“You have to Orientalize us.” my new friend in Tunis told me.

“No,” I told her, with tight-lipped determination. “I will write the hell out of it, and people will read it.”

Flying into the lovely and modern city of Tunis. The tap water is better than DC’s, and the city smells better than New York. Much better.

I said this like I could will people to read about post-revolutionary Tunisia, simply because it was fascinating, complicated, salient on the world stage, and told us so much about what new nationhood in the 21st century might be. Most of our Africa stories cast everyone over there as the inscrutable and irrelevant other, but it’s just not true. I wanted to show how much we all had in common, and I said so.

She just laughed at me, not totally unkindly, and told me no one would read my articles.

She was right, of course. I was determined, but I still gave up by my fourth article.

After weeks of work, I had to abandoned my series. Most of the pieces I’d done to that point never even broke a thousand hits. My editor had the patience of a saint about it, but I had a family to support, and I knew I wasn’t going to keep pay coming in with those numbers. (You can read them here: Whither the Revolution? The Quiet Streets of Tunis, The Walls had Ears. I am still sitting on notes and recordings that are pure gold.)

This was in 2013, and I had gone to write a multipart series on how Tunisia was trying to work out what a state should look like in the 21st century: its struggles, economic problems, lack of jobs, but also some very strong parts of it. I went because in 2012 a Tunisian activist said to me, feeling crushed with frustration: “Did we even have a revolution?”

I said “Well, something sure-as-hell happened.”

I interviewed people from all over. Old people who remembered the French, hip hop radio DJs, activists, NGO people, congressional assistants, start-up folks, secularists, Muslims, just random people on the street, if they happened to speak English. I went to events and took long walks. I struggled with taxis. I cooked a lot, and tried to mess with Tunisian recipes. I fucking loved it, and I thought, I can write what I love. Tunisia is in northern Africa, by the way. It’s next to Libya. Two over from Egypt.

It’s the country where they shot the Tatooine scenes in the first Star Wars movie.

How I end up feeling half the time I talk about Tunisia

I first fell in love with Africa 12 years earlier, at the other end. I drove around the southern bit of the continent, mostly camping with the occasional hotel thrown in. I got sick and recovered. I saw cities, forests, and deserts. I made friends, and saw things off-putting and lovely. I stayed in touch with people for a while after. On the whole, I discovered that Africa is largely populated by people with the same picayune concerns I have, surrounded by slightly different flora and fauna.

This is why I came to hate the term “First world problems.” Most Africans I’ve met on either end of the continent, if I complained about cell phone battery life or social media or dealing with overbearing neighbors or whatever, would chime in with sympathy and understanding.

That’s not to say there are no differences — culture and economics are real, as is distance. You can find plenty of differences between a Zambian villager, a middle class tech worker in Tunis, and me, but pointing out those differences is all we’ve done with Africa for decades. The media in America has taught me that my western life is a complicated scene of interlocking facets of modernity, and Africa is a smoking crater, and so we have nothing in common.

Because of my own experience, Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s post spoke to my frustration as an American writer also trying to write about the places and people and events of Africa for an American audience. I would never claim the expertise of Umebinyuo or any other person born and raised in an African nation, but I felt if I could be honest, do my research, study, interview, and try, I could bring a good story back home to the people I do know well, and who know so little about Africa. I still believe that, I just don’t believe I can make a living doing it.

I’d wanted to tell a different story, about the things we do have in common, and why these things are as important or more than things we don’t. I wanted to write interesting stories about what real life was like in countries that have the misfortune to be globally branded as African. But it became clear to me over time that if I tried, my career was going to be the smoking crater.

This classic video deftly lampoons all the Save Africa BS.

This is not new. That nobody publishes stories which reveal that most of Africa isn’t at war, that many countries are working democracies, and people are developing their own sectors in every industry that you can think of, that sometimes you can even drink the water right out of the tap, has been cried far and wide. But blame for this is usually laid at the media’s feet. I’m not going to for a moment claim we are innocent, we write all those crappy articles about Africa-as-smoking-crater. But I do want to share some blame with you, dear readers.

If it’s not Ebola or Boko Haram, if there’s no one getting shot or starved to death, if photogenically miserable little black children aren’t staring piercingly into your soul while obviously dying, you people never click the fucking link.

This is because you are, on the whole, pretty damn racist, and you don’t really like your visions of African misery challenged by reality. You also don’t like it when someone tells you that Africa has more than just black people in it, in fact it’s a racial and cultural cornucopia. I know, people are going to see this and be all “hashtag-not-all-Americans-slash-Europeans” but I have to call bullshit. Western interest in the real lives of the people of the many African societies is so diminishingly small many of you still think it’s a country.

Here’s a few key things to know about Africa:

John Green demonstrates all the things you can fit in Africa, if you’re will to bend Maine down a bit.