What comes to your mind when you think of "the African story"? Is it poverty, war and disease?

It is commonly accepted that journalism is mostly about bad news - planes landing successfully are not news, but plane crashes are.

In the case of Africa the focus on things going wrong is particularly harmful because of the relative dearth of other widely accessible sources of knowledge about the continent.

The system of storytelling on Africa is too often incomplete, stereotyped - and specious.

For example, reports on conflict in some African countries seem to give the impression that all of Africa is at perpetual war.

Yet no-one would associate the violence in East Timor, Syria, Sri Lanka and elsewhere with Asia as a whole.

Media reporting on Africa rarely focuses on everyday matters or the curiosities of daily life.

The result is an idea that the African crisis is "normal" - and any "good news" about the continent is an exception to the rule.

This narrative needs changing, and there have been numerous calls for more journalists especially from Africa, to tell "the African story".

African countries share some similarities, for sure.

But when reporting on the political, economic and socio-cultural fabric of Africa, lumping all 54 countries into a single category just doesn't cut it.

More than a billion people live in Africa. There are more than 3,000 distinct ethnic groups; more than 2,000 languages are spoken.

It's a huge continent: the US, China, India, Europe and Japan combined could all fit into Africa.

So what could possibly inform a collective identity for such a vast and diverse part of our world?

Historically, much of the African identity has been not so much about what we are, but what we are not.

As Mwalimu Julius Nyerere put it: "Africans all over the continent, without a word being spoken either from one individual to another, or from one country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one."

Perhaps this is the crux of the problem: Africa continues to be defined as a country because it is always being compared to something from the outside.

Maybe that is why we call it either the "Dark Continent" or the "Rising Continent"?