"Our Africa", as we have by now learned from the annual Amref report on how the continent is represented in the Italian media, only lights up in brief, contained flashes — mostly self-referential ones. If the tragedies of Giulio Regeni and Patrick Zaki had not exploded, no one would be talking about Egypt; if our consul Luca Attanasio had not been murdered, the Congo would not exist; if the United States had not killed George Floyd and given rise to Black Lives Matter, we would not be talking about Black rights; if the tragedy of refugees and migrant landings did not continue, Libya, Tunisia and the entire Maghreb would not exist. The rest is crumbs — crumbs of interest and of storytelling.

With the pandemic, the new data compiled by the Osservatorio di Pavia tells us, interest in the complexity, richness and diversity of the African continent has declined even further: "A monthly average per outlet of 10 news items (less than half of what was observed in the previous survey); 1.6 per cent of attention given to Africa in prime-time news bulletins; in news and infotainment programmes only 1,049 specific references to Africa: 1 reference every 58 hours of programming."

What can one say? In 2019 we were just above 3 per cent of total news coverage: now we are at 1.6. No one seems to care that Africa is the largest continent and the second most populous after Asia: Italians are stirred — perhaps instrumentally — only when its contradictions somehow come crashing into us and cause us some kind of problem.

Because when our media finally find a small space for it, it is only Africa's dramas that dominate, only its emergencies (one wonders what would have happened if Covid had hit them the way Aids did: perhaps we would have paid attention out of fear of contagion…). And then, as usual, Africa's voices — from intellectuals to musicians, from poets to theatre-makers — never reach us.

And as a television man, I am particularly struck by that "1 reference every 58 hours of programming," which sounds like a sentence condemning our television storytelling to its own navel and to its perennial provincialism.

But allow me a personal note. Thanks to the advice and "encouragement" born of the virtuous bond between the local authority and the Caritas in my city, we decided to welcome into our home for a time, before the pandemic, a young Senegalese man in need of support. Those were months of discovery, of exchanging stories — some genuinely moving, others wonderfully funny — but above all rich in mutual understanding. For example: through him I learned that Senegalese people living in Italy almost all belong to the Muridiyya, a widespread Islamic brotherhood that grew out of the beautiful and deeply sad story of Amadou "Bamba" Mbacké. Persecuted by the French authorities who feared his independence of spirit, he was arrested and deported to Gabon until 1913, the year he was finally able to return to his homeland and be venerated by his disciples ("murid" means precisely disciple). It had all been a misunderstanding: Bamba had never concerned himself with politics; he taught only devotion to the Prophet and the fulfilment of God's will through work ("Pray as though you were to die tomorrow and work as though you were to live forever"). And indeed the one true concern of our guest was to obtain stable, honest work, which would be the mark of his dignity as a person even in a foreign country.

Scraps of African culture, acquired through a simple encounter, about which I had honestly never read or seen anything in our media over all these years. Instead, as an Italian who is agnostic — and perhaps atheist — when it comes to football, I learned from him another devotion very widespread among Africans living in Italy: that of Juventus, whose exploits he would sing to me every evening. In short, Africa is still waiting to be discovered, learned from, and valued. Amref, with stubborn persistence, helps us every year to see how far we still are from that goal.

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Massimo Bernardini is a journalist, author, and presenter of Tv Talk on Raitre and Nessun dorma on Raicinque.