Africa wants to change its image - but its history casts a long shadow

Travelling in Africa, you sometimes find it hard to avoid being scared or, perhaps more honestly, creepily thrilled by horrors that catch you entirely by surprise. Driving by the seaside, you notice big numbers on placards on the dunes. What are they? Oh, that's where the ex-president used to have people shot. This has been a year in which such images were supposed to be turned upside down. The thesis of the Africa 05 festival is that we have become too used to bad news from the continent.

As cultural politics, this is naive stuff. Why is it, asks the journalist and historian Martin Meredith in his book The State of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence, that having been, in the 1950s, a beacon of hope and optimism, Africa today instills foreboding and pessimism - "a scar on the conscience of the world", as Tony Blair would have it? Meredith's explanation is the opposite of the one propounded by Africa 05. The organisers of the image-changing festival believe that bleak views of Africa are ultimately racist. Meredith, though, thinks the alarm the continent inspires entirely justified: his book chronicles the coups, kleptocracies, wars and economic follies that have not only retarded but actually reversed growth.

"In such a survey as Meredith's it would be good to read more about the positives in Africa," objects a reviewer in BBC History magazine. I suppose you could make the same objection to South African Guy Tillim's exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery. It speaks well of Africa 05 that it supports this show because Tillim's pictures, taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), could easily be titled Africa - The Bad News. These are representations of mobs and refugees, decay and suffering, in a place that appears utterly cast adrift from reason, whose history - ominously visible in Tillim's photographs - is mad, chaotic and evil.

Can there be a bleaker, more desolate prognosis for the future of humanity than the sight of children in uniform and camouflage, training as soldiers? Yet that is what you see in Tillim's pictures.