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Notes -
Could you elaborate? I'm not convinced. On the Africa side of things, that is.
Sub-Saharan Africa development aid per year. It crossed $1bn in the 60s, and has increased steadily to over $60bn/yr today. All those dollars go through various middlemen and NGOs, all of which have a vested interest in preserving those flows.
Development aid and charity fundraising is typically not themed around "Hey, they're doing pretty ok, but just this one more push and they'll be even better off!" It's themed around starvation, famine, death, oppression, murder, dreaded diseases, uncontrolled civil war, genocide. Nobody ever came to my church to gather money for a cause and talked about how basically-ok things are. They talk about how horrible things are.
Those activists and charity groups are the dominant players in controlling US coverage of Africa. African states themselves have either been incapable or uninterested in writing and publicizing books about how great things are in Africa after the independence hangover set in.
I read the NYT Sunday Book Review most weeks, and there's often an African author somewhere in the list, rarely are those books upbeat comedies; a technically well written book by any African "exploring the intersections of race, religion, gender and oppression in the author's native..." While we don't get the African Tucker Max or something like that. The books from African topics/authors I read in undergrad were things like The Pickup (SA illegal immigrants), Things Fall Apart (Itself a wonderful book but about the downsides of colonialism), Machete Season (Rwandan Genocide).
George Clooney et al can always cash in on publicizing something bad happening somewhere in Africa for Human Rights Activist street cred; the last time celebrities put effort into publicizing well developed Africa was, what, The Rumble in the Jungle?
Compare to Asian countries that have specifically put effort into enhancing their image abroad.
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