"This is Africa"

(a working title)

Mar 23, 2024

**UPDATE as of 2025: Sure enough, “This is Africa” did end up being just the working title. RIP. The new title for the book is: “How the Rhino Lost His Horn: Cautionary Tales from Appalachia to Africa”. But I’ll keep this post up regardless, as T.I.A. will always have a special place in our heart(s). Think of these early posts as the old testament or something.**

From Q1 2024:

I guess another quick word would be good re: the [working] title: “This is Africa”.

This is Africa isn’t just a technically true statement about the setting/contents of the book. There’s a few more layers to it. (Think of it like… an onion.)

One is that it’s a reference to a direct quote from my time down there. I’m not sure if it’s used anywhere else in Africa, but in South Africa it’s often thrown around as a sort of “Oh well. It is what it is”/“Ha. What did you expect?”-esque consolation or rationalization for any frustrating or confusing thing you experience. This sounds pretty imprecise, I’m sure, but that’s because the phrase can be used in a broad array of contexts:

Your commute gets delayed by 45 minutes because there’s a troupe of baboons blocking the road?

Don’t look so surprised; this is Africa.

Have to set down your basket full of groceries while you’re trying to shop for your family because the scheduled four-hour-long power cut just kicked in?

You and everybody else. This is Africa, pal.

I should add that it wasn’t used from a place of bitterness or hostility, but rather a sort of resigned acceptance. It was a reminder to go with the flow, and to recalibrate your expectations as to how long things should take and how well they should work. It’s a way of coming to terms with the hard truth that the world doesn’t revolve around you, which, as it happens, is something we get particularly accustomed to feeling in the US, what with our cult of individualism and our strict adherence to guiding principles like “the customer is always right.” Indeed, our frustrations back home, like getting stuck at the DMV or whatever, are the exception to the general rule. The occasions in which we aren’t treated as lords stick out to us because we’re so used to getting our asses kissed:

When I was down in Florida for University, we had a Chick-Fil-A in the student union on campus. (As you can imagine, they made a killing.) I’d never been to one back up north, so this was my first time seeing their trademark customer service protocol, which might have been endearing if it wasn’t so terrifyingly servile. Basically, every time you even hint at thanking them they have to say “My Pleasure.” You could get them to say it upwards of a dozen times in one interaction if you knew what you were doing.

I think this perfectly captures the standard of “care” (deference) that we, as full-time, professional Consumers, have come to expect. And so this, as much as anything else, can be a culture shock for those of us arriving to a place like South Africa.

The book has loads of examples of my run-ins with this. In some, I come out on top. In others, I walk away soundly beaten. One of the more memorable clashes happens on home soil, of all places…

The South Africans, it turns out, are pretty picky about who’s coming and going, and so anyone wanting to spend more than 90 days there (which was me, when I hoped to return there as a student) was required to get an official visa from their embassy. I’ve heard that many other countries have a streamlined, user-friendly process that you can complete online… but that’s them. Not these guys. I was put through a gauntlet of some of the strangest, most arbitrary requirements ever devised by man. I was forced to risk: radiation poisoning, getting drone-striked by Homeland Security, put on a terrorist/No-Fly list, bankruptcy, and getting my legs broken by the Big Paper conglomerate. (Among many other things.)

All of the above would have made the title apt enough. But it gets better.

Part-way through my first trip, I began to notice that the volunteers had started using the phrase too, even though the things they were doing had nothing to do with where we were, other than the fact that this was the continent in which we happened to be living (albeit for some of us this was only for two or three weeks): get drunk and pass out after hooking up with some random German guy, and wake up the next day so hungover that you have to skip volunteering? Oopsie! Well, This is Africa, am I right? Teehee! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

So I like that angle, too: This is Africa being co-opted by us (white, western European) volunteers at our convenience to justify our own selfishness and hypocrisy. There’s something allegorical there. Even more fitting, on this note, was that several of the volunteers decided the phrase was so relevant to their experience that they decided to get commemorative tattoos at a local parlor. The outcome was… disastrous.

(…Or absolutely perfect, depending on whether or not you appreciate delicious irony.)

So there’s all of that. There might end up being be a subtitle that specifically places me in South Africa/Cape Town. TBD. But I also kind of like that it doesn’t name South Africa specifically. This makes it a reference to the fact that we’re all but taught to think of Africa as both a continent as well as a singular, unified country. (Sort of like a bigger, scarier Australia.)

In our defense, I guess (the defense of those of us from the US, at least - everyone else is on their own), it’s not an unthinkable proposition - in fact, it’s a perfectly reasonable one - that a massive landmass might be divided up into smaller chunks, each with their own distinct boundaries and governments yet still acting under the same bigger umbrella. A… union. A union… of… states, if you will.

It’s not really anything personal: we do the same thing with South America (anything south of Mexico), to an extent. Do we really think there’s a cultural [or physical] difference between someone from Guatemala or Panama? Or between a Bolivian and a Uruguayan? No chance. Y’all may very well have rich, distinct histories, complex relationships, long-standing alliances, rifts, conflicts. That all sounds great - we’re very happy for you. But we got bad news for you: it’s time to shut the fuck up. We all know that, at the end of the day, you folks are all related. For all in tents and porpoises, you’re all the same to us.

And so it goes for the Middle East.

And the “Orient.” (This, specifically, is something I’ll talk about in a later post.)

There may well be 190-something countries on paper, but in practice there are about… a dozen? Two dozen, at most?

If it makes you feel better, Africa, et. al, not even our allies are exempt from this treatment: “Great Britain,” to our eye, counts as one (and a half, tops).

So I like that the title plays on this monolith thing. Plus, with the very self-satisfied, authoritative-sounding “This is ____,” you get that nice colonial expedition feel: “Hear ye: I have returned from my foray into the uncharted lands and have summarized it thus. This tome before you contains everything you need to know about the Dark Continent.” This irony is nice, too, because it becomes abundantly clear within a few pages just how conflicted/confused/frustrated I am when it comes to so many issues discussed in the book: everything is so complex and carries so much inherent contradiction that I find it impossible to settle on very many concrete conclusions, if any at all.

Finally, I like that it gives me the potential to play with “This is America.” I end up drawing a ton of parallels to the west throughout the book. Trying to write a travel book without situating things in a global context wouldn’t have been possible, or “journalistically honest” (…as if I care about that). The romantic notion of discovering/reporting on “uncharted territory” has been rendered obsolete, with very few exceptions. This is down to a few things, including the internet (which gives us instant global communication and unlimited access to international media), plus the fact that you can show up in literally any country you want in under 24 hours.

The upshot is that people and places no longer exist in a vacuum; there’s just no way to pretend that a given place’s reality wasn’t totally shaped by - or even utterly dependent on - a ton of different outside factors. Namely, the West. And I don’t think that’s just my Anglo-centrism talking: for better or [usually] worse, We’ve influenced every last place on earth, whether ideologically or materially or however else.

It could be that everyone’s already agreed on all this and I’m beating up on a straw-man here. If so, forgive the digression.

P.s. It’s pretty annoying, but someone actually snapped this pic of me being greeted by friends and family at the end of my volunteering trip. It’s so embarrassing to be caught off-guard - give me some warning so I can at least put on a smile!

Oh well. I’ve forgiven the paparazzi, and to be honest I’m kind of grateful we have some documentation for posterity:

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