I'm looking forward to visiting Accra and recording images, meeting people, and connecting with the land. Relying on media images and history books is a dangerous way of viewing the world.

It is a painful reality, but our history books and our media have purposes that are not always portraying African countries as having both wealth, poverty, success, resilience, pride, and disappointment--all combined as a complex picture of many countries. We tend to see one image, and this singular narrative is dangerous if we want to have an authentic understanding of the world and ultimately ourselves. I do not want to portray all of the media as giving a false representations; this would be incorrect. But the big media picture is not one that gives an authentic image of the real world. And most history textbooks have served to perpetuate these false images that create perceptions of total devastation that are more extreme. Granted, the devastation exists, but the other images should be represented in a more balanced way.