US First Lady Melania Trump on Monday embarked on her first solo visit to Africa - a five-day, four-country tour that will focus on child welfare via her BeBest initiative.
The First Lady is set to tour Ghana on Tuesday followed by Malawi before coming to Kenya and finishing off in Egypt.
It is, however, an article on American news agency Associated Press (AP) that has rubbed Africans the wrong way.
The piece titled: Melania Trump Forges Ahead as First Lady With Africa Trip paints the continent in a not too pleasant light portraying Africa as one that is riddled with misfortunes.
"With a wave and tweet, First Lady Melania Trump headed for Africa on Monday on her first big solo international trip, aiming to make child well-being the focus of a five-day, four-country tour that will take her to every corner of the vast and impoverished continent," the article read in part.
Africans were not pleased with the description resulting in a backlash on the article.
"It’s a fancier way of saying Africa is big and poor, which at the very least, is incredibly lazy and clichéd. For starters, there’s zero-country specific context about the nations she is travelling to, each with different economic/political trajectories. Africa isn’t a country," notes Karen Attiah a Washington Post Global Opinions editor.
Read and listen to Africans. There’s a tendency in the western press to talk about Africa(ns) without talking to them. Don’t do that - do the hard work of researching, reading and asking about African voices," adds Chris Ogunmodede.
Head of communications at the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) Wallace Kantai faulted the writer for not taking views from actual Africans for the piece.
"Dear Darlene - you do know you could have found some Africans to interview, don’t you? There’s only about a billion of us here," he tweeted.
