Uniquely African
It is not very difficult to grasp the rationale behind the popular pronouncement that South Africa is “not really Africa”. Here, a relative abundance of infrastructure and resources allows the foreign visitor easy access to stereotypical ‘African’ sights and symbols without the least bit of discomfort. The continent’s famed wilderness and wildlife can be encountered in carefully managed, fenced environments, and ‘African’ art and music conveniently perused on a Cape Town street or a mere step away from the comfort of your tour bus. Disconcerting urban poverty can be mostly ignored by avoiding the massive and overcrowded townships. Culture villages, ‘traditional’ performances, animal reserve guides dressed in beige safari suits and weathered cowboy hats: South Africa seems to me a place where foreign perceptions of what Africa should consist of are neatly packaged for consumption from the safety of luxury lodges, carefully guarded waterfronts and picturesque European-like villages. The beaten track of this country offers a taste of Africa sans culture shock for the cautious visitor, an opportunity to dip one’s toes into the unknown within the safety of a heavily engineered and Europeanized environment.
This brings me to another factor that seems to underlie the belief that South Africa is not the real deal: put quite simply, there are lots of white people who live here. This builds on common and long-held perceptions of who does or doesn’t naturally belong in a place or on a particular continent: in other words, the idea that real Africa is black, and that real Africans are the ones with dark skin. So from the perspective of a visitor, it is quite possible that the presence of a suburban white soccer-mom family packed into a minivan spells disaster for the illusion that they are bushwhacking through the wilds of the dark continent. And therefore, that family also becomes an outsider to the environment as they ruin expectations of exoticism. Overweight white people can’t be the real Africa, can they?
Well, I will venture to propose the radical opinion that every corner of the African continent is really Africa. If you don’t believe me, check a map. South Africa is not floating off by itself, firmly attached as it is to the southern tip of the continent. In the end, Africa is nothing more than the name given to a large landmass- it is up to us to load the term with meaning, images and expectations. And all too often, from a Western perspective at least, we load this term with the idea of ragged clothed, black-skinned people living in rural villages, following ‘traditional’ lifestyles and dancing around fires or something of the sort. Africa becomes synonymous with an untamed, almost forbidding exoticism, which more pragmatically translates into visions of a lack of industrial infrastructure or materially produced wealth.
While many areas of this continent might superficially fit the mold of these stereotypes (the isolation of northern Mozambique comes to mind, curiously enough), I feel this perspective is hopelessly outdated and plays well to those who like to understand their world in clear black and white terms (no pun intended). Unfortunately, it’s a perspective that is also often mercilessly reinforced by travel guides and destination brochures, which implore one to search out an authentic ‘African’ experience by escaping ‘Westernized’ areas and visiting places which conform to romantic notions of rural poverty. Places, events, peoples and beliefs become artificially categorized as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’, with the former offering authenticity and the latter automatically a product of unnatural forces.
Deeper down, perhaps this understanding of Africa stems from a deeply embedded arrogance found in many us of which is neatly summed up in one understanding of the term globalization, in which foreign cultures are in static, ‘natural’ and passive states ripe for invasion by Western consumerism and industrialization. Africa is wild, poor, superstitious, rural and black, and any deviation from this natural state of affairs is a recent anomaly, an inauthentic cultural graft imposed from the outside. And so an urbanized and serviced landscape of glass and concrete becomes so un-African by its very nature.
As always, however, this understanding relies on the exotic glorification of a past that probably never existed in the first place. The societies and cultures inhabiting the continent of Africa have undergone hundreds of years of flux and change; thanks to cross-cultural contact, changing environmental conditions and, yes, slavery and colonialism, in many ways the essence of these places seems to be cultural collision, confusion, adaptation and change (admittedly not always with pleasant results). The East African coast betrays a fascinating mix between once-local and Arab and Asian influences, later reordered by the presence of European colonialists and finally post-colonial independence projects. South Africa puts on display the curious affairs of a group of European ancestry that tried its best to create an ideal, sheltered little world out of the African landscape, an effort that unfortunately led to the absurd racism of apartheid and all the chaos that entailed. I guess Africa, like pretty much everywhere else in the world, has long been the setting for a thorough blending of ever-changing cultures. Anyone who decries a Western restaurant chain as an invasive presence in Africa in 2007 might want to pick up a history book or two. The idealized ‘pure’ state of affairs whose disappearance they mourn hasn’t existed for centuries, if ever. The very borders of most African states are a simple, solid testament to that.
And so I put forward the proposition that even the whitest, wealthiest corner of South Africa is part and parcel of the real Africa, as equally fascinating in its presence as any remote rural village. Furthermore, the strange and divided history of this southern tip of the continent has had a tremendous impact on the wider region, from popular entertainment to trade patterns and civil wars in neighbouring states. The determination of a small but powerful minority to carve out an insulated world for themselves at all costs is to me one of the central stories of the African continent, and the aftershocks of this can be seen in the furthest reaches of rural Mozambique as much as the strangely discordant world of urban South Africa. This post-apartheid nation might not be representative of many other places on the continent, but I dare say that it is this uniqueness that makes it such a fascinating African place.