inferential racism: “I mean those apparently naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional,’ which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions.”

Images and inscriptions of Africa in Western media over the decades have done just this: crafting an entire continent as sharing a similar narrative, without nuance, of poverty, conflict and turmoil, or a location perpetually dependent on Western resources.