"a young woman from Africa". Words like these are things I hear in the speeches of (especially) Americans, both ordinary and highly placed. Their educational system has presented Africa to them as a place of poor Black people (which of course is very wrong). Since their writers also go through the same system and live in the same society, they adopt this twisted view of the continent. And it eventually gets into speech and written word. The problem here is ignorance, severe ignorance. Many non-African writers, both Black and White, know very little about Africa. As a result, they think it's just 'someplace somewhere'. You tend to hear things like "she is from Africa", "he started speaking African", "like the flag of Africa", etc. All these are ignorant, insulting and wrong expressions. Africa is not just a 'place', it's a continent. It's actually where human life started. It's the second most populated continent on the planet, with over fifty independent nations, at least four races, and thousands of languages. If you're going to talk or write about it, it should be well represented, and you can't do that without knowing anything about it (See MLJ Talk's post, AFRICA: A Continent Misrepresented)
As writers, we are supposed to inform and entertain the world, and misrepresenting an entire continent is not something we should do. It falls on us to do proper research so we don't end up sounding ignorant, stupid and stuck-up which is actually what is represented here in my short story, My Visit To Africa.
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