What is Africa?

Some time ago, a friend called me an "Africa lover".

I know that there are these people who hear the "call of Africa", identify with it, develop a special relationship with the continent and want to spend their lives or their significant proportion there. I'm not one of those people. Though I've been in Uganda for more than two and half years (already?!) and there are things of living and working here that I enjoy, there are other things that I do not enjoy and I look forward to changing continent at some point and eventually, sooner or later, to going back to Europe (I suspect it’s enough just to write this to find myself in Uganda twenty years from now… :-S).

I'm not either one of those people with abundant and detailed knowledge about African countries, tribes, cultures, languages, societies and economies, who at any ocassion feel the need to point out how wrong, stereotypical and unfair others' perceptions of Africa are.

But I know two things that Africa is not, and I feel about it strongly enough to write them in a random rant blog post.

Africa is not one thing, one unit, one country. Its diversity is huge, and obvious even from the few countries I've visited on this continent.

And Africa is not, or majorly not, children with pot bellies and flies in the eyes or a red sun setting over an acacia tree with a lion in the background. Africa is people with lives surprisingly similar to ours. And that's why I love this video.