ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the W. Edward Said’s Orientalism theory to explore how the British Broadcasting Corporation covered South Africans and Africans after South Africa won the bid to host the 2010 World Cup. It argues that the Western media Othered and Orientalized South Africans and Africans during the period under scrutiny. The chapter suggests that the portrayal of Africans and South Africans is a case of the global media treating the West as culturally and politically dominant in the current global geopolitical dispensation. The analysis is predicated on issues of globalization—a concept that, undeniably, compels media practitioners to understand the world. Some global media representations of Africa have endorsed the prejudices that Hegel presents and validated them through their one-dimensional stories, all in an attempt to qualify the myth of the “dark continent.” The BBC’s Afro-Orientalism has shown that it, as part of the global media, exercises some power over the Orient—South Africans and Africans, to be specific.
