I must compliment you on Why I had to turn down Band Aid (19 November). Most people talk or write about

Very few programmes ever feature the magical beaches of Mozambique. Photograph: Gary Cook/Alamy

I first went to Africa in 1966 for a six-month shoot on part of a documentary series for CBS-TV in New York, travelling down the east of Africa from Cairo to Cape Town and missing out only Somalia. I was ashamed of my ignorance and became angry at educational authorities for having virtually nothing in the curriculum I studied about African history. This was aggravated even further when I recently discovered Max Hasting’s statistics in All Hell Let Looseon the Commonwealth troop losses in the second world war: British losses were approximately 340,000. Commonwealth losses were 550,000.

Of course, most of the programmes that I worked on in Africa over the next 45 years were about famine, disease or war, so I have contributed to this image of Africa. Very few programmes ever feature the magical beaches of, for example, Angola and Mozambique, or the ancient heritages of Ethiopia, Benin, Mali, among others. It is further interesting that Paris has a museumsolely for African art (well worth a visit) while London has none.
Christian Wangler
London

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