By Nesrine Benyaiche
What happens to the stories we don’t write? Other people write them.
This has been the pattern of history: whoever wins the war tells the story. Whoever holds the power holds the pen, the brush, the chisel. Our histories especially in Africa, too often the preferred battlefield have been told through the ink of colonizers, missionaries, or “orientalists” who painted and wrote us into their own fantasy.
Edward Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), reminds us that art was never neutral. Paintings, novels, music, even architecture were tools of power, fixing us in a narrative where we were exotic, voiceless, or backward. Think of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (1879), a painting that shows a naked boy holding a python before older men in ornate robes, set against decorative Islamic tiles. Or Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834). Are we supposed to believe these works reflect reality? Of course not. They depict us as animalistic, devoid of morality or intellect. Nothing in them represents everyday life in Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, or elsewhere. They were European inventions of Africa and Asia, reinforcing colonial superiority canvases that traveled the world teaching generations to
see Africa through colonial eyes. Meanwhile, the stories of our grandmothers and rebels went unarchived, fading into disappearance.
If history taught us anything is that art is not a luxury. It’s a tool of self-preservation. To write, to paint, to film, to sing is to refuse erasure. It is to refuse to hand our narrative to the Other and tell it ourselves. Take Anne Frank: her diary was not only a record of horror but also of existence. It survived longer than the war that silenced her. Today, in Gaza, Bisan Owda’s phone carries testimonies of destruction and survival in real time. But what happens if she loses that phone? What if the internet is cut? The archive is lost. The fragility of our memory should terrify us into urgency.
Kenyan novelist and critic, and a fierce advocate for decolonizing language and culture , the Late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o put it clearly: “They want to be the ones telling people: ‘This is what we have done in history.’ But when people begin to say, ‘No, this is what we have done in history,’ it’s a different thing.” Here lies the struggle: whose voice becomes the official memory? Whose art enters the canon, and whose
disappears into silence?
In Africa, artists have always fought back, reclaiming narrative through creativity. Art is not just entertainment. It is our memory, our resistance, our proof that we lived. If the orientalists used art to colonize, African artists reveal how art can be used to liberate. In Sudan, Alaa Satir painted murals and cartoons during the revolution, amplifying women’s voices where politics tried to silence them.
Cartoon by Sudanese artist Alaa Satir, featured as Human Rights Defender of the Month (August 2019) by DefendDefenders
In South Sudan, the Anataban campaign uses graffiti, theatre, and poetry to demand accountability and speak hope into fractured communities. In Zimbabwe, Kudzanai Chiurai creates photographs and films that confront colonial legacies and political corruption, constructing new visual languages of power.
This is why, in our day and age, digital arts matter as much as murals, poems, or songs once did. Through photography, film, podcasts, blogs, and social media posts, communities across Africa and beyond are documenting themselves, archiving daily life, protest, joy, and grief. Digital storytelling allows us to bypass gatekeepers of publishing or galleries, reaching the world instantly.
Yet it also makes us more vulnerable platforms can be censored. The responsibility, then is twofold: to create and to preserve, to ensure that our digital memory is safeguarded just as fiercely as painted canvases.
And beyond war and oppression, the arts are also our bridge to heritage: the thread that keeps our ancestors’ traces alive. To paint, to write, to dance, to archive this is how we refuse forgetting, how we commemorate those who came before us, and how we ensure that their voices echo into the future. These are our living archives. Our memory preserved. But unlike the colonial painters whose works survive in museums, many African artists and storytellers work without funding, without protection, without archives to safeguard their voices. Their murals are washed away, their servers crash, their poems remain unpublished, their films unproduced.
Funding matters not because art needs charity, but because art is infrastructure. Without support, only the dominant version of history survives: the colonizer’s, the oppressor’s, the outsider’s. If we do not fund and protect African arts today, then tomorrow’s children will inherit silence, or worse a history told entirely by others.
Sources
DefendDefenders. Human Rights Defender of the Month (August 2019): Alaa Satir. Link
Kalmar Art Museum. Madness and Civilization. Link
The Guardian. Tired of war: South Sudan street artists calling for peace — in pictures. Link
Editor’s Note
In Africa, art has always been more than expression—it is survival, resistance, and memory. In this essay, Algerian writer Nesrine Benyaiche reflects on how cultural erasure has long been enforced through art, and how today’s African artists are reclaiming narrative as a tool of self-preservation. From colonial paintings to digital storytelling, she shows why investing in the arts is not charity but the infrastructure that ensures our histories, voices, and futures are not lost.
Nesrine Benyaiche, Content Creator, Writer & Feminist Activist, Algeria A writer and content creator from Algeria, Nesrine Benyaiche explores themes of identity, womanhood, ecology, and everyday politics in North Africa. She is also co-founder of GaïaTech, an ecofeminist initiative connecting Algerian women to green tech and sustainability. In this essay, she brings her advocacy and storytelling into dialogue, reminding us that without investment in the arts, Africa risks not just losing creative talent but entire archives of memory and identity.