Dear Telegraph: Africans are not wildlife

Dear Telegraph, I just happened across your Up close and personal: Dale Morris’s portraits of wildlife in southern Africa. I know this is being a little too sensitive but ever since Teddy Roosevelt and his colonial ilk came to our continent shooting and enslaving everything in site, we haven’t had the best image in the world. So you can understand my disappoint when I started flipping through Dale Morris’ gallery of beautiful, well, animals, you see.

Photos of beautiful people are fine and good. Or even photos of humans and animals are great. But I have a problem with Africans being lumped under the category of wildlife. Yes, one of the photos was of bushmen, and I know that technically humans are… wilder than wild animals sometimes, but it is not exactly PC to call Africans wildlife.

Sure, you probably didn’t mean any harm by the misleading, 19th century-era headline befit for a chapter title in Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden. I get it, we all make mistakes and the editor who didn’t catch this was probably busy guffawing at Maggie’s fake trauma from her trip to Uganda, in that episode of The Newsroom.

Anywhoo, I caught it and I thought I’d point it out to you so that you could make the edit before any more of us connected, vocal, and unforgiving Africans see it.

Oh, BTW. If you are going to go out of your way to mention that a wild boar was domesticated and given a name, it really wouldn’t have hurt to actually get the names of the Africans you decided to include under that unfortunate title. I mean it is just too obvious that the only human you decided to give a name was… Dale Morris.

via Up close and personal: Dale Morris’s portraits of wildlife in southern Africa – Telegraph.

UPDATE:

Richard Fletcher, editor at The Telegraph just reached out to let me know that the two photographs of humans included in the gallery that I wrote about above have been removed. Thanks to Mr. Fletcher for the prompt attention to the matter.