How to Write About Africa (by Binyavanga Wainaina)

---SNIP---

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

----SNIP----

http://www.granta.com/Magazine/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1

World-class takedown!

I started reading the article, then smiled at the words, then laughed, then ended saddened at the truth.

I'm emailing the link to a Korean friend. He is an underground gay, the only kind they have in South Korea, activist, and overground academic "Working Class Culture" theorist, and translator. He will get this one very much.
I have not subscribed to Granta for a few years. My subscription to the TLS is over 2 hundred dollars a year, then the London Review of Books, and some French stuff that I love. Sort of broke at the moment.

Thanks again, it was a treat to read.

McCall Smith was born a Scotsman. Yet he writes with what seems to me to be enormous love and affection for the people of Botswana. I've become somewhat addicted to the novels which describe a world that seems (to me, anyway) to be human, humane, honorable, sad, joyful and extraordinary. His heroine is warm, wise, and very real, as are all the characters around her. A new HBO series has just started which captures the books very well. I have always had the feeling(based on no expertise at all, just a sense of what being human means in the best sense) that these stories give a far more accurate and all embracing picture of Africa than many others. And although the scourges of poverty, violence and AIDs appear in these books, the people in the stories transcend them...I wonder what other DU'ers think.

I haven't read his books, but from what I've heard from southern African friends, he paints a respectful if somewhat excessively "nice" and even primitivist view of Botswana.

I've traveled across the length of Botswana several times, and when I lived in South Africa, I primarily researched and socialized with Tswana people there (there are more Tswana in South Africa than in Botswana) and the closely related Sotho.

Botswana is an amazing country. There's so much to say about it, it's hard to say where to start.

I think the first thing to say is how smart and strategic they've always been as a country. It's sometimes said that Botswana was lucky to not have ethnic conflict because 98% of the people are "Tswana". What that fails to account for is the fact that before the mid 1800s, they didn't consider themselves Tswana, but divided into about a dozen separate groups -- the BaRolong, BaKgatla, BaHurutse, BaKwena and so on. They used to fight each other. Then when they saw the Boers taking over South Africa, they just decided to consider themselves BaTswana (which means, "they are the same.")

During apartheid, they provided refuge for South Africa's ANC, but if South Africa invaded, they simply opened the gates at the border, warned the ANC cadres and let the South Africans fruitlessly roll in, look around, blow up a few houses and leave. So they never experienced the militarization or destruction suffered by other frontline states, especially Mozambique and Angola.

Meanwhile, they struck a deal with DeBeers to develop their diamond fields, and by the mid 1980s they had more foreign exchange than their economic giant neighbor South Africa.

Since there is no tradition of corruption in Botswana (a friend, on leaving once tried to leave behind some Botswana coins that would be useless in South Africa but the Tswana border guards wouldn't let him leave the coins), those funds have been used to build up rural enterprises.

It's a cliche to say about Africa, but the people are indeed very warm and friendly. They have great steak houses (more cattle than people) and the greatest game parks in the continent.

Africa scarcely mentions a comment in the US press unless it is as the author describes.

Of course there are copious amounts of minerals all around Africa so best we hush up and just accept the fact that only we Westerners can properly extract the goodies.

One of the early posters for the Truthiness Encyclopedia created a page about http://www.wikiality.com/Africa">Africa, that basically follows these rules.

Lower 48, China, Europe, Brazil, India, Argentina combined have less land area. It's amazing how many people don't realize this just because of Mercator projection:



Mercator maps we saw in school have trained us to think of Africa as a 'small' continent, whereas it can be seen to be considerably larger than either North or South America in a less distorted map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_projection#Equal-area

(If you think this is a minor issue, bear in mind that the Bay of Pigs invasion lost considerable support within the Kennedy administration when a Marine officer pointed out that Cuba was much larger than Long Island -- a fact obscured by Mercator maps.)

K & R

Middle and working class people going to work, students going to classes, artists, farmers, cattle ranchers, teachers, executives, lawyers, doing their thing, raising families, having great barbecues.