Taylor Swift debuted the hotly-anticipated video for Wildest Dreams at Sunday night's VMAs, but within hours it began attracting attention for all the wrong reasons.

The video, set against the backdrop of the African wilderness, shows a 1950s-era Taylor Swift falling in love with her co-star (Scott Eastwood) on the set of their fictional movie. 

There's no denying that the video is beautifully shot and makes an amazing visual spectacle, but many critics have hit back at director Joseph Kahn for his inaccurate portrayal of colonial Africa. The fact that the video features an all-white cast aside from two black extras has certainly not gone down well with viewers.

"Even the most casual observer would have noticed that – for a clip that's set in Africa – it's about as white as a Sunday morning farmer's market. The video wants to have its old-school Hollywood romance but ends up eating some old-school Hollywood racism, too," wrote journalist Nico Lang.

Another critic, Viviane Rutabingwa from public radio station NPR, said Taylor's video presents a "glamorous version of the white colonial fantasy of Africa."

Africa's colonial era began in the late 1800s and didn't end until the 1980s, and its legacy still affects the country in many ways today. "Here are some facts for Swift and her team: Colonialism was neither romantic nor beautiful. It was exploitative and brutal," said Viviane.

Since Sunday, director Joseph Kahn has hit back on Twitter and in the media to say that the video's actual crew featured a number of people of colour… even if the video itself did not.

"The key creatives who worked on this video are people of colour. I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man," he said in a statement to Mail Online.

He defended the decision not to "load the crew with more black actors", saying he was reluctant to start "rewriting history."

As for Taylor, though she has not addressed the criticism on social media, it's worth noting that she chose to donate all of her proceeds from the video to the African Parks Foundation, an organisation which works to preserve the endangered animals of the continent.