Spare us this 'love' for Africa
by Gitau Warigi (www.nationaudio.com) Publication Date: 02/06/2005
You must have heard the old line from ex-colonials (let's just call them Whites) who live in this country. It's about how they have this mystical tie with the African continent that made them uproot themselves from mother Europe.
Think of the adventurers and coffee-table writers who wander here and start talking gibberish about how they suddenly and madly fell in love with Africa. A Laikipia landowner of Italian ancestry actually wrote a book titled /I Dreamt of Africa/. Or think of the dubious cowboy-wannabe types who pose as big-game hunters and weave tall tales to impressionable, rich visitors from America and Germany about how they live dangerously with lions and buffaloes. Living dangerously, that is, from the relative safety of fortified game lodges and four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers.
Whenever you hear this crap about being in love with Africa, treat it as just that. What these fellows really care about, first of all, are the wild animals they are forever waxing lyrical about. Since the wildlife business is so much intertwined with the economic fortunes of many a local White family, it is no wonder that animals hold such a special place in White fantasies about Africa.
Sure, they also love the open vistas of the country, the huge Ol Pejeta-style ranches, the secluded beach properties they long acquired, and the beauty of hopping to Wilson Airport and flying off with a Cessna to any corner they fancy of this country.
Put simply, it is the lifestyle they are able to maintain here that they mix up intentionally with "love." They know very well that the money to sustain this lifestyle is worth spit if they were to relocate to Europe or North America. The decision to stick it out here is basically economic, pure and simple.
It can be said of these cowboys that they at least keep their "White Mischief" peccadillos to themselves in their Karen or Nanyuki redoubts (even as their favourite pastime is to deride everything African that goes on outside their orbit). What I really can't stand are a breed of foreigners who come under the guise of "foreign correspondents" for overseas media and soon start posing as "experts" and know-it-alls about the continent. This kind of chap has an old pedigree, starting with the American David Lamb, who wrote /The Africans./
It's the kind of book that repeats trite cliches about African inefficiencies, poor time-keeping, and so on. The part that particularly amuses is where Lamb seeks to fathom the matatu phenomenon with the explanation that when an African male gets behind the wheel of a vehicle, something intoxicating gets into his head. Goodness me!
The tenor of this kind of book is an unrelenting gloominess about Africa. Sure, Africa is quite a mess, no question about it, but the Lambs of this world are merely scratching the surface pretending they have something deep to relay. To imagine Africa's problems start and end with poor governance is to be as shallow as the fellow who was sent to report on the United States and concluded that the condition of African-Americans is because they lack a work ethic.
Blaine Harden's /Dispatches from a Dark Continent/ has at least the merit of being quite entertaining, though it is evident that beyond its gripping narration of the S.M. Otieno burial saga, the writer is out of his depth when it comes to comprehending the assorted problems of Nigeria or the phenomenon of Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire.
I can only feel sadness for particular African-American correspondents who are posted to Africa (sometimes by big-league newspapers like the /Washington Post/ and the /New/ /York Times/) then promptly succumb, as if by peer pressure, to that sterile cynicism that goes for Western reporting of Africa.
One such fellow is Keith B. Richburg, who wrote /Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa/. There is a thread of self-pity running through Richburg's book, like he has a bone to pick with the natives for not according him the same status as his White colleagues, or something like that.
The latest in the genre is Howard French's /A Continent for the Taking/. It is a continuation of the familiar doomsday reporting about Africa, where quotes from unnamed Western "diplomats" are supposed to convey everything there is to know about Africa.
It comes as a shock when French launches an assault on Philip Gourevitch, the /New/ /Yorker/ magazine writer who wrote the only really profound book (on the Rwandan genocide) by a Western journalist to emerge from Africa: /We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families/. Sour grapes perhaps, more so because the book won such wide acclaim?
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