Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa

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10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers

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Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa



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Kathryn Mathers



Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa

TRAVEL, HUMANITARIANISM , AND BECOMING AMERICAN IN AFRICA

Copyright © Kathryn Mathers, 2010.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10806–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mathers, Kathryn Frances. Travel, humanitarianism, and becoming American in Africa / Kathryn Mathers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–10806–6 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Relations—Africa. 2. Africa—Relations— United States. 3. Americans—Travel—Africa. 4. Humanitarianism—Political aspects—United States. 5. Group identity—United States, I. Title. DT38.1.M36 2011 303.48 26073—dc22 2010023226 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.


For Liz, Mac, and Anthony Wish you were here!





Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1 Moving Fieldwork: Traveling with Americans to and from Africa

11

2 Vexed Ties: Africa in and out of America

41

3 Back to Nature: Americans’ Great African Adventure

61

4 Through the Glass: Encountering the Unexpected in Africa

89

5 Disrupting the Hyphen: Identity and Belonging in America

117

6 “How Do They Know I am American?” Travel and the Discovery of Home

137

7 Suffering Beauty: How to Save Africa without Changing It

155

Conclusion: Saving Africa: Love in the Time of Oprah

181

Notes

197

Bibliography

201

Index

215



C o n t e n ts




Books make it possible to travel vicariously to all corners of the world, and when we do get to go somewhere, they are important parts of our luggage. This book is about travel and is based on observations of travelers between America, where I now live, and my home, South Africa. The journeys these travelers took were always more about coming home than about South Africa. So I have written a book about the meaning of America and the ways that Africa is used to make sense of it. Such journeys, no matter their outcome, are powerful and intimate moments in people’s lives, and it is amazing to me still that I got to share so many of these moments with so many people. This book is the result of the generosity of spirit and intellect of travelers, young and not so young, to South Africa. I hope that I have represented them in these pages with equal generosity, and I wish that their journeys always take them where they want to go. Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa is based on my dissertation research in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. This work was made possible by some amazing institutional and personal contributions by faculty, staff, and colleagues at a range of Bay Area and South African organizations that supported my research or writing process, especially Nelson Graburn, Michael O’Hare, Donald Moore, Elizabeth Colson, Peta Anne Katz, Marianne Fermé, Martha Saavedra, Thom McClendon, Ned Garrett, Nadya Connolly Williams, Margot Winer, Steve Thewlis, Bob Price, Neil Henry, Rehanna Rossouw, Linnea Sonderlund, Quinton Redcliff, John Parkington, Jeremy Mathers, Rachel Goddard, Te Guerra, and Michael Larice. I was able to begin the process of writing this book during a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria. This was a provoking and provocative intellectual space that reintroduced me to the critical and engaged thinking of South African anthropology and to anthropologists like John Sharpe, Isak Niehaus, and Susan Cook, who engaged productively with my work.



Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts


The final iteration of the book was developed through a number of other writing projects and multiple conversations with some extraordinary women who have read my proposals, edited my work, and questioned my thinking, making me a better writer and a clearer thinker. I am so grateful to Zeynep Gürsel and Beverly Davenport for focusing this book and its argument and oh for those titles; for honing my writing and my argument during the Stanford years, I thank Julia Harrison and Susan Frohlick, Hussein Keshani, Cassandra Herrman, and Deborah Simpson. The final product benefited enormously from the careful reading of all these, as well as of other old and new colleagues and friends: Emily Burrill, Kat Charron, Kathy Coll, Jenny Cool, Robin DeLugan, Adriane Lentz Smith, Christian Lentz, Sima Rombe-Shulman, and Brett Whalen. My collaboration with Laura Hubbard has shaped my work in the best possible way; I hope this book is both tribute and inspiration to her. My beloved husband, Jehangir Malegam, and my maid of honor, Sarah Cervenak, have taken these roles seriously in helping this book be born. Thank you. I dedicate this book to three people who started me on my own intellectual and personal journey that took me from South Africa to American and back again but who died before I finished even my dissertation. Elizabeth Biggs was my friend and my first colleague who showed a very young girl the possibility of paving one’s own intellectual path; Douglas McCready, my grandfather, taught me that doing the right thing meant asking hard questions and making tough choices; and Anthony Mathers, my big brother, gave me through his life and death the courage to stay on this journey. Portions of chapters 1 and 5 were initially published in Tourist Studies c 2008 8(1) April 2008 by SAGE Publications, All rights reserved. Sage Publications http://tou.sagepub.com/content/vol8/issue1/. Portions of chapters 2 and 3 were initially delivered as “The Reverse Gaze: The Impact of the South African Gaze on American Travellers,” published in Visual Culture/Explorations Conference Proceedings, c Department of Visual Arts University of Pretoria Copyright Department of Visual Arts, University of Pretoria, South Africa 2005 (pp. 70–78), ISBN 1–86854–614–4. Portions of chapters 2 and 4 were originally published as “Reimagining Africa: What American Students Learn in South Africa.” c 2004 Tourism Review International 8(2): 127–141 Copyright Cognizant Comm. Corp. www.cognizantcommunication.com.



x

xi

Portions of Chapter 3 were originally published as “Doing Africa: Travelers, Adventurers and American conquest of Africa” with Laura Hubbard. In Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist . . . and Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, ed. Luis A. Vivanco, and Robert J. Gordon. 197–213. Berghan Press, New York and Oxford. c 2006 Luis A. Vivanco and Robert J. Gordon. Copyright







The American presidential campaign of 2008 offered the possibility

for Africa and Africans to occupy an important and central place in American political life. The father of the eventually successful candidate, Barack Obama, was African, specifically Kenyan. But Obama’s campaign and presidency embraced an African American identity and affiliation, paradoxically tethered to America. Obama’s African genealogy was, if not ignored, then carefully decentralized in the construction of his identity. Through this campaign America was powerfully constituted as a place united by shared values and morals that made difference between Americans not so much something to embrace, but simply irrelevant. This was summed up in his first presidential visit to Turkey, where Obama told a press conference in Ankara: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. . . . We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values” (Associated Press, April 6, 2009).1 Significantly, in a nation founded on shared ideals and values, specific genealogies become irrelevant, and with that, Obama’s African history was rendered less important. In contrast, the valedictory self-narrative of Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush constructed him as the U.S. president with the best record in Africa (Spillius 2009). This claim was based on his aid policies, especially his emergency plan for AIDS relief, PEPFAR, and not on his administration’s economic and political record on the continent. Here was the peculiar construction of Africa as the recipient of aid from the United States – rather than as a player in global economic and political forums – that characterized the last decade. It mirrors the primary relationship that developed between American travelers and Africa as Americans attempted to make sense of their experiences and



Introduction

Becoming American in Africa

encounters on the continent in the twenty-first century. At the beginning of this decade I followed the journeys of many Americans to and from southern Africa. As I tried to understand the impact of these travelers’ experiences, their stories became part of a national project playing out in mainstream media that was increasingly representing Africa as the iconic place for Americans to do good. Anthropologists, as James Ferguson has shown, have been wary of treating the larger geopolitical and iconographic idea of Africa seriously as an ethnographic object (Ferguson 2006). Yet an idea of Africa is so present in much of the Western world from the New York Times to People Magazine, from the National Geographic Channel to the Survivor reality television show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, that it should not be ignored simply because such examination is uncomfortable. The discomfort is important as it often comes in part from the representations created by and within the academic traditions of North America and Europe. Similarly, Micaela Di Leonardo has suggested that ideas of America are politically consequential and must be taken seriously despite being unpalatable (Di Leonardo 1998). But while studying America has been a consistent element of American anthropology, taking the United States seriously has not been easy for anthropologists. When they have turned to subjects in the United States who were not Native Americans, the quintessential originary subjects of American anthropology, they often looked for ways to tribalize Americans by finding the exotic in the everyday American life. Constance Perin, for example, chose to travel outside of America in order to disorientate herself before entering the field in suburban America (Perin 1988). This is deeply frustrating to Di Leonardo who describes typical ethnographies of the United States as “slapdash, ahistorical slabs of prose about artificially circumscribed ‘subcultures’ described in isolation from larger politics, economy—yet simultaneously over generalized to claim a ‘key’ to American culture” (Di Leonardo 1998, 66). Such work often missed an opportunity to use ethnography in the United States to provide an “analysis of cultural hegemony and the state in our own society” (Hymes 1972, 59). Taking America seriously required understanding and representing “Americans in motion as well as Americans rooted in particular places” (Moffatt 1992, 222). As with other ways in which people move across the globe, tourism is a complex site of mobility and barriers. It is as interesting a site to study convergence and divergence, participation and resistance to globalization or imperialism, as any other that pays attention to borders and their crossings. The ease of movement



2

3

allowed by tourism is meant to represent a changing planetary society. But tourists can be just as marked when crossing borders as the many people who struggle to cross them (in any real sense) for work, or to escape oppression and war. This research paid close attention to what Anna Tsing terms the spaces of awkward engagement that cause friction between the idea of Africa and the idea of America (Tsing 2005). In Chapter 1, I explore the opportunities and tensions of doing fieldwork across oceans and borders with moving subjects both actual and mediated. In studying the ways that travel between the United States and South Africa situates Americans within a particular nation state, I take up the challenge made by James Ferguson to take seriously the category of Africa. Despite the deep discomfort such an analytical move causes, “[t]he questions raised by considering Africa’s place-inthe-world, then, are indeed ‘global’ ones, but not in the way that most discussions of globalization would imply. Instead, they point to the need for a new framing of discussions of the global; centered less on transnational flows and images of unfettered connection than on the social relations that selectively constitute global society; the statuses and ranks that it comprises; and the relations, rights, and obligations that characterize it” (Ferguson 2006, 23). I first observed these global connections and disconnections by doing what anthropologists do—fieldwork. I began this fieldwork at home in the sense that my first engagement with Americans was in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was living. It then took me home in another sense as I followed American travelers, tourists, and studyabroad students to Cape Town, South Africa, where I grew up and went to college and where most of my family still lives. My fieldwork continued when I returned, along with many of my informants, to northern California. Dwelling in movement is no longer especially unusual among ethnographers, much as it is recognized as the way many people live in the world (Clifford 1997). But what was unusual was the overlap between field site and my graduate school and home site, not unlike what Hortense Powdermaker described when working on Hollywood’s dream factory while engaging with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (Powdermaker 1966). Or perhaps more importantly it was the constant immersion that I experienced in the worlds and lives of Americans and the idea of America. I was frequently conscious of when I was and when I was not in the field. But while I eventually decided that my fieldwork was over sometime in 2002, I found myself continuously tripping over my field. This was not simply because I was living among and with Americans—these



Introduction


encounters continued when I moved back to South Africa for two years. My field—this idea of America and its values articulated through an engagement with an idea about Africa—was becoming a dominant theme in media and popular culture in both the United States and in South Africa. In these post-9/11, war-torn years, Africa was increasingly being presented as a place of both hopelessness and hope: hopelessness for Africans suffering the horror of AIDS and war, and hope for Americans who could find themselves doing good for these Africans. So, Africa continued to be a space for young Americans, with little sense of their relationship to an American identity, to discover a sense of belonging and, through that, a sense of their responsibility. In placing myself on an ethnographic bridge between Cape Town and California, making in the course of my fieldwork the same journey that I made between my own home and away, this research suggests a new way to think about anthropology and ethnography. All ethnographies reflect the journeys of both the ethnographer and those she is studying. Research on travelers, however, and in particular travelers to the ethnographer’s own home, makes these parallels more overt. It is likely, however, that, as anthropologists from the periphery increasingly turn their gaze onto the workings of societies in the West and the North where they are students or academics, rather than returning home to conduct field research, new questions will have to be answered about the relationship between ethnographer and subject. The combination of my own genealogy as a white South African studying Americans and the focus of my research on what happens when people are between home and away is a new space for anthropologists. I am neither halfie nor native anthropologist, and my work and questions concern the interstices of lives that are increasingly caught between multiple locations and multiple identities. The glimmer of the power of this relationship forged through the encounters between Americans and Africans that I observed in 2000 has since become fully articulated by the American media and by the American organizations and institutions working in Africa. Here, there, and everywhere Americans are expressing their sense of good American values through finding ways to help Africa. There is nothing new about Africa being a place for redemption for those with power; it is a space that has all too often inhabited that role, largely for Western colonial powers. Africa has long been an amalgam of dense and complex representations that has “served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its differences from the rest of the world” (Mbembe quoted in Ferguson 2006, 2). Colonial missionaries, along with engineers, offered the



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5

good side of colonialism to Africans. Europeans created the African, as Achille Mbembe suggests, as the other against which to affirm their civilization’s superiority. Americans are thus following well-worn pathways in taking up the burden of global power by going to Africa to save Africans. As the dominance of this trope has grown in popular culture in the United States, Americans don’t even have to go to Africa in order to save it; they just have to buy a T-shirt at The Gap on behalf of (Product) REDTM . Over the course of my research I got to spend a lot of time with Americans who cared about Africa. Certainly they were interested enough in the continent and its people to make the long flight for a holiday or to include a semester or a year abroad there during their college careers. Often they became or were already engaged in a number of organizations working in or on Africa, sometimes in the service of American policy on Africa. When I began my research I was interested primarily in evaluating the power of travel or other encounters with Africa and Africans to change or shift the classic set of images and ideas about the continent and its diverse populations so prevalent in America. For most of the Americans I got to know, Africa was largely understood as an undifferentiated construct encompassing the entire continent even though their particular experience was limited to travel to southern Africa and especially South Africa. After their return, I was struck by the travelers’ tendency to frame their travel as journeys to Africa—with many of the same images as travel to Kenya or Ghana or Senegal still in place. While South Africa and the apartheid struggle holds a particular, even special, place in the history of Americans’ relationship with Africa, the engagement that I observed of Americans with South Africans was understood largely as an encounter with a generic Africa and with generalized Africans. This imagined Africa and its role in the lives of Americans is the one that I, largely, write about in this book. In Chapter 2 I describe how images of Africa and South Africa have been shaped and which ones in particular circulated among the travelers I observed during my research. My goal was to observe the engagement of Americans with Africans on a more complex platform than those offered by the safari or similar tourist venture. I felt, however, that it was important to de-center homecoming or heritage tourism—the journeys to and from Africa and the United States made by the descendents of African slaves in search of a homeland of sorts. Travel along slave routes carries a burden of history and continued disparity between black and white Americans. This history remains an extremely important part of America’s relationship with Africa, and it is hard to imagine how



Introduction


the presence of descendents of Africans within the American national ecumene will not always inform and affect how the United States engages with the continent. South Africa, therefore, does not resonate quite as powerfully as West Africa does in the hearts and histories of black Americans and other Americans who strive to understand or come to terms with the United States’ history of slavery. Still, travel to southern Africa can demand more of an engagement with contemporary political and social sites than, for example, a typical East African adventure that is almost entirely circumscribed by the activities of game viewing, ethnic tourism, and possibly rural development. I hoped that this would open up the possibility for a diverse range of encounters between travelers and locals, especially as South Africa does have a shared political history of struggle with Americans who were engaged with the anti-apartheid movement. These were some of the reasons why I chose to focus on American travel to southern Africa, besides my own relationship and interest in my home country. What I observed was unexpected. In asking the question about how travel reframes ideas about Africa, I forgot to consider what idea of Africa Americans had before embarking on their journeys. I cannot, in all honesty, identify any evidence that Americans returned from South Africa with a genuinely informed understanding of the country’s histories, social politics, cultures, or geopolitical relations with other African nations and the so-called first world. But they did learn something about Africa, and what ended up being especially interesting to me was the characteristics of the Africa that they discovered. The transformational role of travel—indeed it is almost demanded of all international travel, that it change your life—is well known, and Africa is exactly the destination where travelers expect to experience the space to find themselves. But these well-worn personal journeys of discovery, though consistently affirmed for the travelers I observed, do not entirely describe their journeys. Travel was a much more challenging experience for them. Their experiences were embodied, contradictory, and seldom entirely under their control. While they might have sought to recreate the images that they associated with Africa on their own journeys and to capture them like so many tourists before them in photographs and other souvenirs, this was not always possible. The focus on the gaze in literatures on travel and tourism foregrounds how the traveler controls the people and terrain through which she travels, leaving the impact of travel on the traveler underengaged. This lack of interest in the day-to-day experience of travel, which along with looking includes eating, walking, sleeping (or not), dancing, talking, searching (often for toilets), being lost, feeling



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confused, being angry, experiencing fear and frustration, and, perhaps most important, being gazed upon, often leads to easy assumptions about how travel changes the traveler, assumptions that this book challenges. In chapters 3 and 4 I explore the experiences of American travelers to southern Africa and consider how their complexity and difficulty begs another kind of conversation not often seen in travel literature and theory. I also begin to show the ways that American travelers have to negotiate how they are perceived while away and what that means for their relationship to home. What was most interesting was not that Americans found themselves in Africa, but rather what kind of self was found. This self was an American self, and this book ended up being a story about what happens to Africa—imagined and ultimately actual—when Americans discover their American identity and a sense of national belonging in Africa. Chapter 5 tells the detailed stories of three young travelers’ struggle with returning from South Africa to face a new understanding of what it means to be American. This story is broadened in Chapter 6 to show how American travelers learn to see their own identities differently and especially how they come face to face with America as a global power. When Americans went to southern Africa in 2000 they discovered themselves as Americans, and with that, the knowledge that Africa needed their help. Many Americans might not have been disturbed to be recognized as Americans by South Africans, but in the early days of the twenty-first century young Americans had grown up in a country where the idea of a national American identity was outmoded. These young Americans were, and to some degree remain, identified by their differences and believed that the spirit of being American rests on the very lack of common national characteristics. These are Americans who grew up with or have embraced the salad bowl idea of what it means to be American, so for them a hyphen was always a part of how they identified themselves. In Africa they discovered the American part of themselves and, through that, realized that America was its own separate nation. But even after visiting southern Africa, the continent remained, was cemented even, as a homogenous space of helpless people who just needed a little push from a well-meaning American. This was a burdensome discovery, even before September 11, 2001. Realizing their Americanness in Africa also meant becoming aware of their responsibilities as citizens of a powerful nation, a responsibility that had until then seemed much removed from their lives. There was a particular serendipity to making this discovery of their global responsibility in Africa. In the aftermath of 9/11 a place to



Introduction


do good was especially in demand, as the United States encountered an outside world that frequently and openly declared what was wrong with them. Africa appeared as the perfect place to save, and for Americans who had been to or were in Africa it was all right there, waiting for them. Chapter 7 describes how encounters between Africa and America in everyday life as well as in popular culture create Africa as a space for Americans to discover ways to rehabilitate the image of the United States. By 2009, Africa, much as it was in earlier imperial moments, stood front and center in the United States as the place that required saving, and Americans were even more positioned as the people who needed to do it. This desire to save Africa is, however, not so much founded on the support or establishment of empire as on the embracing of those very values that President Obama says bind Americans as citizens of a nation. In what has become known as his “race speech” in March 2008, Obama uses his history as the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas to affirm this idea of an America united not by any particular identity but by a set of core values and desires: I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren. This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story . . . . It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.2

His is clearly not a story removed from Africa and the continent or its contribution to the American population. In this speech Obama describes his father as a black man from Kenya and his mother as a white woman from Kansas, as if Kenya and Kansas were interchangeable, identical spaces. Obama thus underlines how his election campaign de-emphasized his genealogy as the son of an African immigrant in order to emphasize his everyman American identity as an African American with a deep history of overcoming challenges common to many Americans. This made it possible for his campaign and his presidency to be about the common ideals that unite Americans and not the genealogies that separate them. He emphasized this in his victory speech on November 4, 2008: “This is our Victory . . . tonight



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we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”3 While this is not a unique or particularly new narrative about America, its centrality is especially important at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As Europe struggles with restructuring its national identities in the face of increasing diversity, Americans embrace the belief that the very meaning of being American is rooted in this diversity, and has always been. The fieldwork I conducted between 1999 and 2002 suggests ways to understand the success of this kind of call to a shared set of values and a proud Americanness. It became a story about how Americans needed to rediscover their Americanness, post multiculturalism and post 9/11. More than ever they had to find their sense of Americanness, which had been lost or denied. America had to become about values and ethics as we see in the Obama election, but anticipated by fieldwork and the experiences of young Americans in southern Africa at the turn of the millennium. What I am trying to do here is show how the young people I followed to Africa were learning how to be the kind of Americans who elected Barack Obama. Or at the very least they showed the possibility for a presidential campaign based on an American identity made in hope.



Introduction




1

M ov i n g F i e l d w o r k : T r av e l i n g w i t h A m e r i c a n s to a n d f ro m Africa

This is a study of a relationship, an encounter between two spaces,

two groups of extremely diverse people, two ideas—America and Africa. Strictly speaking, this book is not an ethnography. I do not claim to study an American ethnos. While I draw on the experiences of a small group of Americans who traveled to South Africa, my focus is on how an imagined and encountered “Africa” is mobilized to support certain ideas about America and being American. It is, however, important to me that I did the research on which this book is based as an anthropologist. For twenty months between 1999 and 2002 I did fieldwork with travelers from California and elsewhere in the United States who went to South Africa and especially Cape Town as vacationers, political tourists, or study-abroad students. My goal was to develop long-term ethnographic relationships with travelers rather than defining my subjects by their presence at a particular place and at a particular time, when they would be defined purely by their identity as tourists/travelers. Most of the Americans, whose journeys I use here to think about how American values are shaped were part of a generation that Farai Chideya calls “the face of the new America” (Chideya 2000, 15) and “the core of a massive transition” (Chideya 2000, 20). They were part of an age group that looks to every experience as an opportunity to define their identities and core values but were lucky enough to do their searching in southern Africa. In having this experience in Africa they became part of a long history of America’s search for self in Africa



Chapter


(Kaplan 1993). Their journeys also became part of a wider American landscape, as much as it is possible for a specific story to be a general one, through the medium of popular culture. While I have been careful to position my interpretations within a specific historical and political moment in the United States, I have claimed the luxury of focusing on broad categories and cannot tell the detailed particular stories of the multitude of Americans represented in some way in this study. I hope that I can show how these ideas about Americanness are being expressed in multiple ways by the Americans I observed and through American popular as well as political cultures. My fieldwork was specifically defined by experiences outside of everyday life. Yet it shows that in doing research as much as possible with travelers as they travel, it is possible to understand the field of relations that are of significance to the everyday life of young and well-to-do Americans (McCabe 2002). Indeed in a world increasingly characterized by the movement in space of objects and of people, the understanding of contemporary society requires thinking about tourists and other travelers (Dann, Kristian, and Jacobsen 2002). Anthropology has moved over the course of this century from a deep discomfort with hybridity to making the hybrid/border crosser the ideal subject—in fact the ideal global citizen. Ann Stoler has shown how encounters at the frontiers of empire could “confound or confirm the structures of governance and the categories of rule” (Stoler 2001, 833). Frontiers are places where ideology and hegemony clash and where culture is exchanged along with commodities (and bodies) (Comaroff 1985, Ortiz 1995, Pratt 1992). Contemporary travel across borders for leisure or study can also set up relationships with people elsewhere that are important in the traveler’s construction of home. The ability to cross borders as well as to move within the United States is a vital aspect of the social life of Americans as it entrenches itself in their identity and personhood, regardless of their reason for travel. As with studies of colonial encounters, an ethnography of tourists can and must be so much more than the study of a leisure industry or of a temporary moment in time and space for a group of privileged global citizens. Tourism, however, has generally been a stepchild to the theories that have circulated around borderlands as spaces where ideas of culture and geography are sufficiently disturbed so that hybridity is able to develop and identities can be constructed or resisted (Anzaldúa 1987, Rosaldo 1993). Despite the fact that a crucial question for contemporary practices of ethnography is how to know about today’s mobile subjects, it remains a challenge to find good ethnographies of the travel



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experience from the traveler’s point of view (Graburn 2002). There is a tendency to leave tourists on the other side of the velvet rope of ethnography that taps into what it means to live in a world of shifting borders and, apparently, infinite choices of identities. This move dismisses tourists as uninteresting mobile subjects in the interests of studying refugees, exiles, and forced migrants—in other words, people who have been dispossessed not only of their land but also of their geographically defined identities or communities. Travel for tourism can also mark these borders that make nations and the enclosures that make particular and territorialized identities visible. If both the subjects and objects of ethnography are constituted by the process by which identities are negotiated relationally in particular historical contexts, as James Clifford suggests, then tourists are no less interesting simply because their reasons for crossing borders are frivolous (Clifford 1997). But while theory on tourists is becoming increasingly sophisticated—building on the work of Urry, MacCannell, and Cohen—there remains insufficient focus on the experiences of travelers themselves (Cohen 1979, Graburn 2001, Lengkeek 2001, MacCannell 1999, Parrinello 2001, Urry 1990). The problem with much of this literature is the slippage between the tourist as metaphor and the tourist as a person who travels. Two elements of a traveler’s journey, in particular, remain poorly researched. One, as long as the traveler is made to symbolize some aspect of the contemporary world, travelers themselves, their identities, their experiences while traveling and at home, their own constructions of the impact of travel on their lives, their differences based on gender, class, ethnicity, race, etcetera, remain under studied. Two, the focus on the contact zone, the in-between spaces in which travel encounters occur, has led researchers to overlook the questions about the everyday lives of people who sometimes are travelers. This book is about the strands that connect people to particular places and to particular identities and the way those strands are made visible by stretching them across nations and continents. I do not assume a relationship between home and abroad, here and there. Rather I make my site of study the ways the strands that link home and away are forged, mobilized, negotiated, accepted, or rejected (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As with many ethnographic, as well as travel, encounters, the process that defined my ultimate sites of research was a series of serendipitous events and connections. I feel that my fieldwork began in August 1997 with my arrival in Berkeley from South Africa to begin my Ph.D. in the department of anthropology. This was a time of intense learning of a different language and



M ov i n g F i e l d w o r k


different codes of interaction, which took place in my own classes, in the classrooms where I was a teaching assistant, and in my social and sporting life. While I was learning about Americans in my everyday life, it was never obvious how I might study the impact on Americans of travel to my own home. The ephemeral character of anyone’s time as a traveler and my desire to immerse myself in their experience posed a particular set of challenges. I set out on many paths in search of a site, including working with vacationers, political tourists, study-abroad students, and volunteer organizations. Some of these proved fruitful in terms of long-term research, while others contributed to developing my understanding of the framing of travel to southern Africa that shapes travelers’ expectations and experiences abroad. My site eventually came about from the interplay of the many paths that I took in search of my “field” and required that I incorporate popular culture and media representations of Africa in America and of the meaning of travel to Africa for Americans. Malcolm Crick has suggested that “tourists are creatures surrounded by such negative emotional forces that anthropologists have failed to see that they may be good to think with” (Crick 1985, 78). Anthropologists—as other—have generally depended on inhabiting the liminal spaces on the outskirts of their subjects’ lives in order to gain insight into the ways that social actors understand their own positions and the likely consequences of particular courses of action. The field was never just there, however, but laboriously constructed in relation to home. The less a place was like home, the more it qualified as field. But now that anthropologists as well as their subjects live in the global ecumene, it has become almost impossible to maintain an outsider-insider distinction (Amit 2000, Hannerz 1996, Olwig and Hastrup 1997). Travel for ethnographers, which used to mark the boundary between home and away, has been undone by the realization that home is not more static than the field and that journeys are taken on multiple levels by an ethnographer. Tourists, as this book describes, have the odd advantage of performing Americanness and the meaning of being American in ways that cannot always happen or appear so clearly amid the complex, negotiated, and challenged everyday life lived in the United States. An ethnography that takes tourists seriously is one that does not seek to find a set of subjects that are fixed as tourists. Tourists are subjects in transition—not only do they become tourists but they also stop being tourists and are, therefore, able to look back at this moment of transition and reflect on who they were before, in that moment and afterward.



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The differences between ethnographer and subject are further broken down when the anthropologist focuses on people, who for reasons of exile, marginalized (subcultural) identities, and tourism, live their lives in border zones. Ethnographers, travelers, and tourists are all implicated in constructing self and other. Travelers, much like ethnographers, construct their travel experiences in relation to home (Harrison 2003). Studying American tourists, then, can illuminate the extent to which anthropologists and their subjects inhabit the same spaces. These tensions were apparent at multiple points in my research. Val, April, and Scott, vacationers with whom I worked from the end of 1999, all seemed quite comfortable with the idea of being researched and, in fact, seemed to gain some prestige from this interaction. When I met them on their return from southern Africa they thought it was funny that they had met another graduate student from Berkeley doing fieldwork in Zimbabwe and who recognized them as part of my project. They remained deeply intrigued by the idea of being written about. The blurring between ethnographer and tourist also occurs as a result of the tourists’ own awareness of the possibilities of being a kind of anthropologist—this is in part why people travel. As Mwenda Ntarangwi suggests, “It is clear that although ethnography, tourism, and colonialism occurred (and occur) at different historical moments all arose (and arise) from the same social formation and that the ethnographer’s motivation to study the other may not be different from the tourist’s interest to see the ‘other’ ” (Ntarangwi 2000, 57). Anthropologists have always been imagined and classified by their subjects (Bowen 1956). This reverse gaze becomes heightened when tourists are the objects of ethnographic research. Tourists are sophisticated, informed about anthropology, and therefore have their own sense of what their cooperation means. When I first arrived in Cape Town, I struggled to gain entry into the circle of study-abroad students that I had met prior to leaving Berkeley. The students, many of whom had taken anthropology courses at college, were very suspicious of the motivations of an anthropologist in their midst. Their understanding of anthropology was of a discipline interested exclusively in the personal, the hidden, and the private. In fact they thought anthropologists only wanted to talk about sex! It wasn’t until I had done a few interviews that my interests were established and students who had been interviewed encouraged others to set up appointments with me. Although these students were objects of my research, they ensured through their own manipulation of what that meant that they





remained instrumental in how I might interact with them. Their responses soon developed into a bit of a game as when, at a braai (South African BBQ) with a larger group of American study-abroad students, one of the students I was working with, Leah, said to watch out, because they were “research rats.” At another party the group I was traveling with warned their visitors that they had better watch what they were saying since there was an anthropologist in the room and she might write everything down. By the end of our time together in South Africa, though, many also expressed a sense of how having an anthropologist as part of their group had enhanced their own experiences of South Africa and had allowed them a special access to understanding the country, and their responses to it. In this project the lines between home and away, ethnographer and tourist, were especially blurred for me. The journey that I was studying was the opposite of the journey that I had taken from my home in South Africa to graduate school in California. I am a white South African woman who grew up in Cape Town and attended the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the late 1980s, where I studied archaeology, African studies, and sociology and participated in the anti-apartheid organization the End Conscription Campaign. Like the travelers I followed to Cape Town, I also discovered something about my relationship to home when I traveled to the United States. As a white South African I had long been aware of having a particularly constructed and privileged identity and did not expect to be seen in the same way by everybody either at home or while traveling. I did believe, however, that I had a legitimate claim to an African identity. Although this is contested and debated by many South Africans, it is not denied me outright on the basis of my whiteness. My family has a long history in South Africa; my mother is a descendent of a French Huguenot family that arrived in the Cape in the eighteenth century. I had grown up in a country where we were all labeled and where access to public spaces was restricted even though my access was privileged. I had been an anti-apartheid activist, and before going to graduate school in California I worked on projects that I believed were important in rebuilding South Africa, including voter education and adult basic education. This combination of genealogy, career, and personal choices made me feel like a South African and an African. But this was not how I was perceived in California or by fellow graduate students. For example, at one event hosted by the Center for African Studies at Berkeley I was chatting to a history graduate student, a white American woman, mostly about her project on South African labor, when she introduced me to a student in architectural



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history. This black American student had been doing work on the architecture of domestic labor in South African households. I had been working earlier that year with a South African anthropologist who was also doing oral histories with domestic workers in Pretoria and so was interested in this project and thought we could have a good conversation about it. But I was introduced to the other graduate student in terms only of what she could tell me about South Africa. My own experience in South Africa was elided either because it hadn’t been done in the context of an American graduate training or because I was white. Other interactions, especially at a conference on images of Africa where I was silenced because, as one participant said, I was a “Caucasoid,” though very extreme, pointed to the latter explanation. Ultimately it was among other Africans in America where I felt most at home and where my identity was either not questioned or accepted. In this way my experiences traveling between South Africa and California began my journey toward understanding the way that travel, by shifting the context in which the traveler lives, forefronts certain ways of being and of relating to home and away. Although as an anthropologist in the United States my role was to gaze on Americans, it was their gazing back at me that profoundly shifted my own sense of self. Anthropologists have worked hard at othering the tourist, in part because of the continuum and even equity between tourist and ethnographer, so apparent in my own work (Galani-Moutafi 2000). If all of us can be tourists and tourism and ethnography look like the same thing, does doing ethnography of tourists mean that it is impossible to bring the kind of objectivity ethnography has claimed through studying an other (Ortner 1991)? Or does it, in fact, mean that it is possible to claim a kind of special knowledge available to the so-called native anthropologist (Messerschmidt 1981)? Do ethnographers of tourists face the same dilemma that Les Back observed as an Englishman studying English youth: “Here I was represented as a stricken soul caught between anthropological selfhood and native otherness” (Back 1996, 23)? A discipline that bases its method on the split between self and other is clearly going to struggle to construct productive ethnographic projects on tourists, a category that even anthropologists inhabit once in a while. As with the dilemma faced by what Lila Abu-Lughod calls being a halfie-anthropologist, studying tourists means studying an other that is simultaneously constructed as self (Abu-Lughod 1992, 140). But as Back suggests, such simultaneity does not have to constitute a homogenizing discourse or exclude the possibility of a complex





and multiple set of relationships between ethnographer and tourist (Back 1996). In fact, in taking tourists seriously this project underscores one fundamental aspect of ethnographies of tourists that not only marks such work as different from the challenges of an increasing blurring between ethnographer and any subject, but also underscores the value of bringing tourists, like Cinderella, to the ball. Tourists are subjects in transition; they inhabit the self that is a tourist only briefly and are always on a road from somewhere to somewhere else. More importantly, they return but not always, as this project shows, to the same places they started. Here lies the potential of being both an anthropologist of tourists and of America. An ethnography of American travelers in Africa can be an especially powerful tool for studying global connections. Much as the remaining threads of state power and enclosure impact even the most persistent of border crossers, so tourists when they are back home continue to inhabit relatively bounded cultural, social, political, and geographic spaces. The way ideas about the tourist circulate in opposition to and alongside other border crossers can be fruitful in exploring citizenship, identity, and experiences of belonging in a world of supposedly porous boundaries (Mathers 2008). Studying travelers, even leisure travelers, offers the anthropologist a rich field to study the implications of a life lived at specific points constituted not only in space but in time, through which a traveler sometimes passes and to which she sometimes returns. Like the study of African global connections evoked by James Ferguson, studying tourists as they travel abroad and home again has the capacity to show that “the ‘global’ does not ‘flow,’ thereby connecting and watering contiguous spaces; it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved points in the network while excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie between the points” (Ferguson 2006, 47). Travel, even by privileged subjects such as young American college students, does not make it possible for them to flow through the space between the United States and South Africa. People, like goods, technologies, and currencies, leapfrog the oceans to appear in South Africa very much representative of the enclaved point left behind. Americans are not just part of a global flow, or flowering for that matter, but they also inhabit specific points in a wider network. Their experiences as tourists in South Africa show the extent to which identity is fixed by a particular national history and by an equally long history of class and racial interactions within those national boundaries. Awkward as it may feel to study tourists—given how much they resemble ethnographers and how unfixed their actual subjectivity as



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tourists is—paying attention to this particular identity made it possible to see nation as articulated with race, class, and gender. Paying attention to the meaning of home for American tourists in particular, however, raises the challenges of doing ethnography not only of mobile subjects but of Americans, both field sites that have tested the limits of ethnographic method (Alvarez 1995, Burawoy 2000, Ginsburg 2006, Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Anthropologists have, in fact, increasingly turned to the United States for research sites as a response to the crisis of representation in the discipline and in search of ways for ethnography to write against the creation of alterity (Appadurai 1996, Asad 1973, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Fox 1991, Jorgensen and Truzzi 1974). But this new anthropology of the 1980s was often reduced to a textual analysis of being there—not here—excising politics and economics, while producing an essentializing discourse on identity politics that led to work on the United States becoming devalued in the academy (Di Leonardo 1998). The journeys that I ultimately observed took place in a complex and media-saturated world in both America and South Africa, and travelers often had particular images from childhood or their parents or their studies that prompted their interest in going to southern Africa. Anthropology has taken representations and especially their roles in how people imagine themselves seriously since the cultural critique of the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s (Appadurai 1996, Asad 1973, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Fox 1991, Hymes 1972). The representations that the travelers I studied carried with them on their journeys defined the practices through which they interpreted their experiences and encounters abroad. When they returned, they came back to an America that felt different to them. It was also a space that itself was changing, and so they found themselves, if only through their brief stay in South Africa, part of a broader conversation about the role of Americans in the world, especially in Africa, and about what it meant to be American, that extended far beyond their own small group. This conversation was just beginning when I was interviewing travelers after they returned home from South Africa in 2000, but it began to swell over the course of writing my dissertation and then developing this book. This particular relationship between Africa and Americans became pervasive as entertainment media and celebrities increasingly began to speak as if for the travelers I had observed. Over the first decade of the twenty-first millennium, the most unexpected figures, from the celebrity heiress and media icon Paris Hilton, who wanted to go save gorillas in Rwanda, to Amanda on MTV’s Super Sweet 16 Exiled,1 were





embodying the feelings and desires of travelers and other Americans who wanted to care about Africa and saw this engagement with the continent and its problems as a way to find the meaning of being American. I take popular culture, especially the media on Africa in the United States that was increasingly permeating American lives, as a site of study because of the ways that media makes “society imaginable and intelligible to itself” (Mazzarella 2004, 346). This was especially important in a study that became about the ways that identities are formed in global spaces and encounters across, and at, borders. Television shows and celebrities brought the experiences of a small group of mostly young Americans into a widely felt set of experiences. While celebrity journeys are highly mediated—shaped by tabloids, news media, television, and film—the analysis of celebrity and fame culture shows that they are inseparable from social life (Gamson 1994, Holmes and Redmond 2006, Mazzarella 2004). It was therefore impossible to understand the impact of their journeys only through the lives of the travelers I worked with. I needed to pay attention to the voices beyond them and to take seriously the way popular culture in various media forms was walking alongside their stories, possibly shaping them, but more importantly reflecting them, echoing them, and taking their narratives to a wider audience in the United States. In the same way that I use travel journals, class projects, and the photographs the travelers took while they were in South Africa, I use the site of popular culture as another site where Americans were trying to make sense of Africa and of America’s place in the world. In paying attention to the stories of celebrity engagement in Africa, my intention is not to critically analyze what makes the celebrity or how media creates representations. Rather, I present these journeys as another site of travel and experience, one as real as those that I was personally able to follow. I do this because I believe that such travelers are equally struggling to find a way to express and represent a complex set of relationships between being American and Africa as those expressed by other travelers’ journals and writing and conversation. While popular and mediated cultural forms from outside the global North and West are more often used to argue, as Brian Larkin shows, how “the West and non-West have mutually constituted each other in uneven but nevertheless two-sided process,” here I use American popular culture to show how American travelers are constituted through uneven encounters in southern Africa (Larkin 2004, 92). I was helped by the permeation of American public spaces with media images of travelers to Africa and, especially, the discovery of American selves in Africa.



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As the travelers I followed to South Africa in 2000 returned home and began negotiating the new spaces of their identities and responsibilities there, America as a nation was forced by the tragedies of September 11, 2001, to question its role in the world. Americans soon seemed to be looking to Africa as a space to find what was good and true about American values and practices. By 2009, when I was completing this book, you could turn on your television, browse the magazine rack at any bookstore, or go to the movies, and a peculiarly intense relationship between America and Africa was starkly revealed. Indeed, Americans seemed to have embarked on a love affair with Africa (Mathers and Hubbard 2006). This love affair has played out on the cover of magazines from Vanity Fair to People and on television shows that would generally have no business in Africa, such as American Idol. Even at the multiplex in 2005, for example, The Constant Gardener and Sahara vied to be the best combination of action adventure and African moral tale on screen, only to be upstaged in 2006 by Blood Diamond. While Madonna and Angelina Jolie famously adopted African babies from Malawi and Ethiopia, respectively, or gave birth to babies in Africa, as Jolie did in Namibia, students on American college campuses starved for Darfur, and Oprah sent the O Ambassadors to Kenya to build a school and herself funded a school for girls in South Africa. Meanwhile, Bono told Americans that they do really care about Africa and they can make sure that an HIV-positive African somewhere will get antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) just by buying a (RED)TM T-shirt at The Gap. At the same time, Gwyneth Paltrow declared “I am African” to support Alicia Keys’ Keep a Child Alive campaign.2 Alongside these images of celebrity giving, however, there circulated potent and often satirical critiques of these forms of aid in Africa. An image of an African woman declared “I am Gwyneth Paltrow” on the celebrity blogs (Mohney 2006); cable television news shows such as Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, on the cable network Comedy Central, mocked the involvement of celebrities in poverty relief forums; and the title character of the film Brüno rather tastelessly brought an African baby to America in a box. Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak suggest that these forms of parody are so hyper-identified with the dominant political language and representations because these are so powerful that opposition becomes unspeakable (Boyer and Yurchak 2010). When critiquing or resisting the good intentions of Americans wanting to help Africans, it does seem that such parody becomes the only way to expose the problematic assumptions and political ideals and relationships that underlie their stories about doing good. This did mean,





though, that there was a conversation happening in America about the problematic ways that celebrities were trying to “save Africa” that helped both undermine and support the ways in which American travelers were making sense of their own desires to help Africa. The circulation of images of iconic American figures traveling to and helping Africa provided “a cultural matrix through which everyday economic, social, familial, and personal insecurities [could] be articulated” by young Americans, both those who have taken similar journeys and those who have not (Larkin 2004, 107). By integrating this matrix into my research and writing process, I am attempting “to attend to the places of mediation, the places at which we come to be who we are through the detour of something alien to ourselves, the places at which we recognize that difference is at once constitutive of social reproduction and its most intimate enemy” (Mazzarella 2004, 356). In this sense the media and mediated personalities that I write about alongside writing about particular American travelers to Africa help to make the world imaginable to me and to my informants. Taking popular culture and media seriously as a site of study also helps to position this work in the present while never assuming a static cultural narrative. The media I use here marks the chronological boundaries of this story about Americans finding themselves and their values in Africa more specifically than many other measuring sticks. Laura Hubbard’s work on reality television and Zambian youths’ futures shows how such an ethnographic move can help to deny an ethnographic present (Hubbard 2007). With her I ask, what is an anthropologist to do when Jon Stewart on The Daily Show or Zine Magubane on the The Zeleza Post Blog makes my argument for me? When this happens in the moment of writing and analysis, their commentaries are perforce circulating long before anything I write will be read. As long as we try to write about ideas and identities while those ideas and identities are debated through Facebook groups and similar forums, “[t]he problems of an anthropology of cultural circulation get entangled in the temporal lag between emergence and the time-space of ethnography, and the anthropologist gets ‘caught’ in a web of multiple observers” (Hubbard 2007, xiii). My question becomes, then, why should an anthropologist write what is front and center on entertainment television two years, two months, two weeks before her book is published? This book, and the work of anthropology, is to give those commentaries a past and a future as well as a present. The detailed ethnographic moments describing encounters between American travelers and their expectations of Africa, and their continued engagement with home and away



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just as it leads them to find an understanding of what it means to be American, have to be told alongside the simultaneous but fleeting mediated representations of just these encounters. This was the only way for me to pull their stories into the future and show them as shaping a broader and continuing set of relationships between Americans and Africa. The rest of this chapter will introduce and put into context the people and sites that most shaped this project and show how I came to frame my project in practice and theory during the research and writing of this book. Such snippets of information will not do justice to the personalities, histories, passions, and interests of the individuals whose lives became so much part of my research. What they have in common, of course, is that they traveled to South Africa from the United States and agreed to share the impact of this experience with me. I hope that in the next chapters their complex and diverse experiences in South Africa make them more real. Africa has never been high on Americans’ list of overseas destinations, but in 1999/2000 interest was growing in Africa, as was reflected in increasing coverage in local and national newspapers of stories on African tourism, including a San Francisco Examiner Magazine feature by Amanda Jones, “Africa, Hemingway Style” (March 14, 1999), a New York Times Travel Section special that included articles by Constance Rogers on Madagascar as a living natural history museum and Lynn Sherr on visiting gorillas in Uganda (February 21, 1999), and an article by Rachel Swarns in which she promised that American travelers would lose track of the centuries in Namibia (New York Times, April 2, 2000). South Africa was an especially intriguing destination because of its well-known political history. But travel stories by Malabar Hornblower encouraged Americans to consider spending time at South African luxury game parks (New York Times, February 21, 1999), while Todd Pitock in the San Francisco Examiner extolled the joys of the Cape Town wine routes (November 28, 1999). On the other side of the tourism spectrum, Ian Fisher reported on the growing tourism industry to Soweto—most famous for images on American television screens of scenes of the clashes between anti-apartheid activists and the armed forces of the apartheid government in 1976—now a place where tourists can spend the night (New York Times, September 24, 1999). The ITA Office of Travel and Tourism Industries (OTTI) reported that in 2000 26,853,000 Americans (about 9.5% of the population) traveled abroad by airplane, excluding American travel abroad via land to destinations such as Canada and Mexico.3 Most were flying for





leisure (78.5%) rather than for business. Most leisure travelers traveled alone (33%) or with a spouse (35%). Only 2 percent said they were traveling for study or research. Sixty-one percent of international flyers were male, 39 percent female. The average age of men was forty-six, and of women traveling forty-three years. Most were in professional/technical (38%) or manager/executive (31%) occupations. Only 6 percent were students. The vast majority of international flyers in 2000 were repeat travelers (94%), that is, only 6 percent were traveling overseas for the first time. The majority flew from the Middle Atlantic States (25%), especially New York (15%) and New York City (11%), and the Pacific States (21%), especially California (18%). Most travelers had been to Europe (50%), Asia (18%), and the Caribbean (14%). Only 2 percent, or 537,060, travelers were returning from Africa, but there is no breakdown for specific country destinations. In 2001, according to statistics available from South African Tourism or Satour, as it was still called then, and available on their website, 5,787,368, people legally crossed South Africa’s borders. The majority, 4,134,141, were from the rest of Africa and are most likely repeat entries coming to work in South Africa from countries like Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. This makes a total of 1,653,227 travelers arriving in South Africa from outside Africa. The majority (61%) of these came from European countries, especially Germany and the United Kingdom. The next largest group of arrivals was from the United States (9.5 %, or 174,728 arrivals). About 60 percent of travelers arriving by air from the United States came to South Africa on holiday. More than 40 percent of these were traveling on a packaged tour, while about 30 percent were traveling independently. Around 50 percent of American travelers were between the age of twenty-five and forty-four; about 14 percent were between eighteen and twenty-four years old. This is slightly more than the proportion of eighteen- to twenty-four-years olds from the rest of the world. Most Americans are first-time visitors (65%), which is substantially more than the average for all international first-time visitors to South Africa (46%). These statistics reflect that while Americans are not frequent world travelers or as likely as Europeans to go to southern Africa, South Africa is a relatively popular destination for young Americans traveling abroad for the first time.

Vacationers On November 6, 1999, I went to a party for a group of tourists planning a trip to southern Africa over Christmas and New Year. I had been introduced to them through a friend of a friend in the department of 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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anthropology after I put the word out that I was looking for travelers to interview. This group included Val, April, and Scott who became long-term contacts. They were all young professionals, mostly architects, planning a road trip through South Africa and Zimbabwe, where they were joining a friend. This first party was an opportunity for planning the trip as well as to view the slides of a mutual friend who had previously visited Africa. I arrived armed with questionnaires and consent forms and pencils and a sense of being an invader. As has been my experience with other research projects, this group surprised me with their openness and acceptance of what I was doing. They were genuinely interested in my research and very intrigued at being the subjects of anthropological research. They were preparing for their trip through reading guides, especially Lonely Planet, and a few members of the group had read James Mitchener’s novel The Covenant, which tells a particularly colorful history of South Africa beginning in the African Stone Age. They had many concerns about health issues, especially about water and medical care and the dangers of malaria. This was my first introduction to the American creation of Africa as a place full of disease or of danger from microbes rather than from political forces. We all watched a slide show of a friend’s trip to East Africa. The main reaction from the group who hadn’t been anywhere in Africa was surprise at signs of modernity that seemed incongruous to people largely concerned with wildlife and exotic environments. This party bought up the tension that I would encounter throughout this research between my interest in learning what people had to say about South Africa and the fact that I was often a valuable source of information for people planning their trips to the country or trying to sort out their experiences. It was always hard for me to temper my genuine desire to help where I could. My gut reaction to set people straight (as I saw it) about some of their misconceptions clashed with my research goal to just listen and absorb. The line between participation and observation became blurred. Of course, the questions I was asked were important and interesting sources of data, but I cannot even claim a small level of distance in answering them. No doubt that an encounter with me was going to affect the choices people made once they were in South Africa and the way that they might understand what they saw and experienced.

Political Tourists Global Exchange is a San Francisco-based human rights organization promoting global education and international cooperation between the United States and other countries. It is a leftist organization 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers




that in 1999 and 2000 was at the forefront of the anti-World Trade Organization and anti-World Bank demonstrations in Seattle, Washington DC, and other centers around the country. Global Exchange runs Reality Tours to countries such as India, Ireland, Cuba, Guatemala, and South Africa. Their promotional material states that they “aim to open the door to travel experiences that reach far beyond hotels and beaches to people and places not found in most travel books.” Their trips are designed to be educational, interactive excursions dealing with provocative themes such as peace and conflict, human rights, revolution, history, culture, art, and the environment. Reality Tours are promoted to politically motivated travelers who seek opportunities for meeting local activists, politicians, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers in the countries that they visit. Global Exchange sets up grueling itineraries for its customers that bear very little resemblance to typical organized tours. In fact, even when requested, they would not organize a game park visit for some of their participants. They ask travelers to prepare for their trips by reading a number of recommended books as well as a reader. I helped compile the 2000 reader for South African tours with the intern Charlotte Youngblood and the program director Nadya Connolly Williams. It included maps, basic statistics, a timeline, excerpts from books such as Fault Lines (Goodman 1999), articles from news magazines such as the Multinational Monitor and the Nation, excerpts from the fiction of the South African author Richard Rive (1983), and children’s poetry produced by The Open School in Soweto.4 The reader included a list of recommended films and videos on South Africa and its history. An orientation packet asked that travelers develop a learning methodology by reading and studying before the trip, developing a list of questions, and starting a diary. Global Exchange also sends its tour participants a code of ethics for tourists that contained the following: ●

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Travel in a spirit of humility and with genuine desire to learn more about the people of your host country. Instead of looking for that beach paradise, discover the enrichment of seeing a different way of life, through other eyes. If you really want your experience to be a home away from home, it is foolish to waste money on traveling. Spend time reflecting on your daily experiences in an attempt to deepen your understanding. It has been said that what enriches you may rob and violate others.



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However, my favorite recommendation for travelers is in Reality Tours’ 310 Tips for Socially Responsible Travelers (Davidson 1999). Tip number 138 states: “Americans in English-speaking foreign countries should get used to saying the word toilet when that is what you need to use. It’s not a dirty word.” I loved this because when I first arrived in America I was constantly confused when having to call a toilet a bathroom or, even more confounding, a restroom. Global Exchange was running two tours to South Africa a year, a “Women Building a Nation” tour in August to coincide with South Africa’s Women’s Day and “A Nation in the Making” in October. They subsequently added a December tour that explored human rights issues for gay and lesbian people and celebrated pride at the Mother City Queer Party (in Cape Town). Their itineraries included visits to township health and community centers, women’s projects, memorials to victims of the struggle against apartheid, human rights and gay and lesbian advocacy organizations, and a rural Eastern Cape village, Lusikisiki, as well as opportunities to meet government officials. Tours included an opportunity for participants to spend the day with local families of all “different classes and political persuasions.” In return Global Exchange, which on the surface seems far removed from the usual tour operator, expects its participants to educate their communities about the country that they visited, by holding lectures or information meetings, writing articles, etcetera. There were clear and not unexpected tensions between the organization’s primary agenda, which is radical criticism of global capitalism, and operating as a tour company. In particular this tension lies in the contradiction between the people they want on their tours—politically active people who will come back and teach others, spread the word, and share their experiences abroad—and the majority of the people they actually get to come on their tours who are largely middle class, frequent travelers who want a different sort of tour for a change of pace. Global Exchange offered me an opportunity to interview travelers who had visited or were planning to visit South Africa. I got a lot of support from Nadya, the then organizer of the South African tours, who also ran the tours to Ireland and India. I started out interviewing Bay Area-based Americans who had participated in previous Global Exchange reality tours to South Africa. I developed a questionnaire and consent form to be sent to future participants of South African tours. Through these I made contact with more participants around the country, and with some I was able to conduct interviews over e-mail and phone. I was also able to see some of the travelers’ tour evaluations. I met up with a Global Exchange tour in South Africa at




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Calvin, an African American fifty-something man had traveled to South Africa with a friend in 1997 and again on a Global Exchange tour in 1999. I met with him twice, the second time at his apartment, where we talked with the music of the Soweto String Quartet in the background. Calvin has worked for IBM since the 1970s and had had a South African friend and colleague for many years. Joan, a close-to-retirement, single white woman who had been to Cuba and South Africa with Global Exchange and worked very hard on her return to share her experiences with others. Joan traveled in order to push herself to do what is hard for her to do. She felt that South Africa would be “big, scary, challenging” and was hoping that this would lead to a serious personal-growth experience. She described how she had been pretty ignorant about South Africa through the apartheid years, although sympathetic to the struggle. Beanie and David, married art dealers, who had been importing ethnic arts from Africa and Asia for twenty years. Both had traveled extensively in Africa but had not been to South Africa for more than twenty years, although they had been consistently importing baskets from Kwazulu. Beanie had been in the Peace Corps twenty years ago, which she identified as the beginning of her love affair with Africa. They went on the Global Exchange tour because they wanted to speak to more black South African people and thought it would be too hard without the structure offered by the organization. Mardge and Gordie, part of a group of doctors and AIDS activists from Chicago who attended the AIDS conference in Durban. All white professionals, they had been anti-apartheid activists. I first met them at a party at Allison’s, their tour operator, in Cape Town in July 2000, and I interviewed them in Chicago after their return. They had also gone on safari with their two teenage children after the Global Exchange tour. Bonnie, Mardge’s colleague, who was on the same tour to the Durban AIDS conference in 2000. I had a long telephone conversation with her when we were all back in America after meeting the group in Cape Town. Bonnie loved the South African authors Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, and J. M. Coetzee. She was fascinated by what she saw as a coincidence of epochal events: peaceful political change and an unparalleled AIDS epidemic in South Africa. She had traveled a lot, always on her own steam, even to Haiti and Egypt, but she was too nervous to do this in South Africa, despite her skepticism about organized tours. Bonnie also shared with me the short stories she started to write to try make sense of her experiences in South Africa. They illustrate the experience of Americans in South Africa with great clarity.



a party organized by the tour organizer Allison, whom I also interviewed. Here I briefly introduce the Global Exchange travelers whom I got to know quite well over the years that I was in the field:


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My early interviews with these travelers who spent between three and six weeks in southern Africa focused on the reasons that participants had chosen to travel to South Africa, their travel histories and their experiences in South Africa, what they brought back, and what they felt the greatest impact of their time in South Africa had been. Interviews were informal, although I did take notes. They took place over lunch or coffee and in one case in the home of an interviewee as we looked at the souvenirs he had bought back with him. Some had taken Global Exchange tours to other parts of the world before. They went on a South African tour because it offered an opportunity for a life-changing experience. Others had more specific interests in South Africa. They felt that Global Exchange offered them the best opportunity to experience in a short time a real South African encounter and to be able to interact with people whose politics and interest were in line with theirs. For most it was unusual for them to travel, even in the developing world, through an organized tour. They felt South Africa was a country that demanded such an intense interaction with people and organizations that it couldn’t be experienced in the way that other places had been. This small group of tourists demonstrated the enthusiasm of most travelers for sharing their experiences. While they are from a different generation from the majority of travelers I worked with, who were college students, they struggled in similar ways with how to make sense of their encounters abroad.

The School of Journalism’s International Reporting Class During the spring semester of 2000 I participated in an International Reporting class on South Africa. It was co-taught by a deputy editor at a progressive South African weekly newspaper. Each week the students met to discuss some background reading on South Africa and later to talk about their own projects and how they were doing in setting up interviews for the ten days that they would spend in Johannesburg and Cape Town. They had classes on the basic geography and history of the country and on the tools of the trade for reporting in Africa, which included hints on how to travel and on essential equipment such as a short-wave radio. Background reading for the course included Kaffir Boy (Mathabane 1998), My Traitor’s Heart (Malan 2000), and Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the



Bonnie’s writing shows how the distinction between tourist, traveler, and ethnographer may be only a matter of self-labeling, or time frame, or funding.


New South Africa (Waldmeir 1998). The former two texts seemed to be ubiquitous in American college courses on South Africa at the time. Much of the seminar time was spent discussing the projects that the students were interested in pursuing. Their assignment was to sell their stories in the United States, so most of their proposals attempted to link the United States and South Africa. I interviewed most of the students and met up with them in Cape Town during the long weekend that they spent there. I will introduce some of them here. They had varied histories, most of which involved some international travel that had contributed to their interest in international reporting. Jeff wanted to go somewhere he had not been before, as he felt this would be good preparation for most international journalism. South Africa, about which he knew little, presented a new challenge and one to which he could bring a fresh perspective. Greg had been to Cameroon and wanted to return to Africa because he hadn’t done the traveling he had expected the first time around, having mistakenly assumed travel throughout Africa to be similar to travel between American states. Casey’s first visit to Africa had been to Kenya. She had really romanticized Kenya before her three months studying Swahili there. She had subsequently traveled through East Africa on a Lonely Planet trip. She had been particularly fascinated by the melting pot of Nairobi and managed to settle there through working for Visions in Action, a volunteer program, and freelancing for NGOs, writing and editing funding proposals. For ten years she felt that she had had one foot in Africa and one foot in the United States. The South African trip was a chance to get back to Africa. Kelly had done political research for her honors’ thesis and had always wanted to study abroad, especially in Africa, or more to the point, not in Europe. She had spent a semester abroad in Zimbabwe with fifteen students from private colleges. The South Africa course was an opportunity to go back to southern Africa and to be rejuvenated in terms of writing. When I met up with them in Cape Town in March 2000, they had obviously been running around like crazy, but many of them had finished their interviews and research while in Johannesburg. Cape Town was for playing. I joined them for dinner at the Africa Café—a fine dining restaurant that offered delicacies from all over the continent in a setting evoking South African ethnic chic. The next morning a few of us climbed Table Mountain, when we were assailed by an unfortunate stomach upset—the result, we realized after checking with other classmates, of eating the lamb. I also drove some of the students whose interviews and projects were completed on a tour of the peninsula.



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The most important site of research for me turned out to be studyabroad programs for students going to UCT. Study-abroad numbers in the United States increased rapidly in the 1990s. In 2000, 63 percent of high school graduates went to college immediately. According to the 2000 U.S. census, available on the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, 15.5 percent of Americans had earned a college degree and almost 9 percent of Americans had earned a graduate or professional degree, and the number of these graduates was on the rise. In 1985/1986 48,483 American students spent summer, a January term, one or two quarters, a semester, or a year at a foreign university, while in 1999/2000 this number was 143,590 students.5 This reflects in part a growing number of Americans attending college as well as an increasing emphasis on global education in the United States.6 These numbers have continued to grow—in the 2007/2008 academic year 262,416 American college students spent part of their academic year abroad. Most American study-abroad students spent a semester (39.8%) or a summer term (34.6%) abroad in 1999/2000. The next largest group spent a whole academic year abroad (8.6%). American students were most likely to go to Western Europe (86,016) and Central America/Mexico (12,414). The vast majority of American students who studied abroad in 1999/2000 went to the United Kingdom (20.4%), Spain (9.7%), and Italy (9.0%). France (8.3%), Mexico (5.1%), and Australia (4.4%) were also popular destinations. In other world regions, Israel hosted almost 3 percent of study-abroad students from the United States, and China hosted 2 percent of American study-abroad students. These countries, along with Germany, Ireland, Costa Rica, Japan, Austria, the Netherlands, and Greece, received more than 75 percent of all American study-abroad students. In 1999/2000, 3,969 American students studied in Africa. Most of these (1,307) went to universities in East Africa, including 695 in Kenya, 253 in Tanzania, and 250 in Zimbabwe. The next largest group of American students (1006) studied in West Africa, mostly in Ghana (630) and Senegal (154), and 969 students went to southern Africa, mostly South Africa (899). The numbers of students going to Zimbabwe and to southern Africa decreased from the 1998/99 totals. It is possible that the region had already been affected by State Department warnings and increasing press about President Robert Mugabe’s human rights violations in Zimbabwe. By the 2007/2008 academic year 3,700 American students participated in some study-abroad program in South Africa alone. A survey of American study-abroad



Study-Abroad Students


programs indicated that by 2000 there were sixty one programs in Africa, including ten in Kenya, seven in South Africa, six each in Ghana and Zimbabwe, five in Tanzania, and four in Nigeria. The rest were spread over fifteen countries, six of which were francophone (Pires, Maraijh, and Metzler 2000). These represented only 3 percent of all study-abroad programs available to American students. Most of the programs were for a semester (28%), or a academic year (25%), or summer only (19%). The majority of participants were white (73%) and female (73%) (Pires, Maraijh, and Metzler 2000). The relatively low numbers of students going to Africa appears to be due largely to the perception, mostly among parents, that the continent is dangerous (Pires 2000). During my fieldwork I interviewed various administrators involved in the International Students’ Program at UCT. This program and office was established at the end of the 1990s to deal with hundreds of international students attending the university. Some of these were postgraduate students from Europe who were doing course work masters focused on local areas of expertise, such as South Africa’s Human Rights Commission and Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The majority of foreign students were American study-abroad students participating in a range of programs from semesters or a year taking classes at UCT to island programs taught entirely by faculty from their home colleges, programs organized by their American colleges, to programs run by organizations like The School for International Training (SIT) or the Council for International Educational Exchange (CIEE). Increasingly, students were also spending time in Africa as volunteers during the summer, organized by programs like Global Routes. An important part of studying abroad for almost all the American programs in South Africa was some community-based volunteer work. Some chose to work through UCT’s existing community service program, SHAWCO (UCT’s Student, Health and Welfare Organization), which ran health and legal clinics in some of the townships that make up the city of Cape Town. Many students participated in a community service program organized by the International Students program Akani, which means “let’s build together.” They volunteered in townships outside the historically white suburb of Fish Hoek—either in Masiphumelele, a relatively new informal settlement, or in Ocean View, a township established in the 1960s for South Africans who had been classified colored. Students were generally given credit for participating in Akani or an alternative service program, and most of them spent one afternoon a week in Masiphumelele or Ocean View.



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Most of the Akani students were being used as teachers, some at the high school where they introduced students to computers, but mostly played basketball, and others at the junior school where they either taught English or life skills. They were asked to bring snacks each week for their pupils and to prepare their own classes for the after-school program. At the general orientation for all study-abroad students run by UCT’s International Students’ Program that I attended in February 2002, the students were briefed about culture shock, mostly in terms of how impatient they would be with African time, and were given a great deal of information about keeping safe but absolutely no sense of what the dangers were or why they existed at the level that they did (see Suvantola 2002 for a recent in-depth discussion of culture shock). They were given a twelve-step program to help them adapt: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Stay open minded Be patient Don’t compare Look—be observant Listen to locals Learn from locals Don’t be afraid to ask Don’t assume or generalize Be optimistic Say no to stereotyping Don’t take the mushrooms they offer on Long Street Enjoy—have fun

I worked with a number of different American study-abroad programs. This included a summer session political science course that consisted of a week of classes in California and three weeks in Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa. This upper-division course consisted of four days of intensive workshops addressing the history of the anti-apartheid struggle and the resulting negotiated political settlement. The class then flew to Cape Town, where they stayed in a residence hall (dorm) of UCT. They met as a class on UCT’s campus and were introduced to the computer laboratory on campus. Much of their free time was spent hanging out at student pubs, shopping at various markets in the city bowl and the Waterfront in Cape Town, and clubbing in the city. The course was, however, intense in its introduction to South African political realities and combined sites of historical, cultural, and natural interests with meetings with governmental and





nongovernmental bodies. I was given permission to ask the students for the summers of 1999 and 2000 to write journals of their experiences that would both serve as evaluation of the students’ experiences as well as research data for my project. In 1999 I met with the students during their week of classes to introduce my project and hand out consent forms to use their journals, and in 2000 I met with the class while they were in Cape Town. An especially important group for this research was from a program run by a small Californian liberal arts college that sends students, mostly juniors, to UCT for the spring semester from February to July. The college has a member of its own faculty travel with them to UCT, and the students all had to take one core course with this professor during their semester. They also took courses offered by UCT. I attended an orientation meeting for the students to introduce my project and ask them to sign consent forms and to fill out background questionnaires before they left. Fifteen out of the seventeen in the group going to South Africa came to the meeting purely in order to pick up their tickets and passports, so they were not particularly interested in any new information but filled out the forms anyway. When I arrived in Cape Town I moved into an office in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, the department where I had done my undergraduate as well as master’s degrees and where the students attended class. I interviewed most of the students in my office on campus and also attended their core class on the social and political history of Cape Town. I continued to conduct interviews with returned students at the end of 2000 and beginning of 2001 back in the Bay Area. I often hesitated to take notes during the interviews, as my relationship with these students was so conflicted between friend and informant. In February 2001 I organized a potluck dinner for a group of students at my home in California. This was mostly a social event, with the students primarily focused on their upcoming graduation and their final courses. I also caught up with many of the students at their graduation. Much of their discussion was about their alienation from American society since their return. Many of these students became important contributors to my work both during and after their stay in South Africa. In describing them here I depend in part on my very first impressions, although many will become more fleshed out as they contribute to my analysis of their experiences in later chapters. I list them alphabetically and situate them in part on the basis of cliques and groupings and identifications that were in common use among them:



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Ben and Lex (they were always together) struck me as typical fraternity boys, or jocks. They had made a pact to study abroad together and both expressed a strong sense that they would never have an opportunity to travel except through such a program. They were expressing a common feeling among many American study-abroad students that this was a “once in a lifetime experience,” impossible once they started on their postgrad career and family paths. Ben and Lex both took marketing classes, which meant that they enjoyed their classes at UCT more than most because they got a very different perspective on marketing than they would have at home. Ben was a first-generation college student and had struggled to convince his parents that study abroad was an important part of his education. Lex told his friends, who were surprised that he would go to Africa, that he was going there to surf. Ben and Lex spent a lot of their time in Cape Town playing basketball and on the UCT water polo team and so hung out with the South African athletes. Their interaction with white South African college students led them to believe that being white and male in South Africa was really tough. Corey, a small, forthright black American woman, was very committed to understanding South Africa and read as many newspapers as she could while there. Her major was sociology. Her mentor had suggested that she take a semester abroad since her financial aid could be transferred to the program, or she wouldn’t have really considered it. Corey was intensely engaged while in Cape Town in dealing with her encounter with her identity as an African American. Duke seemed to be a classic Californian surfer dude, but one with a serious intellectual streak, who didn’t seem sure how to be both smart and popular at the same time. He was a transfer student from a community college. The pace of the four-year college had really frustrated Duke, and the study-abroad program was an opportunity for him to get away. Most of Duke’s friends were South Africans whom he met through UCT’s Mountain & Ski club. Erika, a white woman and pre-engineering student, was generally on the outskirts of any group—not a party girl, not a studious one. She had traveled the summer before, with friends, through Peru and Brazil. She enjoyed the increased independence of being away from home and became increasingly aware of world politics during her semester in Cape Town. She had had no idea that apartheid had so recently ended. Erika had imagined that the rest of the world was pretty much like California. When I first met with her she was planning a trip to the Okavango swamps in Botswana, having just seen a picture in a brochure. Gerardo, a Mexican-America man, was extremely political and was a bit of a loner. He spent little time hanging out with his classmates, but got to know many of the homeless people living around their house in Observatory and took them to church with him and bought them McDonalds’ burgers.





Gerardo had worked in California with homeless kids as well, but had been excited about the opportunity of seeing “real poverty” in South Africa. He felt ashamed of Americans coming to South Africa and showing off their wealth. He wrote some powerful poetry on life on the streets through the voices of some of the young homeless kids he had been talking to. These were very critical of the U.S. government. Katy, a popular redhead, was the wild party-girl of the group. She felt she had been “wasting away” at college. Katie made friends with South Africans despite the fact that they had seemed really standoffish at first and her belief that South Africans didn’t like Americans. Kyle was a business major in international economics who played tennis for the college. He had hesitated to study abroad as it interrupted his focus on the game. He hung out with Ben and Lex, but was not necessarily fully integrated into their crowd. Leah, petite and olive-skinned, was a business major. Leah had needed a lot of persuasion to go to South Africa, as she hadn’t wanted to miss her friends, boyfriend, and the junior formal. She had hoped someone would persuade her not to come, but because her family and friends all assumed she wouldn’t go, everybody had been really supportive. Maria, a blond Mexican-American woman, was introduced to the possibility of coming to South Africa in a World Cultures class. Maria was reassured about leaving home because her best friend, Corey, was going. Maria had not been enjoying her college experience, finding it cloistered yet only giving an illusion of safety. She loved living off campus in Observatory during her semester in Cape Town. Megan, a white woman from a logging town in Oregon, was a politics major with an African and feminism minor. She was extremely focused and earnest about her work. All Megan’s friends were other Americans, mostly Council (CIEE) students. She did not have the money to do the ski diving and adventures where other American students met South Africans. Rachel was an anthropology major and a transfer student and older than most of her classmates. She is an extremely pretty woman of Native American descent and in California had been very involved in her local Native American council’s cultural center, where they teach urban Native Americans about their culture. Rachel had been extremely nervous about coming, especially given the South African rape statistics, and had been reassured by her professor that white foreigners were not in any particular danger. Regan was a popular and beautiful anthropology major. She described how wherever she went people thought that her family was from India, but she identified herself, proudly, as half “Creole.” Regan was from an extremely diverse area of Los Angeles and had struggled with the fact that all her math



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and philosophy professors at college were white men, so she was desperate for culture and diversity. Regan became friends with many great South Africans, and her friends in Cape Town were black, colored, and white South Africans, but she still felt like an outsider because of the differences between Americans and South Africans. She had been very uncomfortable with visiting townships and taking photographs of people without their knowledge. She was frustrated at how difficult it was to find places to listen to or see what she called indigenous music and art except in the open-air market at Greenmarket Square. Rya, whose mom is Japanese, was the youngest in the group, only a freshman, trying to decide between a psychology and an anthropology/sociology major. She had been blown away when her class went on a township tour and she saw the city’s history of violence. She couldn’t imagine how people could be so cruel to each other and yet also how much forgiveness there was. Rya had wanted to go on safari, but money was a problem, and she had met a boy and so didn’t want to leave Cape Town. Rya returned to Cape Town on the same program in her senior year in 2002 as she had become passionate about the country and wanted to be with her South African boyfriend. Stephen, a handsome, wealthy Filipino, had decided to come to South Africa when his roommate, Duke, applied to the program. Stephen made a group of South African friends, with whom he regularly went clubbing. He loved it despite the frustration of public transport and having almost been mugged in a minivan taxi. He had broken all the rules given to travelers—wearing Armani and a gold Rolex and getting in an empty vehicle on his own. Stephen had no desire to go on safari, but had planned a trip up to Sun City to gamble and play golf. Tia, a white student who returned for a second year in 2000 to rejoin her South African boyfriend, had graduated from a small school in Oregon, where it was a big deal that she went to a college out of state. Tia’s first memory of South Africa was of watching a film about Mandela and the whole class crying when they heard he was still in jail. But she had not previously considered studying abroad or going to South Africa, although she had wanted to join the Peace Corps after college. Her family had been supportive as they had wanted her to experience a new culture in a politically interesting place, but they had been concerned for her safety. Tia in fact was attacked while using the subway to cross the railway line, but she was rescued by some homeless men, commonly known as bergies in Cape Town’s Afrikaans vernacular, after the mountain (berg) that many of them sleep on. She expected what she called in-your-face racism but did not experience this. She wondered if this was because there was so little interaction between black and white students. Her family and friends all asked her whether her white South African boyfriend, Craig, was black. Tia had not suffered culture shock when she had first come to Cape Town but experienced a great deal of culture shock on her return home.





Another important program during my fieldwork was the University of California’s (UC) Study Abroad Program, which sends students to the University of Cape Town as well as to the University of Natal, Pietermartizburg, and the University of Natal, Durban. This is a full-year program normally taken during the students’ junior, or sometimes sophomore, year. The students were given a very general orientation in California and were put in touch with someone in Cape Town who picked them up from the airport and helped them find a place to live, generally in student shared housing or digs, and helped them to settle in. There was also a member of UCT’s faculty who acted as an academic adviser for all UC students. The credits for the courses that they took at UCT were fully transferable to the UC system. UC also has a good relationship with the International Students’ Program at UCT, which runs their first week’s orientation in South Africa. For the rest of the year the students were pretty much on their own. They could choose to spend time together or seek help and advice from the support people in Cape Town, or not. UC students tended to volunteer with SHAWCO, which organized teaching, legal, and medical services. My relationship with this program began in December 1999, when I attended an orientation for students going to South Africa in January. I was there partly as an observer but also as someone who knew both the UC and the South African university systems. The director of the program was there, largely to reassure the students about their safety in Cape Town. Most of the students’ questions were indeed about their safety and also about making black South African friends. Many had heard from returned students that this has been really difficult. After my return to the Bay Area I continued to attend orientations for the South Africa study-abroad programs. I was able to conduct intensive interviews with a small group of UC students before they left for UCT and twice each in Cape Town as well as meeting up more informally in the course of our time together at UCT as well as a number of times after their return to California. Some students became especially important contributors to this project. They included the following: Amilca, a black woman, had been a study-abroad student at the University of Pietermaritzburg with her husband in 1999. Her parents had been very involved in the anti-apartheid movement and had taken her to hear Mandela speak, so she had been excited at the opportunity to go to South Africa. Because of the smaller number of international students on this campus compared with UCT, she was able to make more non-American friends. But, as with many of the students at UCT in 2000, her friends were mostly Zimbabweans.



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Bahar had been attracted to studying abroad because of how Eurocentric she found the United States education system. She had originally wanted to go on the Egypt or Ghana programs, but her parents, who are Iranian, felt best about South Africa. On her travels to Zimbabwe and Botswana with Phyllis, most people assumed that she was Indian and their perceptions shaped her interest in comparative race relations. Dahlia had spent a year at UCT in 1998. I first met Dahlia in a South Africa history class, for which I had been a reader in the fall 1997 semester, and remembered her talking about her mother’s concerns about violence in South Africa. Dahlia was a Latina from Los Angeles and had been amused during her year at UCT by the assumption made by many South Africans that she was colored. Liz, an athletic white Californian, had a deep fascination with the politics of change in South Africa. She had taken a number of relevant classes before going to Cape Town: one in African American studies that made parallels between the United States and South Africa; another in history on colonialism in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand for which she had to read the South African author Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm; and a class in political science on conflict and change in South Africa, which she had loved, as it dispelled common myths about South Africa and talked about the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission). Phyllis is a black woman who returned to college after some years working as a dancer in New York. She was an anthropology major with a focus in medical anthropology. Her interest in international politics was driven by her African Caribbean friends in New York and by a trip to Trinidad. She had found this Caribbean nation to be “amazingly British,” which had disturbed her understanding of universal diasporic identities. Phyllis had been driven by the political consciousness of her non-American friends and their perception of Americans as ignorant to become better informed about the world. As a result she had begun a reading program, which was mostly focused on news media, especially the New York Times. Sara had been in South Africa with Dahlia. Her study-abroad year was not her first trip to South Africa. She had gone to stay with her uncle, who was a missionary in Natal (now Kwazulu/Natal) for six weeks when she was fifteen and in high school. She had visited Cape Town and always wanted to go back. During this first trip Sara had also been to small rural towns (Vryheid, Ladysmith) and had been amazed at the natural beauty, hiking, and camping in Kosi Bay. She had been ashamed by the fact that her cousins went to a white-only school in 1992/93.

These are the important characters that enliven the stories alongside their friends and teachers throughout this book. Hortense Powdermaker described her ethnography of Hollywood as being limited to the “interplay at specific points” in the making of movies 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers




(Powdermaker 1966, 213). She was frustrated by the fact that she always felt that she had one foot outside of the world she was studying, firmly planted in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and she keenly felt the lack of a community that made “constant and seemingly casual observation” impossible (Powdermaker 1966, 213). These are the very challenges facing the ethnographer of tourists—a community that looks and even behaves very much like the ethnographer herself and that exists only at certain moments in time and space. Yet, at a time when anthropologists are encouraged to do ethnography of global connections, and pay close attention to the cultural diversity and spaces of awkward engagement that cause, what Anna Tsing labels friction between these connections, Powdermaker’s interplay at specific points does more than describe a flawed ethnographic project (Tsing 2005). It articulates a project that makes it possible to observe travelers become the traveler where/when they get constructed in a very particular way and where/when they are required to take responsibility for a particular set of identities. This moment/space plays into another set of interactions back home when the traveling subject comes home and inhabits a new set of identities, sometimes with more confidence. Ultimately I had to pay attention to the interplay at specific points through which each of these groups of travelers moved as they negotiated their encounters in southern Africa and back in the United States. This meant that my field-site did not end or begin with each of them. It required that I pay close attention to the complex and mediated worlds that they inhabited and opened up a multitude of representational practices to which I needed to pay attention. In Chapter 2 I outline a brief history of representations of Africa by Americans and in the United States. I focus on the ways that these structured and shaped the expectations of American travelers to Africa, as well as the ways Americans have thought about who they are and where they come from, or what their role in the world is and should be. I will also describe a number of the images that circulated as the small group of mostly young travelers that I studied left the United States for African destinations. These linked them to a wider conversation and to an important set of ideas about who they are or might become that is specific to this generation and to those Americans who get to travel to Africa but also extends to a wider set of ideas about what it means to be American.



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Vexed Ties: Africa in and out of America Arie: I am finally on my way to the mysterious country of South Africa. At first, my decision to go on this trip was based upon ideas and images of beautiful beaches, great surfing, and gorgeous women. Anna: I’ve developed most of this negative thinking from the news and what other Americans have to say about the place. Basically, when I told people my plans for this summer they looked at me as if I were crazy and then asked, “Why the hell would anyone go there?” Caroline: The day before I left, my upstairs neighbor came down to ask me what compelled me to go to South Africa. She stated, “Why would you want to go there? Isn’t there enough racism for you here?” I was appalled by her comment. Marisa: I can’t help but think that the United States is the only truly civilized, modern country. I already know what a ignorant statement that was, but my perception of Africa has never been of modern cities.

These comments from the journals of young American political

science students preparing to visit South Africa for the first time in the summer of 2000 reflect the relationship that Rob Nixon described between South Africans and Americans as “a vexed sense of half-shared histories [that] sometimes led to an illusory sense of mutual intelligibility” (Nixon 1994, 3). This vexed sense of mutual intelligibility is a familiar trait in the long history of encounters between Africans and Europeans and Americans. In this chapter I describe a range of images and encounters with Africa within the United States that framed the research I did with travelers to South Africa between 1999 and 2002. While in the field in California I tried to focus on the ways Americans



Chapter


talked about and engaged with South Africa. Yet I soon learned that despite important links between Americans and South Africa forged by the anti-apartheid movement, South Africa more often than not stood in for a homogeneous and generalized Africa as did many other different African nations. When I began my fieldwork in California I observed or participated in a range of events and exhibitions, including the National Summit on Africa, and I tried to pay attention to newspaper articles and television and film that represented Africa in America. Together they offer a glimpse of the images that Americans were able to easily access about Africa in the early part of the twenty-first century. Even when a specific nation like South Africa was the focus, such as at the Smithsonian’s Festival on the Mall, the common tropes of representations of Africa remained: rural, silent, musical, focused on the past or on tragedies. Such images of Africa were listed by the students I talked to in a high school in California in 2000 and were consistently evoked in popular media as well as in class discussions and orientations for students planning to travel to southern Africa. This was before Africa and its suffering became everyday fodder for entertainment magazines and television programs on MTV, CNN, the History Channel, E!, and all the networks. My students were also not yet “Starving for Darfur” or planning projects to educate Capetonians about HIV as they were five years later. They are important images because they set up the travelers I was working with for discovering this desire to save Africa. Travelers writing about journeys to Africa since the seventeenth century have shaped many Western ideas about the continent. These popular writings often ignored people and focused rather on descriptions of landscapes. Where people were, perforce, encountered, the European was placed at the center of their stage, thus dramatizing and eroticizing any contact between European and American travelers and African people (Pratt 1985, 132). These texts turned Africa into a desert or a moral wasteland without history, culture, or technology. Ultimately the writing of explorers, scientists, and missionaries shaped ideas of the so-called Dark Continent as a space where the achievements of the Enlightenment could be inverted (Brantlinger 1985). For example, descriptions of London’s underclasses were linked metaphorically with the tribes of Africa, and people who ventured into the ghettoes became travelers in an undiscovered country of the poor (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 268). Africa became and remains a way of understanding where civilization had failed (Cooper 2001, Ferguson 1999).



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The gaze, as it was produced in these texts by scholars, journalists, and other travelers, allowed authors to reflect from a commanding view with the permission, coerced or not, of the colonized, and so to articulate their meaning of these encounters between travelers and others (Spurr 1993). The colonial travel writer’s gaze invariably met emptied landscapes that evoked scenes from home while upholding unequal relations of power (Pratt 1992, Spurr 1993). The suppression of the gaze of the other was required for preserving the relations of power in the larger system of order (Spurr 1993). The contemporary tourist gaze, despite its diversity based on gender, class, and personal histories, also uses visual appropriation to fulfill its main purpose: the consumption of goods and places (Urry 1990). Multiple studies of tourist experiences are complicating the idea of the tourist gaze in part by considering the ways in which emotion, taste, hearing, and touch structure them (Bruner 2001, Dann, Kristian, and Jacobsen 2002, Favero 2000, Harrison 2003, Koshar 1998, MacDonald 1997, Perkins and Thorns 2001). While these studies trouble the singularity of the tourist gaze as the primary way tourist experiences are shaped, the possibility of the objects of the tourist gaze gazing back has seldom been explored. This is not the case in analyses of colonial and imperial encounters, which increasingly acknowledge the complexity of the relationships forged on the frontier of empire (McClintock 1995, Stoler 2001). Mary Louise Pratt shows how some colonial authors used a reciprocal vision to underscore an anti-conquest agenda, which claimed that their explorations of colonized landscapes were an innocent pursuit of knowledge. Mungo Park, for example, told stories of how ridiculous he appeared to the Africans he encountered, but in doing so he only increased the reader’s belief in his authority and truthfulness (Pratt 1992). That was possible because the gazer largely created this reciprocal vision; it was a fiction of reciprocity. But there were moments when it was possible for the colonized to gaze back, and when they did, the colonizer could not always sustain an illusion of traveling through emptied spaces or of forming reciprocal relationships with natives. This led to some of the more emotive scenes in travel writing such as when John Barrow described an attack that he organized on the !Kung by Afrikaner farmers. Pratt describes this event in Barrow’s account of his travels in the interior of the Cape Colony in the late eighteenth century as the “only nocturnal scene in the work, the only instance of direct dialogue, the only occasion Barrow dramatizes himself as a participant, the only outburst of emotion, the only outbreak of violence, one of the few scenes where people and



Vexed Ties


place coincide, and the only time Barrow questions his apprehension of his surroundings” (Pratt 1992, 67). As this book will show, when travelers cannot escape acknowledging the lives and bodies of the people whose lands they are traveling through whether as imperialists or tourists, whether through direct attack as Barrow did or a more subtle sense of being observed and labeled, they experience a fundamental shift in their own understanding of their position in the world. The gaze is not, however, the only way though which tourism echoes similar structures of inequality and the uses and abuses of power as seen during colonial travel encounters. Contemporary tourism, especially in the guise of sex and romance tourism, consumes not only goods and places but also bodies and emotions through both the gaze and a bodily appropriation (Pettman 1997, Ryan and Hall 2001). The intimate frontiers of sex tourism are zones in which power may appear unidirectional but is in fact negotiated and, if anything, reversed. More importantly this is a space where a reverse gaze and even embodied appropriation become visible. I observed this in 2004 while attending a conference on heritage management in Livingstone Zambia, where I ended up eating dinner most nights with young Zambian men in the bars of youth hostels. This town on the edge of the Victoria Falls has experienced a tourist boom since 2000, when the struggles over land in Zimbabwe were driving tourists from that country’s Victoria Falls village. Every night at the bars the men, all involved in the tourism industry as no other Zambians are allowed in these bars, come and flirt with the young, mostly European tourists. Though Zambian women hooked up with foreign tourists in clubs, it was rare to see them in the bars as they didn’t do the right kind of tourist job, such as abseiling and bungee jumping, that would have given them this access. Though it is extremely easy to spend the night dancing and flirting with these men, sex is clearly not the number one priority on their minds, although it may be on the minds of the female tourists. Their energy is spent romancing the, mostly white, women they meet, telling them how beautiful, how special, how smart they are. These men will have sex with white tourists, but what they really want is girlfriends—to some extent confounding the fantasies that the white women are exercising of having a sexual adventure in Africa. These Zambians were in search of a route out of Africa, but they constructed a narrative of romance rather than of sexual conquest to achieve these goals. Beach boys in Zanzibar are equally convinced that the women that they take care of while on holiday will be their ticket to Europe or America, where they can live what they see as the truly modern life (Ferguson 2006, Sumich 2002). Mostly the women in



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these relationships simply treat them as a holiday fling, and such a trip out of Africa rarely occurs. But as I got to know some of the men in Livingstone better, I heard all about their girlfriends in Holland or Finland, women whom they spoke to on their mobile phones and via e-mail regularly and whom the Zambian men had either already visited or had plans to visit in Europe. They had stories of snowdrifts and photographs, which they were happy to show me. They spoke of their love for these women, while quite blatantly seeking out a girlfriend from another country—even South Africa was good enough. They appeared simultaneously more cynical and more idealistic, more successful and yet just as unlikely as the Zanzibar men to achieve their goals of a new life in the north. Paulla Ebron’s study of sex tourism to The Gambia by European and American women in search of romance illustrates the complex negotiations that underpin transactions in the contact zones of tourism (Ebron 1997). Sex tourism plays out some of the more obvious inequalities and anxieties between Africa and the north and between men and women. Within this unbalanced space, though, the young men who have sex with European and American women use their reverse gaze to construct a sense of the relationship that makes them not exploited sexual objects but entrepreneurs creating opportunities for social and economic mobility that are otherwise unavailable to them. The stories told by tourist women and Gambian men are very different, of course, yet both in some way undermine accepted categories of victim and oppressor. The women feel liberated from the patriarchal sexism of their own northern societies, and the men believe they are escaping national inequality. None of the participants in sex tourism in the Gambia can be imagined as victims. Their stories show their agency especially in negotiating connections despite differences in power (Ebron 1997, 242). What all these men have in common, however, is that they have placed tourists in categories and labeled them with identities that are unlikely to have very much in common with how the tourists perceive themselves. Here the tourists’ desires to interact with locals make it difficult for them to entirely control their own gaze. The tourists are gazed on, and these men use this gaze to further their own goals and aspirations, whether successfully or not. Multiple factors, therefore, create tension between tourists and hosts and disturb the hegemony of the gaze. This reversal was also palpable surrounding the development of Elmina Castle, a slave-trading castle on the coast in Ghana, as a tourist site where a reverse gaze disturbed tourists’ expectations of this encounter (Bruner 1996, Holsey 2008). African American tourists felt



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strongly that the castle should be memorialized because of its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Bruner 1996). Ghanaians and local heritage and cultural agencies felt that the castle’s history was far longer and more complex than this one period and that rather its role in the anti-colonial struggle should be memorialized. Not least, perhaps, because of their troubled relationship with their country’s history of the slave trade (Holsey 2008). In this encounter between black Americans and black Africans, a reverse gaze disrupted the Americans’ assumptions about their relationship to Africa and to Ghana. This is, as elsewhere in Africa, especially apparent when locals demand payment for photographs that had been taken of them. Photography, a classic technology of the tourist gaze, becomes a site of struggle between tourists and tourees. The tourists wanted to see themselves as visitors, but for the locals, tourism is a commercial enterprise. This disjuncture was underscored when Ghanaians demanded money for their images that would be taken back to the United States. The travelers, therefore, were exposed to a perception of what they were doing in Ghana that did not match their own understanding of their journey. Paulla Ebron’s observation of a homecoming tour to Ghana and The Gambia organized by the Alex Haley Foundation and sponsored by McDonalds goes further in illustrating how American attitudes can be disrupted by a reverse gaze (Ebron 1999). The tour, based on Alex Haley’s Roots, was set up as an “evocation of African American discourses of cultural identification with Africa” (Ebron 1999, 913). It, therefore, produced an encounter between Africa and America that elided contemporary politics, thus largely producing an experience based in colonial relationships. There were moments, however, when the actions and words of Africans disrupted these relationships. The travelers did not discover that the children running after their bus were calling them Toubob, meaning white person or European. But at a naming ceremony in The Gambia the travelers did feel the impact of a reverse gaze. All travelers were named, regardless of whether they had already given themselves an African name, as many of these African Americans travelers had. Their hosts made no distinction between them as black Americans who had already made a connection with their African identities and other Americans. Ebron believes that this tour did produce a transformative personal experience but mostly because it rehearsed anticipated aspects of a homogenized Africa (Ebron 1999, 911). She suggests that, similarly to some of the travelers I followed, an identity that was under constant negotiations became more comfortable as participants’ sense of being successful American consumers was affirmed. In this comfort zone of



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being given what they searched for—a homeland—the few anomalous experiences such as the naming ceremony ultimately made it possible for the travelers to develop a stronger sense of their Americanness. The search, then, for a generic African experience that has more to do with American desires characterizes not just images of the continent but also expectations of travelers to South Africa. These desires rooted in a long history of colonial and American representations of Africa reflect the vexed set of ties and unequal relationships that I briefly explore here. Historically, encounters between Americans and Africans were imagined as possible for everybody through the popular writings of an eccentric, highly driven, often Scottish group of men and a few women who set out to map the continent during the eighteenth century (Hibbert 1982, Pratt 1985, Wheeler 1999). The longevity of the images created by early explorers and travel writers becomes clear in the similarities between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings of men such as James Bruce, Mungo Park, Richard Burton, and David Livingstone with contemporary iterations of adventures in Africa and the constantly reinvented representations of Alan Quartermain, Tarzan, and Isak Dinesen (Hickey and Wylie 1993, Keim 1999, Mayer 2002). So persistent are these images that in 2009 the History Channel launched Expedition Africa, a form of reality television that brought together an oddball group of explorers to retrace the footsteps of Henry Stanley in his search for David Livingstone. Such shows build on the already entrenched ideas about Africa that Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins identified in the National Geographic magazine. Despite multiple new avenues for stories from and about Africa and Africans to be told in America, most continue to portray Africans as exotic, idealized, naturalized, and sexualized with a single historical narrative (Lutz and Collins 1993). The dominant idea of Africa as described by Dennis Hickey and Kenneth Wylie has, therefore, remained remarkably constant. It looks all too often like “a mysterious place of jungle, mountain, and plain, mostly unfamiliar or unknown even decades after everything has been ‘explored’ time and again; the idea of Africa [is] as zoological Eden of infinite variety replete with primordial flora, fauna, and above all, primitive people” (Hickey and Wylie 1993, 22). Africa, like the Orient, was and continues to be seen as a single, homogeneous space and to be equated with an imaginary geography rooted in colonial relationships and discourses (Mitchell 1988, Said 1979). Unlike Orientalism, though, images of Africa are characterized by its naturalness, so that while “India’s capacity for alienation is



Vexed Ties


represented by such modernist writers as Kipling and Forster in terms of its cultural institutions (the Museum, Temple and Mosque), the most prominent insignia of Africanness in modernism is the forest” (Gikandi 1996, 169). Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical piece on How to Write about Africa skewers the persistence of these familiar tropes used to represent Africa: 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. (Wainaina 2005)

It is not surprising then, given that “[t]oday as before, the best Safari is the one closest to nature,” that representations of the safari remains the most persistent penetration of Africa (Bull 1988, 7). The safari has always been defined by the possibility of traveling through an Africa that has no people, a country that was nothing but wilderness and game. In representations of safaris there are Africans, but these are limited to the gifted tracker—an honor most often given to the bushman—and loyal gun bearer (Keim 1999). Early twentiethcentury expeditions such as the Denver African Expedition contributed to the idea of Bushmen, and to some extent, through them, all Africans, as being one with nature. But even recently I attended a high school class in California where the 1980s film The Gods Must be Crazy, portraying Bushmen as the epitome of being one with nature, was used as a good representation of Africa—a common use in American schools (Keim 1999). Hollywood, Haggert, and Hemingway have contributed and continue to contribute to images of Africa as a savage, ageless, and fickle land that brings out the wildness in everybody (Hickey and Wylie 1993, Keim 1999, Mayer 2002). Like all relationships based on power, the ways that Africa is imagined is not always monolithic; many narratives are intersected by racial, gender, class, and national differences (Cooper and Stoler 1997, JanMohamed 1985, Lowe 1991). Representations do not derive solely from a simple dichotomy between north and south or rich and poor, but are developed as much from various social and cultural forces and events—such as changing class and gender



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relationships or global patterns of resistance to strategies of control— taking place within both these spaces. Attempts to create alternative representations, though, seldom seem to really fundamentally shift the primacy of the dominant and familiar images of Africa and its relationship to Europe or America. Ruth Mayer, for example, shows how the fictional adventures of contemporary girl travelers that are meant to be alternatives to the classic tales of colonial adventurers in Africa end up offering legitimacy, and not contestation, to the familiar stories about Africa such as Dineson’s Out of Africa (Mayer 2002). These alternative representations suggest that travel, while the basis for many of the iconic images of Africa, is equally meant to create spaces where what is imagined about Africa must be engaged with by people constructing or sustaining those imagined geographies. Even colonial-era travel created a contact zone—“the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6). Encounters across frontiers were framed by a particularly fraught set of global relations and expectations that still structure the ways that Americans travel to Africa and what they desire from their encounters. These were the persistent images and vexed relationships that I wanted to understand when I began my research—how and why do these deeply colonial ideas about Africa become fixed in Americans’ minds and lives, and what are the effects of travel to southern Africa on these ideas? Here I will describe some of the ideas and images that shaped and reflected in many ways the expectations of the travelers I studied. These twenty first century American travelers worked hard to control their encounters with Africa producing similar narratives of erasure and possession as those produced by the gaze of colonial travelers. Their journeys also reduced Africa to a single, primeval landscape that set the scene for the American travelers’ discovery of their own identities. Research in and on any society can only focus on a small fraction of that society and its population, but this fraction is integrated into multiple webs of information and activity. The geographic spaces that this research inhabits span the United States and large parts of southern Africa. The individuals who traveled between their American homes and a range of southern African sites have multiple histories and identities. I could never do justice to either these geographies or histories. This is one reason why I do not focus on the United States or on South Africa but on the strands that link these two



Vexed Ties


spaces. The United States, while not qualitatively different from any other region of the world, is especially characterized by the quantity of media and sources of information in which Americans are embedded. Here I briefly describe the encounters and representations that shaped my questions and concerns as I searched for ways to examine and understand those strands. As I launched my project in 1999, I needed to find a way to do fieldwork amid representations. I paid close attention to the trickle of media representations of Africa and South Africa on television and newspapers, especially the local San Francisco Chronicle and national New York Times, and attended as many events on or about Africa in the San Francisco Bay Area as I could. I kept up with what was going on through the very active joint Berkeley Stanford Centre for African Studies, activist list-serves, and the media. I attended a wide range of events from talks on safari adventure travel, such as Allan Bechky Safaris’ presentation at the Marmot Mountain Works, an adventure equipment store, to highly charged political discussions, such as Patrick Bond’s lecture on “Tactics and Strategy Against Globalization” for the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel third world debt. Both the media and these events foreshadowed and framed my fieldwork. It was not hard to find newspapers printing the all too standard version of Africa, such as this description by Chester Crocker reminding American readers of the New York Times that “Africa remains torn by wars involving 16 nations, and countless rebel and splinter movements. Largely internal in origin, these have a nasty habit of metastasizing into regional conflicts” (August 6, 1990). Fulfilling Crocker’s viewpoint, news stories on Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and his crackdowns against democracy that began early in 2000 appeared, unusually frequently for an African country, in the national and local press. This focus was replaced in 2004 by persistent coverage on the violence in Darfur in the Sudan. But at the turn of the twenty-first century news stories on sub-Saharan Africa in the United Stated focused primarily on the democratization of Africa’s nations and their potential for creating new consumers and on what then President Clinton and America could do to facilitate this process. These stories were driven by the tours of the African continent in 1997 by Secretary of State Albright and in 1998 by President Clinton. In an article by R. W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times (March 28, 1998) Susan E. Rice, the then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and later President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, described the aims of Clinton’s visit as “to show Americans the side of Africa that’s not



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bodies floating down the rivers.” This statement at once re-enforced the stereotypes while claiming a space to change them. The World Affairs Council of Northern California, an organization established in 1947 to promote public knowledge and education about international affairs, hosted Susan Rice speaking on “Africa at the Crossroads” on November 10, 1999, in San Francisco. When I arrived at the meeting in San Francisco I was greeted by protestors against the involvement of U.S. oil companies, especially Chevron, in violence and government oppression in Nigeria and other human rights abuses in the name of free trade. They declared “Ken Saro-Wiwa Lives!” and their placards described Shell and Chevron as partners in murder. This kind of activism was always present but muted in the Bay Area while I was in the field. The demonstrators wanted to ask Rice what she was doing to ensure responsible corporate behavior in Africa. The meeting itself, however, was extremely controlled, and nobody was able to challenge Rice as questions were pre-selected by the chair. The Under-Secretary of State focused on the importance of a healthy Africa to Americans, and especially to American corporations, because it could then supply new consumers for American businesses. She also made a plea for the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), then under discussion in Congress, in opposition to Jesse Jackson’s Hope Bill for African Economic Development. Rice expressed a belief that it was sufficient gain to foreign policy just to have anything discussed in the House pertaining to Africa and that it was, therefore, worth supporting the AGOA bill despite its limitations. The news coverage on South Africa itself during this period was more varied, drawing as it did on a number of cultural and social issues. Susan Daley, the then African correspondent for the New York Times, for example, covered stories on the hominid fossils at Sterkfontein (March 17, 1999), Afrikaners’ search for a homeland (May 4, 1999), and black Americans living and working in South Africa (April 7, 1998), and Donald McNeil contributed a piece on abalone poaching near Cape Town (New York Times, April 14, 1999). But the focus here too was on analyses of the creation of a new democracy and in particular the application of constitutional law and the country’s second democratic elections by, for example, Louis Freedberg in the San Francisco Chronicle (June 12, 1999) and Anthony Lewis in the New York Times (August 23, 1999). R. W. Apple Jr.’s report in the New York Times showed how Clinton’s trip in particular brought focus on the “continued struggle” to establish a capitalist economy (March 28, 1998). Well-known South African authors such as Mark Mathabane (June 4, 1999) and Sindiwe Magona (August 4,



Vexed Ties


1998) contributed op-ed pieces in the New York Times on violence and race hatred in South Africa. But in general most representations and discussions of the continent in the United States reflected the cliché of Africa as a single entity. Sometimes this was fodder for humor, as on an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway on the WB network that actually aired in South Africa while I was there. The host Drew Carey described Madagascar as “the island off the coast of that country Africa.” The actors thought it was funny that he could not tell the difference between a continent and a country, but the joke falls flat given how common such a misconception is. This homogenizing image was even acknowledged in the business press in an article by Henry Cauvin that examined the challenges posed by Africa’s image to South Africa’s attempts to promote the country as a tourist destination: “Talk to travel agents in the Unites States or Britain who specialize in South Africa, and they report the same queries from curious but confused customers: Is there toilet paper in the bathrooms? Are the roads paved? Do the people speak English? Are there restaurants? Do we have to bring our own food” (New York Times, January 15, 2000)? On August 23, 2000, Oprah opened her show on ABC by asking, “You all do know Africa is a continent?” This was Oprah’s Book Club, which featured a discussion of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Oprah was amused that some of her audience had written in assuming that Africa was a single country. This was before Africa and especially South Africa became a common arena for the Oprah show and for Oprah’s own spiritual journey. Many people, though, had recommended this book to me or mentioned it as a source of their knowledge about Africa. The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of a southern Baptist family’s mission tour to the Congo in the late 1950s. The story of the family parallels that of the Congo’s first democratic election and the assassination of Lumumba, its first democratically elected president. It is very direct about the involvement of the colonial power Belgium and of the United States in this assassination and their role in installing the dictator Mbutu Sese Seko into power (Kingsolver 1999). Yet, despite the book’s attention to history, it was never clear on the show whether Barbara Kingsolver was talking about now or then. She spoke eloquently about a singular Congo culture and the harshness of the landscape and about how she thought that, compared with Africans, Americans are spiritually impoverished. All participants spoke of Africa as being without history. One black reader thought the book “took her to Congo” despite wondering before she began to read what a white woman could tell her about



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Africa. A white woman who spent her childhood in Africa described how she doesn’t feel African in Africa or American in America—in other words, that Africa (no country) touched her so deeply that she no longer belongs anywhere; Africa was too powerful. In July 1999 I attended “An Evening with Thenjiwe Mtintso” at Malcolm X Middle School in Berkeley. The Deputy Secretary General of the African National Congress (ANC), described by her hosts as the “highest ranking woman in the African National Congress party,” gave a lecture called “South Africa: The Struggle Continues.” Mtinso focused on HIV/AIDS, and she attempted to show how American conservatism posed challenges to South African development goals. The participants pretty much ignored her argument and mostly asked questions about world trade. This was in sharp contrast to later meetings I attended when HIV/AIDS had become the only issue of importance in Africa. Similarly the positive press that dominated most of Clinton’s administration related to his attempts to establish better trade relationships with the continent came to an abrupt halt at the beginning of 2000, when the issue of AIDS began to dominate American media attention to Africa. This was apparent in the op-ed pieces in the New York Times by authors like Nadine Gordimer (December 1, 2000) and in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kai Wright (March 5, 2000), as well as in news magazines (McGeary 2001). This press suggested that whatever hope Africa may have had to develop solid capitalist democracies was completely drowned by this epidemic. The only other issue on Africa that drew similar passion to the AIDS crisis was the PBS series hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Wonders of the African World, which aroused debate between African writers about the relationships between Africa and America (see Gates 2000, Mazrui 2000 for details of this debate). Bay Area discussions of Africa throughout 1999 and early 2000 were dominated by the mobilization of all the local African interest groups and individuals for the organization of the Regional Summit on Africa. It was a nationally driven project that described itself in its various program documents as “an unprecedented nationwide effort to create a shared policy agenda to guide United States relations with the countries of Africa; educate the American public about Africa; and broaden and strengthen the network of Africa’s supporters in the United States.” The World Affairs Council was the home for the organization of the Pacific Regional Summit at which representatives of ten Pacific states met in San Francisco over two days to discuss the policy papers produced by the national body and to attend various Africa-oriented cultural and media events. The



Vexed Ties


participants emphasized the need to use this opportunity to counteract the perception of Africa as a continent without history, to address the way that Africa is represented in the United States, and to develop a map of Africa that illustrates its diversity within and across national borders. Yet, the poster designed for the Regional Summit on Africa in San Francisco was of a leopard’s face enlarged and marked by various artifacts of a generalized African tribal culture including masks and beads, which evoked the dominance of wildlife as an African trope, but with some exotic nonspecific cultural counterpoints. The participants involved in planning the preliminary regional summit in San Francisco were a disparate group whose only uniting quality was their interest in Africa. They ranged from leftist political activists from organizations, such as Global Exchange involved in protesting American corporate interests and activities in Africa, to individuals who wanted to build their business connections with Africa. I was there as an anthropologist of images of Africa in America and as a volunteer. This diversity, not surprisingly, produced a great deal of tension in organizing committee meetings especially when the question of sponsors was discussed. Activists were deeply disturbed by sponsorship from corporations such as Chevron1 and Monsanto,2 whose activities in Africa were then the focus of debate and outrage. In the end, though, their money was accepted. Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco, welcomed participants to the Pacific West Coast Regional Summit with a letter that spoke to the spirit of much commentary on Africa at the time: “The nations of Africa have an important role to play in the economic political and cultural future of our world in the next century. As these countries continue to develop, it is vital that we establish a dialogue that will ensure good relations with their leaders, citizens, and all who will help to guide them in the rapidly evolving global marketplace.” On February 16, 2000, I flew to Washington DC to attend the National Summit on Africa’s five-day Dialogue and Celebration of Africa, titled Africa and America: Partners in the New Millennium. Over 2300 Americans and Africans came together in Washington DC to lay out a plan of action for United States–Africa relations. The stated framework was of a grassroots-based and participative policywriting process. Leonard H. Robinson, president and CEO of the National Summit on Africa, welcomed opening delegates who were then addressed by Madeleine K. Albright, the then U.S. secretary of state, and by President Clinton. Despite a heavy presence from the African diplomatic corps, the only African head of state present was Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, another controversial choice for activists at 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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the meetings, given that his government was being accused of human rights abuses (Adar and Munyae 2001). Clinton’s presence, however, ensured a packed house, a large press contingent, and a drumming performance welcoming the “big chief” onto the stage. Following the theme of the summit, Clinton and all the supporting acts essentially made the argument that “Africa matters!” Clinton was enormously charismatic and appeared extremely sincere, especially in his insistence that his trip to Africa “changed his life.” This claim placed him among almost everybody I met who has traveled to the continent. Tourism, he said, should be promoted partly because airports, built to support tourism, also enable other trade and industry by providing hubs to the outside world. Clinton argued that the end of colonization had not changed the perception of Africa as a place of colorful flags, names, and animals, but that globalization would. Africa was always referred to as a single entity. In general he talked about his trip to Africa as wonderful and unforgettable, except for the challenges posed by HIV/AIDS and the suffering it had wrought. Yet he dealt with AIDS in Africa as a cultural phenomenon and passionately avowed (apparently, he claimed against the advice of his speech writers) that Americans cannot allow cultural relativity to paralyze them against doing something about preventing the spread of AIDS in Africa. The meetings were underlain by a belief that if Americans could just get a real understanding of Africa, they would support better policy. It was unclear what such a “real Africa” would look like and to what extent grassroots American organizations and activists really do contribute to policy, especially foreign policy. The National Summit echoed many of the themes that dominate the Africa-centered events and organizations that I observed or participated in over the course of my research and that were a factor in influencing the experiences of travelers to South Africa. These included the assumption of a natural connection between black Africans and African Americans and of the existence of a single African identity, as well as the homogenization of the African continent, while simultaneously bemoaning just this gesture. A powerful representation of Africa to Americans at the beginning of 2000 was the Africa: One Continent. Many Worlds exhibition developed by the Chicago Field Museum, which I visited in Chicago and San Francisco. This exhibition was developed in part to attract black visitors to the museum,3 and while its aim was to introduce visitors to contemporary Africa, it was in large part focused on the African diaspora in America. The exhibit began with an introduction to Dakar city life by using a reconstructed, almost comic-book, urban space 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


Vexed Ties


peopled by life-size black-and-white cutouts of photographs of locals making tea, doing the washing, and welcoming the visitor to Dakar below a large cutout of a colorfully painted car rapide. Introducing visitors to Africa through the urban spaces of Dakar was innovative in a world of museum exhibits more often than not focused on the exotic aspects of African life past and present. There was an obvious presence of non-African artifacts such as a Chicago Bulls T-shirt on the washing line and Marietou’s (the Wolof woman whose cutout welcomed visitors) Louis Vuitton-look-alike handbag. Yet Senegal remained within an ethnographic present with no hinterland or diversity. From this beginning in Dakar the exhibit avoided developing a grand narrative but took the visitor through a fun and child-friendly tour of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on a caravan across the Sahara with the Tuareg, to the art of the Cameroon and to the Great Rift Valley. Visitors could learn how conservationists do scientific research in Africa and about local and international debates about conservation policies, especially around mountain Gorillas in Rwanda and Uganda. Finally the transition from “African to Slave” was represented and discussed. The San Francisco presentation of the traveling version of this exhibit was smaller, resulting in different countries being squashed together and confusing themes and regions. The overall theme (logo) of the exhibit was One continent. Many worlds. The exhibit designers explicitly addressed the basic stereotypes that they identified through research on images of Africa in America. These included the homogenization of the continent, whether based on the good (beautiful nature and people) or the bad (war, violence, disease). The exhibit, however, still seemed to cement the singularity of all things African. The exhibition’s focus on changing stereotypes meant that it avoided the bad news, so the only tragedy that the exhibit addressed was slavery. It presented Africa without wars— any history of colonialism, famines, droughts, disease, urban poverty, or political repression. This focus on how African Americans might want to perceive Africa meant that the exhibit also excluded recent hopeful political and social transitions throughout sub-Saharan Africa. On the whole, though, this was a representation of a continent very unlike what most Americans are used to seeing in the news media. In her review of the exhibit, Sidney Kasfir characterized this as typical of the schizophrenia of representations of Africa, which evokes simultaneously the ethnographic present of essentialized kingships and well-functioning traditional societies versus the horrors of the hopeless continent as seen on CNN (Kasfir 1995).



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conflicts over the way Africa is represented are indirectly played out through a variety of Diaspora constituencies and not with Africans in Africa. It is an interesting fact of American political life that both the museums and the Diaspora communities assume that Americans of African descent are the legitimate voices to be heard on the issue of representing Africa (a view that would not be universally shared in Africa). The complication which it involves, is that for most African-Americans, Africa is a cultural abstraction not informed by direct experience. (Kasfir 1995, 50)

The African diaspora, in its importance to American political life, can in such representation perpetrate erasures of Africans. As Bayo Holsey argues, “We have long understood that the African diaspora makes use of the figures of both Africa and the slave trade . . . . In the process, however, it often reduces Africa to its womb. Rather than viewing the African continent as a dynamic place of ongoing struggles, it views it instead as its prehistory, as a remnant of a time that is now dead” (Holsey 2008, 237). Africans thus become the victims of even the best-intentioned and well-researched representations. In July 1999 South Africa was featured along with Rumania and the American state of New Hampshire in the Smithsonian’s annual celebration of folk culture, The Festival on the Mall. While through the 1970s the festival had included African diasporic cultures in a general sense, only Senegal in 1990 and The Cape Verdes in 1995 had been featured in past festivals, and Mali was subsequently represented in 2003, so this was a rare appearance by an African nation on the Mall. Richard Kurin, who had been director of the festival since the 1980s, describes the Smithsonian as “America’s Institution” and the festival as being a form of cultural brokerage, bringing folk cultures together (Kurin 1997). The South African program was meant to highlight “the role of handicraft and statecraft in the formulation of a new South African national identity, economy, and political democracy,” according to James Early in his piece in the festival program on the historical context of South Africa at the festival. The catalogue for South Africa included a piece by Rufus Matibe called “Crafting the Economic Renaissance of the Rainbow Nation,” which described what the South African experience would offer: The visitor moving through this Festival will be walking along the path traveled by millions of South Africans in search of social, economic, and political comfort. This road will take you from traditional and decorative murals



Kasfir’s analysis of the exhibit shows how

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South Africa’s camp welcomed visitors to the Rainbow Nation and offered tastes of crafts from every province, each carefully selected to illustrate the nation’s “Unity in Diversity” through representative ethnic groups. Children were taught to play South African games such as Bok in die Hok, Moraba-raba, and Kgati. Talks were given on rural and urban architecture and the role of shebeens (apartheid-era illegal purveyors of alcohol in South African townships) in the economy, social life, and political struggle. Demonstrations on how to cook South African dishes like bobotie, matabellam vuswa, inkobe, breyani, and melktert were on offer. In fact these cooking demonstrations illustrated the most diverse range of South African folk traditions. Most craft areas featured those perceived as indigenous or, as was the case with the batik work of colored women from Cape Town, imported by slavery. The recipes being demonstrated, however, included a rich assortment of Indian, Dutch, Indonesian, and black South African influences. South African urban life was largely elided amid the rural crafts and identities represented as making up the new South African nation. Although New Hampshire dominated the festival in space and numbers, South Africa’s dance and music tent was without question the most popular spot on the Mall. From Marimba to Tsongo and Tswana traditionals to Zulu-Indian fusion, South Africa’s tent rocked and nobody needed translations. But a lack of interpreters among the South African craftspeople was a problem, especially given that the Rumanians were well supported by interpreters. Also, unlike the Rumanians, who sat behind tables, the South Africans craftspeople sat on slightly raised platforms, as if on the ground, and had to try to answer questions in struggling English from the floor. The impression was frighteningly evocative of a living museum—women silently representing ancient craft forms to Americans and Europeans looking down on them. While these events and images provided Americans with encounters with Africa in the United States, American travelers had to struggle with the ways in which such educational and cultural experiences have powerfully structured their perceptions of Africa and Africans (Brantlinger 1985, Keim 1999, McClintock 1995, Mudimbe 1988).



of rural Venda to contemporary murals influenced by struggle for liberation and found on the walls and bridges in Soweto; from grass woven baskets of Kwazulu-Natal to wares made in Gauteng from telephone wire; from traditional beaded Xhosa cloth to hand printed banners and T-shirts bearing the logos of political parties.

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One image that has consistently been part of the way Americans see Africa is as a hopeless place that Americans can save and where they can do good. The continent has often been the space where Americans find the myths necessary to be citizens of a global power while maintaining their belief that they are good people (Keim 1999, 8). While the meaning and interpretation of these images are not static, their continuity in form is one of the characteristics of Americans’ relationship to Africa that this book both exposes and tries to understand. This continuity is highlighted by the experiences—described in Chapter 3—in which American travelers seeking adventure end up finding ways to do good, while Americans going to Africa to do good also find some adventure. This book will show how this control and possession is in part disturbed by a reverse gaze and a dialogue between Americans and South Africans, even if only through the closed windows of a mini bus. Through this dialogue American travelers, while controlling their encounter with Africa, cannot entirely control their encounter with America and their own sense of self.



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3

B a c k t o N at u r e : A m e r i c a n s ’ G r e at A f r i c a n A dv e n t u r e

“Is this everybody’s first trip to Africa?” one guide asked on Sunday at the start of a safari. “Yeeeess!” eight rows of camera-ready adventurers on the all-terrain motor “lorry” roared back, as if they did not know the difference.

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n this article in the New York Times Mireya Navarro describes taking one of the first safaris at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom in Florida (April 16, 1998). Her report, though, begins with the story of collisions and setbacks as Disney was struggling with injuries and sickness among its animals—including the death of some from being run over by the park’s safari vehicles. Most Americans can easily visit this site of encounters and collisions between an imagined Africa and Americans. Disney World’s Animal Kingdom in Florida offers visitors an opportunity to be tourists in a picture-perfect representation of Africa that includes not just a safari redux but an adventure in saving animals from poachers. I was able to go on this safari in Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom in October 2000. The park is an extremely sophisticated zoo where the environment looks a bit like the purchase of Stonehenge by some wealthy industrialist, in the sense that it appears to have been literally dug up from the most African of game parks and reinstalled in the park, baobab and all. The animals are essentially caged, but by the subtle use of trenches carefully hidden by vegetation and other natural formations, so that they appear free to roam wild. The animals are so close together and in such numbers that it is possible in a rapid



Chapter


twenty-minute safari to see an amazing range of hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, lions, giraffes, zebras, ostriches, and various buck or antelope from a very close range. This must make it very difficult for game parks in Kenya or South Africa to attract tourists to the concept of getting up at 4:00 a.m. to catch the best animal-viewing time at dawn with the risk that nothing will be stirring that morning at the water hole. Disney’s Animal Kingdom also offers a steam train to the research center where visitors can observe the behind-thescenes research and maintenance required by the animals that, despite all appearances to the contrary, are caged. On arriving in Disney’s Africa, the scene is of a busy town square masquerading as Mombasa during some idyllic, but world-weary, colonial period. Dressed in the Kente cloth that marks African ancestry for Americans rather than any particular place in Africa, musicians entertain guests with familiar West African rhythms. All signs and all greetings are in Kiswahili, a lingua franca in large parts of East Africa, but only one of thousands of languages spoken on the continent. It did mean that I had the rather surreal experience of being greeted in Kiswahili by a Tswana-speaking Botswanan in one of the stores. As with all Disney sites, the highly sophisticated re-creation of an imagined Africa is a front for the Disney stores that fill almost every structure that isn’t serving food. Standing in line for the safari, one sees a video presentation by a Kenyan game ranger explaining the problem of poaching that is decimating animals in East African parks. At the head of the line I got to climb into a land-rover-like vehicle made up like the large overland trucks that normally trek from London to Harare, Maun or Johannesburg. A Disney worker from Africa drove this truck and acted as tour guide. It is possible to get a visa specifically for working in Disney’s international fantasies, and all the employees in Disney World’s Africa come from the continent. My guide was a white woman from Swaziland who was educated in South Africa. The guide drove us along a distressed path over rickety, about-to-fall-down bridges, at the sort of speed that would get a driver kicked out of any game park on the continent. The speed was a tough balance between staying behind the truck in front and ahead of the truck behind us. All the while she was chatting to an “expert” in an airplane flying over the park looking for poachers. This disembodied expert shared bits of information on the animals via a two-way radio. Inevitably the plane spotted poachers that we were dispatched to find, having already driven past their recently abandoned camp. We reached an army-like truck, where the poachers were being loaded, just in time for us to



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not need to give any assistance, and continued through the rest of the park. Disney seems unparalleled in providing people with what they expect. It’s as if they were able to take all stereotypes, all popular images of the continent, many of which I described in Chapters 1 and 2, and created a place that would not surprise, not shock, but simply confirm for its visitors just what Africa is like. Africa, according to Disney, is a single homogeneous place where everybody speaks Kiswahili, dances to the sounds of West Africa, wears Kente cloth, and lives in attractively distressed eighteenth-century European buildings. The only archetypal image that I might have expected and that was missing was of Egypt. Except that in a stroke of genius that indicates the sophisticated understanding of Disney’s market researchers, the train to the research center is straight out of an Agatha Christie-type movie such as Death on the Nile combined with Murder on the Orient Express. Disney, however, chooses here to engage with a social issue in Africa, something it does not do in the neighboring Asian Kingdom, a space that draws on past cultural glories very much in the tradition of the Indiana Jones movies. In this Africa the people’s main concern is the poaching of those animals that should be a primary source of income through tourism. This extraordinary choice reveals Disney’s ability to tap into every conscious and unconscious vision of Africa in America that was not ugly or violent. The Animal Kingdom at Disney World does not leave Africa either to the animals alone or to an idyllic or lost past. This would, given the dominant understanding of Africa in America as a place of suffering, beg the question of Africa’s people and their suffering in the present. But by giving visitors insight into Africa’s most pressing problem—the illegal poaching of big game— and showing them how to rescue Africa from this plight, Disney’s African experience can be enjoyed without worrying about the other human realities of Africa. This safari is, therefore, a remarkable reconstruction of exactly what Americans would expect from Africa. As the manager of Walt Disney World, Margaret J. King, said, “people have long ‘understood’ other cultures not through actual contact but through mediated experience and imagination” (Mintz 1998, 47). A similarly cyclical relationship between America and Africa and between tourists’ expectations and their experiences is apparent during sundowners held on an Out of Africa tour described by the anthropologist Ed Bruner (Bruner 2001). The tourists were serenaded by park staff singing the Angolan spiritual Kum Ba Yah and the song Jumbo Bwana, an



B a c k t o N at u r e


anthem to tourists that uses the phrase Hakuna Matata (Kiswahili, meaning no worries), made famous in the Disney movie The Lion King. Both songs have been interpreted and frequently used to represent Africanness and blackness in American popular culture and are now being re-represented to Americans in Africa. Just like visitors to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, “the Americans who have presumably made the journey in order to experience African culture, instead encounter American cultural content that represents an American image of African culture” (Bruner 2001, 893). Bruner describes the space in which Americans sit on the escarpment as the sun sets, drinking cocktails and listening to young Kenyan men sing songs as a touristic borderzone, a space that is neither American nor African but where culture, without politics or history, can be reinvented and reinterpreted. In 2000, while I was following young Americans traveling to South Africa, television in the United States was offering an intriguing picture of the world outside its borders. This was the year reality television shifted its focus from the trials and tribulations of a group of young American travelers á la MTV’s Road Rules to the introduction of the cutthroat competition and exotic locales of CBS’ Survivor and The Amazing Race. I spent much of 1999 and the beginning of 2000 attending orientations where study abroad students and tourists heading to southern Africa were warned about the physical dangers of the continent. In contrast, the first season of The Amazing Race sent its contestants to Zambia to do a gorge swing at Victoria Falls. This conjunction of Africa with adventure, so reminiscent of nineteenth-century narratives, was bemusing. It seemed to be in direct contradiction to the otherwise dominant discourses around Africa’s dangers and health risks in the present. This disjuncture started to make sense, however, in terms of America’s relationship to Africa, revealed both through my observation of travelers and the popular culture about Africa in the United States. Mireya Navarro’s article quoted at the beginning of this chapter is probably unjust in suggesting that visitors to the Animal Kingdom confuse it with an actual safari in Africa. But Disney’s safari is remarkable in not even attempting to be an authentic Africa. It is in fact something quite different—offering Americans an authentic African experience as they have always imagined it. Disney’s Animal Kingdom is a work of genius worthy of these masters of the sublime. Not only does it structure and reflect American fantasies of Africa and Americans’ expectations for their travel there, but it shows how appropriations are more effective than disappearances. David Hughes shows this in his work on white Zimbabweans who appropriated Lake 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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Kariba as part of a fantasy landscape of white progress and success, not by annihilating the Tsonga residents of the flooded lands but by rendering them irrelevant (Hughes 2005). Hiding in plain sight as part of a landscape, making people irrelevant rather than absent, much as Disney does, is a much more effective silencing tool than wiping people out. It also creates the perfect landscape on which to find oneself. This project began as an evaluation of how travel to Africa, especially South Africa, can disrupt the ways Americans construct their images of the continent and its people. American travelers and television and other media representations of Africa show multiple versions of an imagined Africa. But they also reveal an idea of an Africa that exists in and for America, a space that in its namelessness becomes a blank slate on which Americans can write themselves. This chapter describes the expectations and encounters that American travelers have of and with Africa and Africans. It shows how penetrating adventures and photographing from a distance help travelers find this Africa that gives them a space to find themselves. I explore these encounters through the travelers whose journeys I have observed directly and indirectly, as well as through other travelers who have reflected on or had their journeys described in various forms of media, including Web-based magazines and blogs, television, film, and marketing brochures. This description of Johannesburg in “The Story of Edward Carter,” written by Bonnie, who toured with Global Exchange during the AIDS summit in Durban in 2000, evokes an interesting trope in the ways Americans’ experienced Africa: Edward Carter told his story in the most amazing setting. For one thing, the day was cold and windy. During all our time in South Africa, we had forgotten that it was winter in July. Except for that day, our July in South Africa was cloudless, warm and still. But on the day I heard Mr. Carter, the wind howled over the tailings from the mines that encircled Johannesburg like a tribe of crouching coyotes. A cloud of yellow dust blew against the van, rattling the doors, blotting out the early morning sun as the temperature fell to forty degrees. By the time we sat down to eat that night the winter sky had brightened, the wind blew the dust over the horizon, and the moon rose, bright and clear and full over the city, lighting even the crevices occupied by the homeless and the dispossessed. In the moonlight, the gold of the hills, the moon and the streets glowed as one.

Bonnie describes the most obvious marker of Johannesburg’s history of mining, an industrial history deeply implicated in South African colonialism and apartheid, as crouching coyotes. She takes a powerful 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers




social and cultural image in South Africa and gives it an animal character, a wild animal character. This is an animal image that in America evokes cunning and joking. Donna Haraway has argued that the coyote is a figure that confuses the boundaries of our cultural and social expectations in the age of hypertechnology sufficiently for us to understand the spaces we inhabit as both cultural and biological beings (Haraway 1990). But while Americans can strive to inhabit a world where they can blur the boundaries between nature and culture, when they tell stories about Africa that blend nature and culture in this Harrawesque way, they risk making African wildlife human and African people part of the natural landscape. This blending of nature and culture begins with the ways that many African destinations are branded and marketed to Americans. The South African Tourism Board’s pamphlet Explore South Africa informed potential travelers in 2000 that, [h]istorically, indigenous cultures were, at best, given a passing patronizing nod. These cultures have now burst in the consciousness with 11 official languages and the blend of East, West and Africa creating the new South Africa. Local music (especially our jazz), cuisine, art, architecture, literature and theatre are typically South African. Our culture does not only include the present; anthropologists have found here the oldest remains yet of our own species, Homo sapiens, in fossils and artifacts. More recent inhabitants of the Southern tip of Africa, the nomadic San people, have also left invaluable traces of their past. Their priceless rock art painted in caves and on rocks is one of the world’s richest art heritages, etcetera.

In this pamphlet and other marketing tools South Africa brands itself as a land of possibilities, offering traditional African culture and the heritage of colonial settlers but also the culture of poverty and of political struggle, all equally powerful, if imagined, cultural identities for South Africans. Cultural and heritage tourism in South Africa in fact rests heavily on this legacy of cultural identities created by apartheid. Trips, an adventure travel magazine aimed at alternative travelers featured an article titled “The New South Africa, Same as the Old South Africa?” It portrayed a mixed picture of a country that is great to visit but still just as full of poverty (Wynne 1999). An article on Cape Town in the same travel magazine focused on the apartheid history of this city and described what was essentially a tour of apartheid trouble spots (Lindow 1999). As a result the cultural and heritage sites that have caught the imagination of the South African tourism industry and the foreign tourism market include such diverse spots as



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Shaka Land, an ex-film set in rural Kwazulu, turned into a hotel and cultural village that sells the Zulus as warrior nation; The BaSotho Cultural Village, on the border with Lesotho, invoking traditional rural South African life; Townships, the areas originally designated for black workers outside cities and towns during the apartheid regime. Visits to townships often include an overnight stay with a local family; Anglo-Boer and Anglo-Zulu war battlefields, South Africa’s most popular heritage tourist destinations; Voortrekker farmhouses, whose tales of survival in the wild closely resemble those told of pioneers in the American West; Shebeens, previously illegal pubs, in most city townships and now even recreated in historically white, upper-class suburbs; Robben Island, an ex-leper colony and a famous prison of famous people, including President Nelson Mandela and now a nature reserve and museum; and Hector Peterson Memorial, the site of, and memorial to, the first deaths in the June 1976 student uprising in Soweto.

Most of the encounters I describe between American travelers and Africa took place physically in the city of Cape Town and around the University of Cape Town (UCT). UCT is an impressive, ivy-covered campus nestled on the mountainside that overlooks the vast Cape Flats, which many research participants would visit only as part of their township tours. During the struggle against apartheid, the university, a progressive campus, was host to a diverse range of anti-apartheid organizations and was known as Moscow on the Hill, because of the perception that all students were supporters of the African National Congress and, therefore by definition in local terms, the South African Communist Party. In the 1980s when I was a student there, UCT was frequently the site of large demonstrations along the highway that divides Main Campus from Middle Campus. On the drive from Cape Town’s international airport, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the red brick buildings that dominate the central part of the campus almost immediately on hitting the highway into the city. These are just south of the paler blocks of Groote Schuur hospital, home of the first heart transplant, teaching hospital for the University of Cape Town’s medical school, and a large public hospital. Both hospital and university are overshadowed by the massive bulk of the mountain that defines most visitors’ sense of topography in the Cape as it splits False Bay from Table Bay, the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic (if only allegorically), the tanning beaches from the surfing





beaches. The mountains are always green, massive, bulky, and stolid, as befits a mountain that has presided over Robben Island just off its slopes in Table Bay throughout its deep and heinous history. It is a beautiful vista, but as it is almost always first glimpsed as one is driving along a highway almost overrun by the makeshift shacks of township residents, it has a dark side. Most visitors to UCT first arrive at the base of the mountain in the towns of Rondebosch, Rosebank, or Observatory that ring lower campus. Rondebosch, often described by the American visitors as a village, is the commercial hub that services the students’ need for bookshops and fast-food joints. It is a mixture of beautiful old, privately owned houses, many of which were seized from their original owners who were categorized as colored during the implementation of the Population Registration Act in the 1950s, and apartment blocks owned by the university and bought during the 1980s to house the anticipated large numbers of black students and their families. Observatory has gone from a working-class neighborhood packed tightly with Victorian row houses flanking narrow streets to housing a grungy student and lefty population in the 1980s, through gentrification as Oregon pine floors, steel-pressed high ceilings, and bathrooms built onto the back of the kitchen became fashionable in the 1990s. By 2000 it housed a mixture of young professionals and wealthy, often American, students. Observatory remains attractive for its village-like atmosphere, its remaining funkiness and edginess still present in some of the multiple restaurants and clubs along the Lower Main Road, and because it is one of the most integrated areas of the city, where it is possible to hang out in a pub with South Africans of all colors. Many of the larger properties had been converted into furnished and serviced digs for foreign students. It was impossible to go anywhere in Observatory during the school year without bumping into large contingents of Americans at the internet café or their favorite bar/restaurant, the Obs Café. Observatory is a long, but not impossible, walk from campus made tough by the last few hundred meters of walking straight up a mountain, and most students simply stroll up to Main Road and hail a combi taxi. These minivan jitneys, which developed to meet the desperate need for public transport to and from townships into the city, scream along the main roads of all South African cities, callers yelling out their destination and never hesitating to screech to a halt wherever and whenever for a potential passenger. Mastery over these so-called black taxis becomes very quickly a marker of fitting in, although the students were frequently warned—sadly—to never travel in one alone



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or to climb into an empty combi because of the real possibility of being mugged. The students would take these taxis along the main road to the Rosebank dormitories, where registered students can take the Jammie shuttle up the hill, a service provided by the university to drop students from lower campus and medical campus on Main Campus in front of Jameson Hall, the central and dominant building of the university. The students with whom I spent most of my time in Cape Town were living in a large, relatively luxurious house in Observatory. The house had been converted by the landlord to take advantage of the study-abroad industry. It had a large garden and a swimming pool with an outdoor braai (grill, or BBQ) area built in brick. The house itself had been a fairly typical Victorian one. Its attic had been converted into multiple rooms, and extra rooms had been added outside to accommodate large groups. Separate quarters for the domestic worker still existed in the back next to the laundry room. The house was decorated in a faux-colonial bed and breakfast style. This meant floral covered cushions on the rattan furnishings and lots of pictures of horses and hunting hounds and stylized prize farm animals. The public areas, kitchen, living room, and enclosed patio were kept tidy, although everybody’s shared bedrooms were generally in a state of chaos. Photography was a central concern for these student travelers to South Africa. It was important for them to go home with photographs that showed in easily understood ways where they had been. While Disney’s Animal Kingdom reflects back to American visitors their expectations of Africa, tourists reflect their own expectations through taking photographs. Photographs have long given shape to modern travel and tourism and have contributed to the power of the tourist gaze in capturing sites and people. Tourists are driven to track down images they have already seen (Crawshaw and Urry 1997, Little 1991). One student traveler, Kyle, had lots of panorama shots of the coast from his visit to Camps Bay, where the students often went partying. He felt that these reflected being in Africa for his buddies back home. Most photographs on display once back in the United States, though, were of friends and their families, of social events, parties, and dinners marking the passage of time and the development of lifelong friendships. One of the most frequent refrains I heard from students once they had returned from the safaris that they all thought they should take was about whether they had got a good picture of the lion they had seen. Shooting with cameras on safari, as Haraway illuminated, has of





course replaced shooting with guns (Haraway 1990, Sontag 2001). The MTV’s Road Rules Semester at Sea episode in Kenya particularly highlighted this. Here the participants were sent out on a game drive to compete with each other to take the best photographs. Many of them were deeply frustrated that the best sights were at night, when it was harder to take a good picture. These students of course were required to see their photographs as a competition for the best. But the feeling expressed by many travelers is that there is little point in seeing a lion kill if you cannot capture it on film. One reporter, Amanda Jones, spent her time on a safari in Tanzania searching for that ultimate sign of an African experience and eventually finds it: “After a tense hour, the giraffe turned away and the lioness ran back in, gathered up the now dead baby and dragged it into a thorn bush” (San Francisco Examiner Magazine, March 14, 1999). Whatever else she experienced on this trip becomes just a sideshow; the scene of a lion kill had been recorded, and so she could lay claim, seemingly without irony, to having experienced Africa: “The theatre of survival was finished. Another trip to Africa was over. I had seen my lions.” The nonprofit Global Exchange gave their Reality Tour participants a photographer’s code along with their code of ethics for tourists that reminded people that “there are times when using a camera can make you feel uncomfortable and cause resentment among those whose photos you take” and included the following rules for good tourist photography: ● ● ● ● ● ●

Leave your camera behind—just for today Ask permission Keep your encounters close Send a print Pay up cheerfully No smash and grab [taking pictures without the subjects’ knowledge]

Travelers concerned with these rules often return home able to reflect in complex ways on what they saw and experienced and yet at the same time full of the expected tales of adventure and beautiful vistas and people. Bonnie, a member of a Global Exchange Reality Tour in 2000 to the World AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, was an especially thoughtful traveler who wrote about her experiences in South Africa in order to make sense of them. She shared with me some very evocative reflections on her encounters with South Africa and South Africans in



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the form of a series of short stories, including “The Story of Edward Carter” that I quoted above, that she wrote when she returned to Chicago. They were written much like the students’ journals as a way to make sense of her experiences. Unlike these journals, they are written with a bit of distance, but they reveal the confusions and richness of travel encounters no matter how brief. They are also honest enough to highlight how journeys begun on a trip abroad, continue long after the travelers return, and do not always follow a clear trajectory from ignorance to knowledge or from assumption to understanding. In a story called “The Black and White Man,” about visiting a craft store in the Western Cape, Bonnie reveals that despite her thoughtfulness, and Global Exchange’s rules, she tried to take photographs from a distance: I didn’t come to South Africa to see coffee mugs. So, while everyone else was going through the stuff in the shop, I watched the scene outside in the courtyard. There were ten or twelve black boys, all very thin, all about fifteen, all completely silent, all throwing mortar on a wall, setting concrete blocks, carefully checking the level, tapping, coaxing, nudging the blocks into position, then shaping the grout . . . Every so often, the boys would check the time. Only one boy had a watch. At some moment, an instructor came out from a room down the courtyard a bit and blew a whistle. The boys dropped their tools, ran down to the far end of the narrow grassy yard and grabbed a ball. As I watched them, they made the transition from serious apprentices to boys passing a football to each other, screaming and running, knotting up, shoving off. They were just boys playing football. There was an almost uniform joy in their release and so I stood in the doorway, taking picture after picture trying to capture that spark of boyhood before I had to leave, before it was callused over . . . John [Bonnie’s tour guide] came out to watch me—he had an enigmatic little smile on his face. I thought that he was interested in what interested me. In the first couple of days, he had been surprised when I yelled for him to stop the car so I could take a picture of an old granny crossing the street, or a group of boys scrabbling through a dumpster. I think at first he thought it was the photography that interested me. So he would point out lovely vistas, sunsets, Table Mountain in silhouette, things like that. He had followed me around as I ran through the botanic garden looking for just the right Protea flower for a picture for my husband. He was sure that I was some kind of fanatic, fantastic amateur photographer. “What do you see?” he said. “Just this soccer game, these boys are wonderful.” He looked down the yard, where I had the camera pointed. Two of the boys suddenly became aware of





us watching them, taking pictures. They stopped, came up to us, dressed in their African rags, mismatched shorts and shirts and bits and pieces with prints and plaids and stripes all in a crazy quilt, with American cast offs and African prints, and they gathered in front of the camera for a picture. I have it here— eight or nine boys in a makeshift group, with the soccer ball held up in the middle. Several of them are grinning straight on. They have their arms around each other. There is a kind of glory, a riotous splash to the clothes of even the poorest Africans. It takes a while for the American eye, hogtied by years of concentrating on symmetry and neutral colors, to be able to appreciate it. After a while it is wonderful that people dress in colors and patterns that come from opposite cultures in designs that clash and work together in ways we cannot see at first. It is the opposite of restrained, simple, elegant—it has a beauty that we can only slowly learn to know, but only if we are willing to discard the golden mean.

Here Bonnie suggests the draw of taking photographs from a distance and the pleasure of being spotted doing it. Yet what she sees is very much structured by her struggle against an American eye. She is looking for something that is not there—symmetry and order—only to reject that in the interest of discovering a different, but recognizable, African culture. Bonnie’s stories, as with the photographs that the student travelers and other tourists took, and especially those they display, illustrate how travel experiences simultaneously affirm and disturb familiar assumptions. Like Bonnie, students often took photographs from a place where they felt distant enough to feel unobserved themselves. Katie, a normally gregarious and outgoing study-abroad student, for example, stood across a square pointing her camera at an unaware family of Sufi Muslims, wondering whether she could capture their image quickly enough for the hat diversity project she was doing for their core class on Cape Town social and cultural history. If the students felt uncomfortable, mostly because they and their cameras were being observed, they simply avoided taking a picture. I never actually observed a traveler go and ask people whether they could take their photograph. The one group that all travelers felt comfortable taking photographs of and displaying at home was of young children. These young kids clamor around travelers hoping mostly for handouts, but just as happy to pose smiling for the camera, preferably with one of the foreigners. The photographs that I viewed with travelers after their return to America, when not of friends, were dominated by these amorphous, undistinguishable groups of grinning, ragged children with large, knowing eyes that seem to capture the imagination of all visitors. These are the archetypal images of the continent, the ones most



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often spoken of before arriving in South Africa and the ones most often seen in news media in the United States, no longer as orphans of war or famine but now as orphans of AIDS (Bornstein 2001). The tension for travelers to Africa between being part of the scene and remaining at a distance comes to fruition in the new version of a safari. The best way now to capture animals on film is from a balloon. Most game regions in Africa now offer this option to their wealthier customers. Serengeti Balloon safaris describe the experience they offer on their website thus: At dawn we take off, rising as the sun rises and float in whichever direction the winds of the morning take us. Your pilot can precisely control the altitude of your balloon: sometimes flying at treetop height, sometimes lower, offering a unique perspective and great photographic opportunities of the wildlife below.1

These balloon rides, whether in Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, or South Africa, all seem to end with something called an “Out of Africa” breakfast. Their importance was underscored when Survivor Africa (CBS) gave two participants a balloon safari over the Serengeti as a reward, cementing their love of the continent as they drifted high over the savanna, there but not there (Hubbard and Mathers 2004). The photographs that I saw and the conversations I had with travelers suggested that the camera, when not reflecting their lives, was for capturing the other and not the everyday or the same. In a conversation I had with a group of students in Cape Town about their photographs, Kyle was especially intrigued by a photograph he had taken of a Xhosa woman with her face painted white, which he saw as exotic enough to have meaning for people back home. When looking at the photographs of their township tour, some of the students questioned the authenticity of the healer’s pharmacopoeia, reflecting a common fear of being caught out by a staged environment or encounter. Phyllis, who spent a year at UCT and traveled extensively throughout southern Africa, went home to America with many photographs from Kwazulu of what she and her friends had thought was a traditional engagement ceremony that they had just been lucky to happen upon. They learned later that it had been put on for the benefit of tourists like them. These failed backstage encounters are common sources of frustration for travelers to Africa. Backpackers in Zanzibar, for example, are frustrated at overt commercial tourist practices such as having to pay for an experience or a photograph that destroys their





sense of an authentic encounter with locals (Sumich 2002). Student travelers to Kenya objected forcefully at being taken to cultural villages where people perform Maasai dances, sell crafts, and pose, for a fee, with tourists because they saw this as inauthentic and as exploitative (Ntarangwi 2000). These students, however, like the travelers in Cape Town, would at any opportunity take photographs from the safety of their vehicles or otherwise at a distance if they thought they could get a serendipitous shot of a young Maasai initiate or other unsuspecting person going about their supposed traditional business (Ntarangwi 2000). These young Americans were appalled that anybody would be willing to display themselves for a fee, as this meant that they were being exploited by the tourist industry, but felt no qualms at shooting a picture of someone without their knowledge. The semester-abroad class with whom I worked most closely was assigned a photographic project that required the students to reflect on their lives in Cape Town. Almost all of these photo essays focused on the diversity of people that the students saw on various visits to neighborhood townships. In their class presentations of the projects and in conversations with me, they reflected on how they had at first understood this diversity as similar to their San Francisco Bay Area home. Many of their photo projects became ways for them to try to come to terms with their discovery that Cape Town’s diversity could not necessarily be understood through familiar categories. Their projects reflected a complexity in representations that echoed but moved past their initial responses to the vibrancy of Cape Town. Ben, one of the young men whose original priorities for their semester abroad was to enjoy Cape Town’s party scene, chose to focus on the neighborhood in which he lived. But he did not take photographs of the different local residents, a tempting but simple way to show diversity in Cape Town. His photographs were all of the bergies, or homeless people, that were a common sight on the streets of this largely well-off area. Bergie is a diminutive of the Afrikaans word for mountain— berg—and is used to describe the homeless in Cape Town who have traditionally sought refuge on the mountainside at night. Ben’s photo project was an intriguing portrait of the diversity of people who are often lumped into a singular category. Regan’s project was particularly astute in its representation of township life as a shopping bag. She had pasted her photographs taken while on a township tour on common objects: a beer bottle to symbolize forgetfulness, aromat (a popular brand of monosodium glutamate, MSG, flavoring in South Africa) to symbolize a poor



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carbohydrate-based diet, and so forth. She commented on the way that they, as visitors, went to townships to shop for an authentic experience and effectively but critically represented how these tours reduced people to objects. Gerardo, who worked with homeless people in California and in Cape Town, put together a poster for the imaginary “Sickside tours.” He directly compared the must-see sites of Cape Town, such as Robben Island and Lion’s Head, with the images of poverty and marginalization that he considered to be the real Cape Town as experienced by homeless people. These juxtapositions were stark in highlighting the very real gaps between rich and poor in Cape Town but also revealed the discomfort that these young Americans experienced with their role as visitors and tourists. John, a student on a summer program in South Africa, expressed a similar discomfort in his journal: However, when we pull out our cameras, some tried to shield their faces with what little clothing they had. Others moved out of the way as if we were taking aim with guns. Are they embarrassed of their poverty? Are they afraid of being spectacles? I felt weary of taking pictures after this incident. I felt like I was on safari. What I was hunting for were pictures that I could take home with me to explain to my friends what I had seen.

John recognized and was troubled by the link between safari photography and taking pictures of the dozens of children that crowd around tourists visiting townships—between taking pictures and hunting that is repeated in much of the discourse of travel to South Africa (Little 1991). But he also shows how disturbing these encounters can be and that even from a distance, both physical and personal, these children can change a traveler’s way of thinking. Tourist photographers may actively avoid spaces in which the locals encourage photography while hiding themselves from the gaze of their objects. But this very gesture shows that their control over the African landscape is not a given and that they have to carefully manage the way they take photographs to ensure they recognize the Africa that they are visiting. Travelers have to work to maintain control over the gaze and to prevent it being turned on them. Although they capture on film those images that prove to family and friends back home that they have been in Africa, the gaze back through the camera’s lens may produce a more powerful shift. As a very particular destination in Africa, South Africa presents an intriguing challenge for tourists seeking authentic African landscapes and people. Despite the South African Tourism Board’s relatively





sophisticated framing and range of sites encompassing the wide diversity of South Africans and their histories, tourists to South Africa have pretty basic expectations of the country. In a class discussion in Cape Town on representations of South Africa and the students’ expectations before their arrival, most of the comments focused on wild animals, bush people, and headhunters. These expectations of what an African destination should be like are reflected in the literature of the vast majority of tour companies and in the kinds of tours most Americans take to the continent. A presentation by Alan Bechky’s Safaris at the outdoor store Marmot Mountain Works in Berkeley, for example, focused on their tours to pristine African environments where, the audience was assured, people are “authentically tribally marked” and embedded in a “savage” landscape. Participants in the discussion after the presentation described South Africa as a disappointment for visitors wanting to experience Africa as it is too much “like America” and is, therefore, insufficiently pristine or primitive. The family and friends of study-abroad students also frequently expressed surprise that they would go to Cape Town since, in their view, “it is not Africa.” In the experience of one professor who talked to me about the different groups of students he takes to South Africa, African American students were often especially disappointed by South Africa as it is insufficiently primitive to fulfill their expectations for a genuine encounter with their imagined Africa. The organizer of a student volunteer program in Kenya whom I interviewed described the students she worked with as thrilled by the “primitiveness” of life. They embraced and enjoyed the lack of plumbing, water, and other modern amenities. This allowed them to feel that they were having a genuinely African experience. One area of surprised disappointment for many travelers to South Africa was the roads. Many South African roads are nicely paved and have more than one lane. Representations of Africa in film and fiction and travel writing almost always include a scary journey bumping along a dreadfully rough road in an ancient vehicle without suspension, often with goats and chickens along for the ride. Admittedly with some ironic humor, Megan, a semester-abroad student whom I got to know very well, actually expressed disappointment that she had not experienced riding on a bus with chickens in Africa. Like the tourists described by Jamaica Kincaid in Antigua, tourists to South Africa wanted to be charmed by how bad the roads are and the way the potholes make them feel removed from the order of their home countries in the northwest (Kincaid 1988).



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Of course there are many places in South Africa, most notably in what used to be the homelands (tribal reservations established by the apartheid regime to exclude black South Africans from citizenship), where Americans could find African roads just as they pictured them. But in Cape Town or Johannesburg or Durban the roads became just one more piece of evidence of the modernity of South Africa and, therefore, its un-Africanness. It is not entirely surprising that Cape Town should lead to this confusion. This city is a favored spot for study-abroad programs from all over the United States and is a mustsee destination for most tourists to the region. The first impression for most travelers was one of familiarity, especially for the northern Californians. The city is very similar to San Francisco in terms of both its physical and social landscape. The climate is Mediterraneanstyle mild and temperate with winter rainfall and hot, dry summers. Cape Town, though, is hotter in summer and lacks the fog associated with the San Francisco Bay. The city was built on the foothills of Table Mountain, which dominates the city much more than the Berkeley hills, but still creates a similar set of leafy suburbs. Cape Town is a popular summer holiday destination for many South Africans and is also becoming a global destination for gay and lesbian tourists, especially during the annual Pride Festival. Much like San Francisco is perceived to be unique in relation to California or the United States, Cape Town’s white population was on the whole considered to be liberal during the apartheid era, and the city represents itself as particularly cosmopolitan and multicultural. But it wasn’t just Cape Town that travelers thought was not African enough as they found many parts of South Africa too urban and cosmopolitan and (in their words) Americanized to be African. Chris, a journalism student, reflected on how the suburb of Johannesburg that they lived in, Melville, was just like Rockridge (a trendy area south of Berkeley). Melville is near the university, where many faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand live, and is well known for its restaurants and village atmosphere. In her feedback about a trip to South Africa in 1999 a journalism student discussed her surprise at seeing the urbanness of even the township of Alexandra. Despite having read about South Africa’s recent political history, she and her classmates had anticipated seeing elephants and warring tribes. A white Malawian at a braai at Brentwood echoed their expectations by declaring forcefully that Malawi was more African than South Africa, which, she said, was not third world enough. A number of the summer session students who traveled through South Africa for three weeks expressed in their journals this concern




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Hyon: Cape Argus today (7/8/00) featured two articles dealing with tourism in South Africa. The first one was about how tourists, when they come to Cape Town, are finding, to their disappointment, that Cape Town is Eurocentric and that it does not feel like they are in “Africa.” That is exactly how I felt when I first arrived in Cape Town. Alexandra: “So far, it seems hard to believe that I am in Africa. This is probably typical—I don’t think it will truly hit me until I visit the townships on Wednesday and Thursday and see the poverty that I have been led to associate with Africa.”

Bonnie also reflected on the familiarity of Cape Town in the stories she wrote after returning to Chicago from her Global Exchange tour. This extract is from “Anna!”: All of Capetown was like that, related to something I knew from somewhere. The apartheid policies that created an empty urban renewal zone around the heart of the white business district seemed similar to the one that destroyed Woodlawn and Lawndale in Chicago or which leveled the South Bronx. Even the scenery, as beautiful as it is, seemed to be a cross between Santa Barbara and Monterey with the gritty parts of Haifa and Naples thrown in. The look of it, the feel of the place made you think you knew what it was about, what it had been about.

Linda Kurtz, who wrote about her own Global Exchange tour online, makes a similar comparison: “It doesn’t really seem like I am in Africa somehow. I look out my hotel window and the lights of the city seem reminiscent of Austin, Texas” (Kurtz 1998)! Another site of encounters between Americans and South Africans that struggles with finding the real Africa is the Peace Corps. I first attended a Peace Corps meeting on the power of volunteerism at the National Summit on Africa, where I learned that they have sent over 60,000 volunteers to Africa. The Peace Corps’ stated goals are to “introduce people to Americans; bring the world home and share so as to learn more about each other.” Peace Corps volunteers are diverse and from all over the United States, and though they are clearly driven to do good in some way, they do not necessarily choose to go to Africa or South Africa and do not really have much more knowledge about South Africa than any other travelers. Peace Corps training focuses extensively on cultural competence and draws on much of the same knowledge common in the education abroad literature.



and surprise about how un-African Cape Town and South Africa seemed:

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I attended a Peace Corps recruitment/information meeting, hosted by returnees, in March 2000 at a Berkeley branch library. Cultural exchange was the keyword used by all the representatives. They felt that getting to know people and exchanging cultures was the most positive aspect of the Peace Corps experience. Most of the attendees were older people, their motivations unclear, but their concerns focused on health, languages, and the bureaucracy of getting into the program, which they seemed to see as a good stepping stone to a better life in America. We all went away with a brochure on the Peace Corps, “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” that asked “how far are you willing to go to make a difference?” I interviewed Yvonne Hubbard, director of Peace Corps South Africa, in Pretoria in June 2000, when the organization had been in the country for less than two years. She underscored the tension around how South Africa isn’t always African enough, Volunteers, she said, had to be really mature to not be “sucked into first world,” which is only about one-and-ahalf hours away in cities like Nelspruit, from the little villages most of them were supposed to live in. She described this “first world/third world dichotomy” as the major challenge facing volunteers in South Africa as opposed to elsewhere in the world and emphasized the idea expressed by so many visitors that if South Africa was not third world, it was not Africa. Americans who had traveled to other African countries often compared their experiences in Cape Town with their “real” African experiences in countries where they did not have to engage with white people at all. Much of South Africa seemed just like America to these travelers, not a completely white country but not dominantly black. Rachel expected to see mostly black people and more obvious military presence. She was surprised that people really did speak “proper English.” The primary impression the 2000 journalist students described for me when they arrived in Cape Town after a week in Johannesburg was that it just didn’t feel like Africa. Greg, for example, couldn’t quite believe that only 10 percent of the country was white, as he was seeing almost all white people. The journalists whose articles were rooted in government offices or other urban spaces had to remind themselves where they were all the time. The students with journalism projects based in townships like Gughulethu, however, were less likely to express frustration at how un-African Cape Town was. The study-abroad students, while frustrated at the lack of wildness and nature, were unlikely to perceive Cape Town as un-African on the basis of the idea that Africanness and blackness were synonymous, as they took taxis packed with black passengers every day; their





friends were often black, and they did community service in townships every week. Like many of their contemporaries in South Africa, a group of American students studying abroad in Kenya were searching for a place as removed as possible from modern human agency. These students wanted a Garden of Eden, an untamed wilderness that happened to include Maasai, but only if these were not identified as tourist-savvy (Ntarangwi 2000, 55). The expectation that Africa and Africans must maintain a certain kind of connection to a natural state often found expression among travelers to game parks. These desires have been translated into the modern safaris, journeys that have long been the defining feature of European and American travel to the continent. Kyle had come to South Africa expecting something closer to a grass hut type of lifestyle, and in Cape Town he still wanted to see that side of life—such as animals, tribal people, and desert. Many students confirmed the conjunction between Africa and wild game seen in photographic safaris. Katie felt that when they had been on safari, they would know that they were in Africa. Maria, Hope, and Katie were thrilled on their return from Kruger Park, where they had seen lions, and so could now feel as if they had really been in Africa. Duke, who spent a semester abroad in Cape Town, expected like many of his classmates something resembling the wild empty bush of the standard PBS or National Geographic Channel special, but not just any bush: he felt called to it “with his heart.” This calling, though, could not be fulfilled in the disappointingly modern city of Cape Town, and so he looked forward to going on safari, where his “personal calling” might be satisfied. Such close-to-nature journeys have become in the West’s imagination a representation of what is good about Africa (Bull 1988, 123). Many safaris were sponsored by newspapers and, like Theodore Roosevelt’s safari, were key to introducing Africa to the American public. Travel brochures and information meetings that featured Africa available in the Bay Area during the period of my research were largely confined to high-end, extremely luxurious safaris and downend adventure tours. High-end safaris frequently evoked the heyday of nineteenth-century African exploration and travel writing. For example, the California Academy of Science sponsored a trip on Rovos rail, a restored steam train straight out of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express; Park East Africa promised that “wildlife alone is not enough for a safari. You must also see wild spaces, endless plains like the Serengeti that embrace a lone acacia tree as if it were a work of art”;2 and Mountain Travel-Sobek’s Allen Bechky Safaris used titles such as “Secret Serengeti” or “Lost World of Madagascar and Zambia: 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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[c]amp staff who look after all set-up, housekeeping, and commissary tasks. We have roomy walk-in two-person cabins or reed and thatch chalets, which are mosquito-netted and have excellent ventilation . . . Members of the camp staff prepare hot showers and bring hot water to your tent for washing. Our camps allow this intimate connection with the wildness of Africa without sacrificing comfort.3

Such modern safaris consciously evoke an earlier era of travel to Africa offering luxury campsites, wall-to-wall (bush-to-bush) servants, lots of alcohol, and excellent food, along with a, more often than not, great white hunter guide. Blain Harden describes this in his piece “The Last Safari”: “The ‘product,’ as tourist operators call Kenya’s natural offerings, had become an expensive fantasy that was part Happy Valley, part Hollywood and part Ralph Lauren: balloon rides at dawn over the wildebeest migration, followed by a Champagne breakfast, followed by a nap in a tent with a hot shower and flush toilet” (New York Times, June 4, 2000). Champagne breakfasts and flush toilets, though, were the opposite of what most of the travelers I worked with were looking for. One study-abroad student from another program, extolling the virtues of white-water rafting, referred to the Victoria Falls—a classic stop on luxury tours of southern Africa—as just another big waterfall, exclaiming, “It’s the Zambezi that’s hot.” Here she makes clear that action is required to penetrate, to do what used to be the archetypal sight on which to gaze in order to know Africa. Most of the student travelers looked for ways to experience the other side of the safari—danger and adventure. These young travelers focused much of their energy on seeking out opportunities for the best sky-diving, bungee jumping, white-water rafting, and boogie boarding on the Zambezi that they could afford. The short-term trips that they took for their midterm break took advantage of package tours clearly designed to fill these needs. Although one group of students drove up the coast from Cape Town, most flew or caught a bus to Johannesburg and joined a tour going to Kruger Park and then on to Victoria Falls.4 The longer trips headed straight north to Botswana and Zimbabwe. Even the purpose of driving north up the East coast, rather than flying, was to bungee-jump at Tzitzikama (the highest commercial bungee jump in



The Last Wilderness.” In 1999 such high-end safaris cost between $6000 and $8000 (land costs only) for around 19 days in luxury camps. According to their brochure, Allen Bechky Safaris feature luxury alongside immersion in the wilderness that is Africa that includes


the world at Bloukrans) before heading to Victoria Falls via Kruger Park. One student had bought a big hunting knife for the safari, and many of the students were really surprised that you couldn’t get out of your car in a game park. They all talked as if they were going to the jungle but at the same time not really believing that it may be truly dangerous. These young Americans were convinced that they had not been to Africa, until they had bungee-jumped at Victoria Falls or done the white waters of the Zambezi on an inner tube. Gazing on the Victoria Falls itself was considered completely unnecessary for experiencing Africa. Even the photograph was now almost invariably a moving image, and it was a moving image of the tourists themselves, not of the object/space/place being penetrated. When I interviewed travelers after their return to the States, I often looked at their photographs to get a sense of the events and interactions from their time in South Africa that they considered important. Young Americans who return from southern Africa are more likely to have a photograph (a still from the video) of themselves bungee-jumping or kayaking at Victoria Falls than an image of the Falls. The same can be said of the new generation of wildlife programs that are more about the person/showman interacting with the crocodile or snake than they are about the crocodile or the snake. These programs are very different from the David Attenborough versions, where he is a self-effacing, whispering presence at the corner of the frame, describing in hushed accents redolent with awe some primordial life force. He is never the center of the picture as the new generation of biology television presenters are. The late Steve Irwin launched a new style of presentation in the late 1990s in his extremely popular series, The Crocodile Hunter. This was a prime example of how it became the explorer/adventurer who took center stage, wrestling with snakes and crocodiles, loving nature not with hushed accents but with aggressive engagement (Vivanco 2004). Adventure tourism does the opposite of observing from a distance; contamination is exactly what adventure travelers are looking for. American travelers, particularly young ones, tend to increasingly seek experiences in Africa that are defined through actions. They, in fact, require adventure in order to feel that they have been to Africa. It seemed ironic that a location like southern Africa should be so successful at building a market for such adventure tourism. Few people can plan a trip to this part of the world without being constantly warned of the dangers at the hands of people with guns and no scruples and in the face of Africa’s multiple pathologies. Disease and death keep American parents awake at night worrying about their children



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in this part of the world. It is intriguing, then, that travelers should, once in South Africa, choose to engage in dangerous behavior. Although young travelers are willing to be reflexive about some of their expectations, their plans for adventure act to cement an engagement with the continent as if it was a singular entity. The separation between South Africa and Cape Town from some imagined construction of Africa as a homogeneous whole that had so frustrated their experiences there did lead to many travelers considering the possibility that Africa could be cosmopolitan, urban, diverse (Mathers 2004). When the semester-abroad students, for example, went to a demonstration for peace in Zimbabwe, they were really struck by a debate about who was African. All the Zimbabweans, many white, sang in Shona, the primary language spoken in Zimbabwe, and one of the white marchers talked about another as African. This was an important moment for the students who were there as they realized that their expectations about Africans might be incorrect. But just like their struggle over whom and what to photograph generated in part by the reverse gaze of Africans, this disjuncture between expectations and experience made it necessary for American tourists to work hard at structuring their encounters with South Africa. They still looked for the authentically African experience and found it often in action and adventure that occupied a particularly placeless realm. I have shown, with my colleague Laura Hubbard, that this danger creates the intimate and embodied love affair with Africa that is consummated by the returned traveler’s determination to seek succor for the ills of this continent (Mathers and Hubbard 2006). This is the kind of love affair that, as I argued in Chapter 2, colonial travelers felt through gazing over and through their gaze controlling the African landscape. Penetrating action now does the same work for contemporary travelers in Africa. In South Africa, though, the safari or game park is not the only space offering tourists opportunities for a form of penetrating action. The township tour has become an essential part of the American traveler’s experience of South Africa. Travelers who had participated in anti-apartheid demonstrations and organizations in London or Washington wanted to see for themselves the shacks that formed the backdrop of all those news images of youth uprisings in Soweto. In the mid-1990s this meant driving through Soweto seeing the shacks but also Nelson Mandela’s and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s houses. One stopped for beer at a shebeen (the name for what would have been an illegal beer hall during apartheid) and visited the soonto-be site of the Hector Peterson memorial, commemorating one of





the first young people killed in the 1976 Soweto uprising. It was even possible to spend the night with a family in Soweto. These tours, though they developed out of the desire of post-apartheid tourists to revisit the sites of struggle, have become increasingly controversial, especially when they are seen as versions of poverty tours or black spot or dark tourism (Rassool and Witz 1996, Sharpley and Stone 2009). It often seems that in the stories travelers tell about their travels to South Africa, townships and game parks become blended as similar insertions into a real Africa. In a disturbing twist it is now even possible to take a balloon safari over Soweto, described in a South African magazine: It is sunrise, the dawn of a Soweto uprising. This time round, however, there are no toyi-toying (a dance that characterized protest movements in the 1980s in South Africa) crowds or sinister yellow police vans, no chanting demonstrators, no crack of gunfire. This time round, we are being lifted off to a “new revolution,” as the brochure so wittily puts it, in the form of a hot-air balloon ride. (Hilton-Barber 2004, 56)

This analogy made between safaris and township tours is chilling especially as the camera has increasingly replaced guns for shooting animals (and people) on modern safaris (Haraway 1990, Little 1991). It is also a consonance that reveals the ways that tourism to South Africa can conflate nature and culture. I had noted this odd consonance between township tours and game tours when I joined some journalism students in Cape Town in March 2000. They had just arrived from Johannesburg, where they had been taken on a guided tour of Soweto. Many of them mentioned to me one aspect of this tour, which must have had a deep impact on them. They had been told throughout their tour to keep the windows of the van closed and to not put arms or heads out of the van. If they had been on a game tour the guide would have told them exactly the same thing: do not get out of your vehicle, and keep heads and arms inside the vehicle. In the latter case this warning is for protection from wild animals. In the former it is because of security concerns about gun violence and theft. Much like on a safari, when capturing the elusive rare animal as closely as possible becomes a competitive sport, the township tour became a search for the authentic cultural moment unmediated by self-aware and commercially orientated posers. When I went with Americans on township tours I was struck by how many photographs



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of unwary people were taken from inside the minivan. If you are lucky on a game safari, you get a reminder of the violence of nature through the glimpse of the ultimate safari trophy, photographs of a lion kill, quick, vicious, and unforgiving and of course bloody. Photos from a township tour are not focused on violence but need to reflect a new revolution whether taken from a balloon or a road vehicle. Township tours have become increasingly sophisticated. The tour in which I participated along with a group of American students had a political focus but was otherwise fairly typical. It highlighted the role of young people in the history of the struggle in Cape Town’s townships and the geography of oppression mapped out by the racialized neighborhoods through which we drove. Stuffed into combis (minibuses), we slowly drove around the shack lands that were so often broadcast on television in America and clambered out at designated areas to stand in the dust and listen to our guide. Despite its political narrative, the tour also included the sites that have become required markers of the township experience for visitors. These all evoke familiar expectations of what is exotic and African about South Africa. They included a visit to the traditional healer and his pharmacy of baboon testicles and other strange animal parts and plants and an opportunity to sit in a shack and pass around a pot/metal can of traditional maize beer. But most of this tour took us to monuments that commemorated important events in the anti-apartheid struggle such as the Trojan Horse Massacre and the murder of the Gugulethu 7. In both these incidences, police action killed a number of young people, some of whom had been anti-apartheid activists and others who were bystanders. The tour’s guide had set up an organization with the families of the murdered youth and was campaigning to have memorials set up in their memory.5 But the experience was not only about memorialization. It offered its participants an opportunity to meet and engage with residents of Ghughulethu and survivors of the events that were being memorialized. The tour included a visit with the mother and family of one of the young men who had been killed in Ghughulethu. Here we sat around a crowded living room and drank sugary, fizzy cold drinks and looked at the newspaper clippings of her son’s death. We also visited an old pass station, where we were told about the history of the dompas (identification documents that marked black South Africans as illegal residents in South Africa unless they had a specific work permit) and the restrictions on black workers’ movements. The students were impressed with the drama of death, bombs, and ambushes and their guide’s involvement with such potent stuff—that





is, until they heard the full extent of his involvement and its nature. The day had been full of hints in the undercurrent of anger that run through much of the commentary and the scars that clearly touched more than the skin of this man’s face and, one could be sure, body. But it was only later in the afternoon, steeped in the dust and chaos of township life, cameras full of pictures of childish, if not untouched, faces, bellies full of corn beer and the fizzy, sweet sodas shared with the mother whose son had died, that we heard why. This jovial, friendly, thoughtful man, who had been driving us from one spot of brutal massacres to another and through perhaps even more brutal evidence of the daily life wrought by the violence of apartheid for so many, had been tortured horribly by the South African police. He spent six months under this terrible regime of fear and pain. He told us that he was in therapy and on many drugs. For students familiar with Vietnam War movies, this was something that at first they could comfortably slot into the category of posttraumatic stress disorder, as many of them murmured after clamoring out of the combi. But then he told us about the reason he was captured and tortured. His role in the struggle had been as a people’s court judge. That didn’t seem like a bad role; the townships were declared ungovernable by the African National Congress from their offices in London and Lusaka and Washington, so the people had to have some order. But he didn’t stop there, telling us that in his role as judge he had sentenced people to necklacing. This, though, had to be explained. Necklacing? That’s when those found guilty, largely of treason, informing for the police or the army or some other arm of the government, had a car tire doused in fuel put around their necks and set alight. It’s a slow way to die and, during the 1980s State of Emergency, I remember photographs of these events being featured on the front pages of South African newspapers. These images helped the South African government legitimate its constant use of force by contributing to white South Africans’ fears of a supposed black threat. They also added to the fears and paranoia of many South African activists who were being manipulated by government spies to suspect everybody of betraying them. Needless to say, the horror of this was immediately apparent to the American visitors. It was unimaginably violent and barbaric. Yet this person was so cool, with all the right politics and a gentleness and kindness apparent in his work with parents devastated by the violent loss of their children to erect monuments to their loss. This did not make sense. Here was a visceral illustration of the complexity of apartheid violence. It was way too complicated in fact. Why exactly this man felt the need to share his past and his pain with these students,



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I am not sure. Perhaps he wanted them to understand how complex the history of the places he had just taken them was. The students, however, ended up worrying about what they should tip and then wondering what to cook for dinner or whether they should go down to Obs Café for a drink. It had been a long day. While these young Americans actively and constructively engage and challenge their own expectations based on experiences in southern Africa, in the end they just want to go where it is hot. More often than not, they end their trips to South Africa at Victoria Falls. The bungee jump at Victoria Falls, therefore, allows American travelers to have an adventure that is divinely African. Since the mid-1990s Victoria Falls has become a must for young adventure travelers to southern Africa despite the fact that almost no one I met who was planning to go there knew what country/countries it is in. Here all of their questioning and engagement gets replaced, if only for a moment, with an adventure that makes borders and the specific histories and politics of the countries they have visited meaningless. Their plunge over the bridge at Victoria Falls ultimately marks Africa as a place with no borders. Only one company operates bungee jumping here, and it caters to visitors on both the Zimbabwean and Zambian sides of the border. Getting to the jump itself, at least from Livingstone in Zambia, was in my experience a simple matter of taking a taxi to the Falls, circumventing passport and custom’s control, walking up to the guards at the border post, explaining to them that you intend to bungee jump, and, after some verbal but entirely jovial sparring about whether you might be planning to smuggle something over to Zimbabwe (at least if you are white and foreign), walking out onto the bridge that crosses the Zambezi just beyond the Falls themselves. Registering and getting weighed in for the jump requires walking to the Zimbabwean end of the bridge, where the company has a small office. The jump itself takes place in the exact center of the bridge and plunges the participant deep into the gorge over the Zambezi. The Falls are directly behind them, and the high cliffs of the gorge on either side are overlooked by the veranda and terraces of the Victoria Falls Hotel, that quintessentially colonial hotel, in Zimbabwe. As the jumpers ricochet and swing from side to side waiting to be pulled back up to the bridge, they are quite literally swinging from one country to the next: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Zimbabwe. This symbolically marks the continued existence of the British colony Rhodesia and turns this leap from a bridge into a leap into a colonial past. It also turns a place with specific history into one with a single name and thus into a space of nothing. The state constraints of border posts, passport





controls, and customs fall away, and Africa’s namelessness is underscored through action, not vision. The bungee jump at Victoria Falls is, therefore, an adventure that plunges the travelers into an unmarked and quintessentially African territory, one that looks a lot like the Africa imagined by colonial travel writers and by Disney. This lack of specificity and history is something with which American travelers to southern Africa struggle. But it ultimately makes it possible for their experience to become an encounter with their own identities as Americans. It begins their journey toward questioning what exactly it means to be American.



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Through the Gl ass: Encountering the Unexpected in Africa

American tourists and study-abroad students go to South Africa

in search of a genuine connection to the people they are visiting and expecting to learn about South Africans and the country. They are supported by organizations and institutions, whether commercial companies or their university administrations, that want them to have a life-changing experience. Chapter 3 showed how such encounters in southern Africa are framed by deep histories and contemporary media on Africa in the United States. In fact, drawing on his observation of tourists in Kenya, Ed Bruner argues that “tourism in a foreign land becomes an extension of American popular culture and of global media images” (Bruner 2001, 897). African tourism does benefit from selling back to Americans these images rooted in Americans’ imaginations of Africa and branded by National Geographic, Disney, and even CNN. But because travelers can find these images and expectations fulfilled in Africa, they struggle to discover spaces to have the “authentic” backstage encounters that they desire (MacCannell 1976). The vexed relationship between Americans and South Africans produces barriers that make it difficult for even the best-intentioned travelers to fulfill their expectations. In this chapter I explore these barriers as a variety of tourists and study-abroad students experienced them. But I will also show how encounters between tourists and their hosts can sometimes create complex spaces that require travelers to think, if only a little, about where they are and where they come from.



Chapter


This struggle is revealed by Bonnie’s story “Boys of Summer,” about a tour of Alexandra Township in the south of Johannesburg. Bonnie wrote her stories after returning from her Global Exchange tour to the World AIDS conference in Durban in July 2000. Her stories were an attempt to try to make sense of experiences overwhelming her thoughts and feelings even months after her return to Chicago. Her description of the tour of Alexandra sounds a lot like a safari, as tourists drive through an exotic environment trying to capture on film the essence and the unexpected sights of this new landscape. But while the same comparison described in the last chapter between safaris and township tours highlighted the limitations of tourism to Africa, this tour shows that even through the glass there can be moments of real encounters between tourists and South Africans: Being a tourist in a strange place is hard work, sometimes. I felt as though it was almost impossible to see below, beyond, through the surface glitter, the strangeness of life lived on the outside, through to the other places where life is lived, into the heart, into the mind and the spirit. I was not used to the place, I was blinded by the visible, the easy comparison, the well designed, the obvious. I was grateful when I escaped it. It took me a while to adjust to a life lived in the street, on the outside. The surface itself was engrossing, it can save you. One Sunday morning, very early, in Johannesburg, we drove through Alexandra. Alex is a huge “informal settlement” and stinking collection of shacks and huts, a fetid swamp and a home to more than two million humans, living so closely, in such difficult circumstances, that it alone is one gigantic crime scene. It was in Alexandra I learned that the only way the people could be counted is by aerial photography, with the population scientists back at the lab counting the number of people in a particular cell and then multiplying. It is the way blood cells are counted in every lab in the world. It is the way to count the innumerable. We drove through Alexandra so early in the morning because it was dangerous, we were at risk of car jacking, or armed robbery. At seven in the morning, on a very cold morning, it was probably quiet enough, tranquil enough to see it. So we saw it. It was anything but quiet, the streets, the muddy, shit-strewn tracks, that roughly separated one set of huts from another, were thronged with people—old ladies wrapped in blankets, toddlers running around in skimpy clothing, girls and young women with water cans on their heads, going from here to there. Blocks were delineated by stands of Porta-potties, in the familiar grimy aqua, planted in the dirt at crazy angles and leaning over from the load. The urine curled out from under them like oil spilled on the ocean, puddling out to seek its lowest level. We turned the corner, drove up a hill, over a river dammed tight with refuse and there you could see how big this



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I had had enough. I felt awful, intrusive, invasive, ignorant, rude, wrong. It was wrong to look at this as if it were a zoo and it was equally wrong not to look at it, not to help, not to get involved. I felt sick, the chills were starting to come, the tears dimmed the light. Then we turned yet another corner, another time. Just then, the van slowed, to avoid a little kid darting across the street, and two guys looked up, saw us all pressed against the glass of the van, cameras ready, trying to capture the most picturesque scene of poverty, the black, backwater of Apartheid caught in this tidal pool. They were at the foot of a street, just like all the others, bending over a fire in an oil barrel, cooking boerwurst [boerewors—South African farmer’s sausage] stuck on the end of sharpened sticks, waving them at each other like Zoro swords and giggling like little boys. What I saw was two guys, cooking breakfast, joking with each other and keeping warm while the sausage and eggs cooked. A squad of little kids was gathered around them, waiting to be fed. The guys yelled to us, “Come on, come on, come have breakfast with us! Welcome to Alexandra!” Wild gestures beckoning us to the fire underscored the welcome. I was hungry, I wished that I could.

Bonnie’s story shows how difficult it is for tourists to achieve a serendipitous and unstaged experience, but also complicates the idea that tourist encounters are entirely controlled by the tourist. Her gaze was neither an appropriation of desired symbols nor just a visual experience. By opening herself to a new place she was exposed to feelings ranging from guilt and sorrow to excitement and wonder. But it was also impossible for Bonnie to get out of the tour bus and have breakfast with the young men in Alexandra. Such encounters between Americans and South Africans show how travelers’ experiences in Africa can begin to disturb their understanding of taken-for-granted ideas learnt at home. But they also highlight how the ways Africa is represented in America and how travelers’ understanding of the relationship between America and Africa make it difficult for American travelers to experience South Africa. Travelers’ expectations for a life-changing experience in South Africa are shaped by some very entrenched ideas in America about the power of travel. In their pamphlet on ethical travel for the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Global Exchange, which hosted Bonnie’s tour of South Africa, Jeff Cole and Kevin Danaher argue that “[a]s people move throughout the world and learn to know



place was, how many people were there. It was maddening. How could people live like that, how could we help them? Why would anyone allow this to happen? Forget about HIV, what about water, food and shelter? Why weren’t they all dead of cholera or typhus or plague or even flu? It was forty degrees and windy, why weren’t people falling over from the cold?


each other’s customs and to appreciate the qualities of individuals of each nation, we are building a level of international understanding which can sharply improve the atmosphere for world peace” (Cole and Danaher 1996, 1). They believe that “[t]ravel has become one of the great forces for peace and understanding in our time” (Cole and Danaher 1996, 1). This is the motivation for a human rights organization like Global Exchange to get involved in managing tour groups. Cultural and educational exchange literature as well as much travel literature argues that travel or exposure to another culture, society, or place opens the eyes of travelers to the possibility of difference and teaches them to respect the fact that not everybody sees the world in the same way. The history of travel and tourism is redolent of this belief that travel broadens the mind and has evoked the slogan “world travel for world peace” that characterizes organizations such as the International Council of Tourism Partners (ICTP) and the International Institute for Peace through Tourism (IIPT). Even critical sociologists of tourism suggest that “[t]hinking positively, this movement [increasing desire to travel, to see back regions] will continue to have important effects on the character of civil society. Notably it may demystify our notions of ‘the other’ in all of its manifold forms, revealing the strengths and limitations of our domain-cultural assumptions and bonds” (Rojek and Urry 1997, 19). Tourism or travel is, therefore, trusted to be the panacea for false images of the other. This seems intuitive; after all the discipline of anthropology itself is based in part on a presumption of the special knowledge that can be gained through culture shock and the othering of the researcher (Mattick 1997, Nader 1982). The literature on tourists emphasizes the link between tourism and self, travel, and identity (Abram, Waldren, and Macleod 1997, Favero 2000, Harrison 2003, Li 2000, MacCannell 1984, O’Byrne 2001, Picard and Wood 1997, Suvantola 2002). Tourism’s, like anthropology’s, claims to producing perceptual shifts in the way people think lies in part in its association with liminality. This in-between state, associated by the anthropologist Victor Turner with rites of passage, is believed to encourage the requisite perception and debate for forming a new identity (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 1994, Graburn 1989, Turner 1974, van Gennep 1960). Young travelers, especially, even select their travels as a form of rite of passage between two stages in their lives (Ben Ari 1991, Desforges 2000, Hastings 1988, Suvantola 2002). This condition of being betwixt and between is supposedly experienced by tourists who move through a world that floats between their



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own and familiar mores and those of the society that they are visiting. Given that people’s views of self and other reflect where they come from, it does seem possible that travel could cause them to adjust their inner worlds (Galani-Moutafi 2000). When young Americans go abroad for longer periods for study or volunteering, the expectations are even greater. Study abroad is meant to “encourage empathy between nations, and foster the emergence of leaders whose sense of other nations and cultures would enable them to shape specific policies based on tolerance and rational restraint” (former Senator J. William Fulbright, quoted in Laubscher 1994, xiii). Study-abroad programs are, at the least, believed to help students gain a greater understanding of the foreign society they are visiting (Smith 2000). As a result, they have been multiplying and growing over the last decades, especially in the wake of the Clinton administration’s internationalization programs (Obst, Bhandari, and Witherell 2007). Many forms of cross-cultural programs depend on these assumptions; for example, a teacher exchange program between El Salvador and the United States was specifically developed to create ambassadors for American policies and values in El Salvador (Mahler 2000). The Africa America Institute brings many African civil servants to the United States, ostensibly to train them, but with a broader goal of creating African bureaucrats who appreciate and respect the United States. On the other side of these exchanges, the University of Cape Town (UCT) encourages students from the North and West to come to South Africa because they believe that exchange programs can create a generation of European and American college graduates who love South Africa. All these programs depend on the perception that “physical dislocation . . . establishes more enduring psycho-social alliances and embodies them in people with familiar, not foreign faces” (Mahler 2000, 205). Studies of Italian and French tourists in Spain have shown that tourists with a strong motivation for cultural exchange do find ways to interact with locals—the desired backstage encounter for many travelers—which does lead to new perceptions of Spain (GomezJacinto, Martin-Garcia, and Bertiche-Haud’Huyze 1999). These are the kinds of goals that characterized the organizations that I worked with, including the study-abroad programs and the Global Exchange tours, and that motivated the travelers I observed and interviewed. These expectations derive in part from comparisons between tourism and pilgrimage, which is meant to create a freedom from everyday structures and hierarchies and a subsequent life-changing experience (Graburn 1989, Morinis 1992). Yet there are numerous examples where pilgrimages have played a role in reinforcing



Through the Gl ass


social boundaries and distinctions rather than in breaking them down (Eade and Sallnow 1991, 5). Similarly an evaluation of the campaign Tourism: A Vital force for Peace, which surveyed Greek package tourists to Turkey, concludes that there is no real possibility for tourism to bring about attitude change among nationals who have traditional hostilities (Anastasopoulos 1992). Other studies—of Americans’ visits to the Soviet Union and of Israeli tourists’ trips to Egypt—showed that these cross-cultural encounters led to unchanged or even worse attitudes toward the other (Milman, Reichal, and Pizam 1990, Pizam, Jafari, and Milman 1991). Visitors to Pueblos and museums in the American southwest also constructed their experiences in ways that were most likely to bolster their often positive, sometimes negative, stereotypes (Laxson 1991). It seems that cultural stereotypes often remain unchanged and are even cemented by the brief contact allowed by tourism, contrary to the expectations of travelers to South Africa who were searching for a new understanding of Africa, sometimes of South Africa. Study-abroad impact assessments also tend to show that students are more likely to gain a better understanding of their own society and of themselves than of their host society (Carlson 1990, Guan and Dodder 2001, Kauffmann, Martin, and Weaver 1992, Kramsch 1995, Opper, Teichler, and Carlson 1990, Akande and Slawson 2000, Widaman 1988). Ben Feinberg argues, on the basis of interviews with thirty returned students conducted by one of his undergraduate students, that study abroad simply entrenches images already present in their minds created by media, including advertisements and reality television shows. He suggests that students, much like tourists, “return from study-abroad programs having seen the world, but the world they return to tell tales about is more often than not the world they already know, the imaginary world of globalized, postmodern capitalism where everything is already known, everyone speaks the same language, and the outside world keeps its eyes on those of us who come from the center” (Feinberg 2002). The experiences of many of the travelers to southern Africa that I worked with, especially those whose trips lasted less than a month or so, confirm the almost impossible task of really changing the way people see the world. One anthropologist at UCT, whose classes included many of the American study-abroad students, bemoaned his experience teaching these students and suggested that they were incapable of developing any sense of cultural relativity. The American leader of a summer session course for students who spent three weeks in South Africa expressed enormous frustration at the attitudes represented in the



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journals that they wrote for my research project. These journals reflected the students’ struggles to view the world through other than American lenses and the limitations of travel to change the travelers’ perspectives (Mathers 2004). Their professor had believed that the intense preparation he gave his students before their trip would make it possible for them to perceive what they saw and experienced differently. This teacher and I, of course, had our own set of assumptions about what constitutes real or valid knowledge of South Africa and what we hoped Americans would learn when they went to South Africa that may not have matched their own expectations. Most travelers were very committed to learning about South Africa and having a life-changing experience there. They wanted to learn to see the world differently, but like all travelers they brought with them their own particular sets of assumptions and expectations. As such, what they saw and experienced was filtered and made sense of through these lenses. Geographic, cultural, and linguistic differences will always create barriers to tourists seeking to learn about the people and the places that they are meeting. But American travelers bring ideas of “home” with them to South Africa that introduce an extra obstacle to the encounters that they longed for. The stories of American encounters in southern Africa that I tell in this chapter draw from students’ journals and interviews with a range of travelers. They are in part an illustration of the different and contradictory experiences that Americans can have abroad. But they also show how the American ideas and expectations that travelers brought with them on their journeys made it more difficult for them to encounter South Africa. The NGO Global Exchange wants to facilitate the transformative experiences that their American clients are looking for on their tours to South Africa. Global Exchange is an activist organization that might seem out of place as a tour company, but they believe enough in the power of travel to transform and educate Americans that they market and organize regular tours. In South Africa they hire a local company to do the on-the-ground organizing. When I met up with Bonnie and Mardge’s Global Exchange tour in June 2000 they were at a party hosted by Allison, their tour organizer. Allison was the co-founder of the tour company AfriCultural Tours, which described itself in its brochure as [a] specialist Cultural Tourism Enterprise, offering guests, nationally and internationally, the opportunity of experiencing first-hand the natural and human resource diversity of South Africa. We satisfy very specific needs in



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I sat down and interviewed Allison in her office in the Bo-Kaap, the area of the city known as the Malay quarter. Allison, like many other tour operators, clearly saw her company as fostering cultural exchange and changing perceptions, especially negative perceptions, of South Africa. So her tours avoided typical tourist sites and she felt that she offered travelers an “authentic experience”—an encounter with a real South Africa. She had found Americans to be very demanding about things being on time and very put off by surprises or—the inevitable— changes in itineraries. She believed, however, that while Americans tended to begin the trip at a distance from the South Africans whom they met, they did learn over time to be more open to personal engagement. Tourism, then, is shaped by people who believe in its power to change how travelers think and see and experience the world. Yet the enthusiasm for tourism as a powerful way to facilitate cross-cultural encounters is often matched by cynicism. A South African humor writer, Barry Ronge, took on Global Exchange’s Reality Tours that had been hosted by AfriCultural Tours in a Sunday newspaper column. He described a travel company that offers tourists “close encounters with communities beset by conflict, poverty and repression” (Ronge 1998). In wonder he asked himself, Can there be people whose lives are so untroubled, calm and ordered that they feel a need to get away from it all by traveling to some Third World land to experience at first hand what it is like to live in a country impoverished by political oppression, war and sanctions? I was immediately struck by the notion that for reality tourists South Africa is a prime destination. We have more “reality” here than we can reasonably deal with and skilled marketing could give us complete market domination. (Ronge 1998)

Ronge then proposed his own version of a South African reality tour that included meeting immigrants facing daily persecution due to xenophobia, street hookers, an AIDS hospice, the luxury of Sandton City (a high-end shopping mall near Johannesburg), an arranged car hijacking and imprisonment and abuse by police due to drug dealing in a club, squatter camps in Cape Town and Soweto, and gang warfare at the waterfront in Cape Town. By emphasizing what reality looked like for many South Africans, his satirical treatment of Global Exchange’s Reality Tours suggests that it might be impossible to have



the cultural tourism market viz. the authentic, the intimate, the human scale, the immersion experience.

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a genuine encounter with a “real South Africa” if you are privileged enough to have to look for “reality.” Tourists like those on Global Exchange tours are seeking unstaged and serendipitous encounters with South Africans. But the backstage encounters they do have do not always make sense to American travelers (MacCannell 1999). It has become a well-known cliché that the tourism industry, especially in non-Western countries, creates jobs primarily for servants and sex workers in contradiction of the role that tourism is meant to play in economic development (Brennan 2001, Enloe 1989, Honey 1999, Pettman 1997, Smith 1989). For many travelers to South Africa the only locals they properly meet and interact with, other than tour guides, are, however, often servants. American visitors found the ubiquity of domestic labor in South Africa an uncomfortable and yet also familiar space of contact with South Africans. It was also often the only encounter they observed between white South Africans and colored and black South Africans. This extract from Bonnie’s story “Anna!” about her encounter with a domestic worker on her Global Exchange tour illustrates this aspect of life in Cape Town that remained confusing for most travelers: I am an early riser, usually I am drinking coffee and writing or reading by 5 am. This was the only public room in the house, clearly it was meant to be the breakfast room, but nothing was set yet, it still seemed to be leftover from yesterday’s scene. When finally the door opened, a very well dressed light skinned woman in a business suit came out bearing a tray of sliced oranges and a pitcher of juice. She was thin and stylish—all made up at such an hour. She smiled: “The first breakfast isn’t served until 6:30,” she said, “but I can get you something now, if you want it. Just tell Anna, she’ll make kippers, oatmeal, eggs, anything. Anna!” she turned her head and summoned the woman through the closed door. There was no question about who she wanted or how fast she intended for it to happen. Maybe a minute later the door opened and Anna stood square in the center of it, holding a bowl. “Anna, come help the lady to some breakfast. Now please.” I was embarrassed. Anna was very tall, very, very tall and very broad in the beam—not fat, but singular, she occupied significant space in the room. She looked as if she didn’t want quite so much of it—there was a small hunch in her shoulders an odd angle to her neck. She stood in the doorway, looking only at the bowl, which had something in it that I couldn’t quite see, maybe a frothy batter or a bowl of egg whites. Her hands gripped the bowl and she pressed it tight against her stomach. The bowl was white, her apron was white, but Anna was the color of chocolate, so glossy she seemed almost liquid. She had on a long skirt and an apron that went almost down to



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“Yes, Bass,”1 she said, “but the eggs aren’t ready and the biscuits aren’t out yet.” I was too intimidated by Margaret and her attitude to ask Anna for anything, so I motioned broadly, catching up my coffee and my book—“No, no, really, this is all I need for now, I rarely eat in the morning at home, I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” I went back to the paper. “One out of two fifteen year olds to die of AIDS,” it said. Anna and Margaret disappeared into the locked room again. Really, we had grown up with Anna and Margaret—it was the tyranny of the well spoken, the light skinned, the educated and the well dressed. The house mistress and the field hand. But still, they made us nervous. What should we do about them? Was it appropriate to leave them a tip when we left? What should it be, should it be the same one for each, how much was right, how much was respectful, what would convey our gratitude for the food cooked, for the beds made, the laundry folded, for the work done for us while we went to the Wine District and Robben Island and Cape Flats?

Bonnie once again juxtaposes a glimpse into an everyday South African encounter with the strange pleasures of travel to show what tourism encounters both reveal and hide. As with the tour of Alexandra, she comes back to an American history to try to make sense of it all. Some doors were opened for travelers onto new worlds through the familiar, yet unfamiliar, spaces they found in Cape Town. When I interviewed Mardge and Gordie in Chicago after their Global Exchange tour, they described how they had found South Africa full of contradictions and they realized that they had to suspend judgment and to stop worrying about political correctness. Joan, whom I interviewed in San Francisco about her Global Exchange tour in 1999, described her joy in seeing the youth involvement in community and politics. Fellow traveler Beanie was also especially thrilled at how positive everybody was, especially their white safari guide, who she assumed would be angry and bitter about having lost his white privilege to black power. Global Exchange clients were often surprised at how friendly South Africans were and asked Allison whether she stages these encounters. This was in part due to their expectations that poor South Africans would be angry and bitter and in part because, being sophisticated tourists, they did not trust in the possibility of meeting people in their everyday contexts.



the floor and, something I had never seen before, a head rag. This was not one of those gorgeous African head wraps, this was an old white rag tied round her head with the knot square and prominent in front. The frayed edges hung down in ravels all over her head, suggesting a lunatic fringe.

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Allison worked hard to offer these American Global Exchange tour participants some insight into the complexities of South African society. She felt that her cultural tours came closest to a model of travel that could make people change, believing that “the personal experience is vital, the tour guide plays a big role, especially if he or she was willing to share their own life and history.” She described the encounters she set up as opportunities for travelers to “meet the artist rather than just shopping at the market.” Allison felt that the tourist had to “meet the maker,” so that memories could be created through personal encounters. What follows is a description of just such a backstage encounter set up by AfriCulture Tours and Global Exchange. This extract from Bonnie’s “Our Guide to Robben Island” describes the meeting between tourist and maker and shows how reality asserts itself: We went, that afternoon, to Robben Island, the prison where Mandela had been kept for twenty years, the prison five miles off the coast of Capetown, the place with the most gorgeous view of Capetown that there was. On the other side of the island there was a ship wreck and the pounding of currents where the Atlantic crashes face first into the Pacific. The boat left from a glitzy new pier, a pier with a shiny white mall trimmed in gold, a mall with all those stores that are in your mall at home along with gift shops selling African tourist junk and you were sure you were in Baltimore or South Street Seaport or Fisherman’s Wharf. In front of the pier was a construction site, deep and muddy with pilings and rebar scattered all over it. In front of that were boxes, hundreds of cardboard boxes full of very rare, very endangered penguins soaked in oil.2 It was easy to miss the boxes, they looked just like any other shipping box, stacked up to be loaded off to somewhere, except that they were alive—they rocked back and forth and odd little bleats issued from random spots now and then. We stood in front of them watching them do their dance. One or two penguins had either poked their way out or had been liberated to die in the open air. All the birds that we could see had matted black and sticky feathers. The smell was disgusting. I took a picture, but it looked just like a stack of boxes being loaded onto the truck. The image couldn’t convey how alive those boxes were, how close to death they might be. On the ferry to the Island, John was giving a history lesson, it was hard to hear him and the beauty of the bay was so distracting. Besides, what could they tell you, it was so much like Alcatraz that even the questions were the same? Inevitably the first question was, “Did anyone ever escape?” And of course the answer was the same too: A few tried, but they were pulled under by the riptide. And there you were, conjuring up memories of Burt Lancaster. One story was superimposed on the other one. John said the man you are going to



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When we were introduced, the man told me his name, but I couldn’t hear it, it had too many sounds for me to comprehend in the space of one handshake. He was a slight man, a man in prison denims, a man with tawny skin and gray-blue eyes. His story was frightening, but he told it in flat, simple tones. His story made you do the math. This was 2000. He was freed in 1993. He was imprisoned there for fifteen years, from 1978, the year my first daughter was born. He didn’t look much older than forty. So, he spent fifteen years in a cell that was six feet by eight feet with a bunk and a slop bucket because he organized other colored teenagers to become anti-Apartheid activists. He spent every day pounding stones in a quarry pit, heaving a sledge at a blindingly white rock pile that never went away, timing the rhythm of his swing so it didn’t jerk the leg of the man chained next to him, constraining its arc so it didn’t hit the man assigned to the pile behind him. He stood in the courtyard, the same courtyard I had seen during the worldwide new years celebration of the millennium. It was the courtyard where Mandela and Sezulu3 had plotted the revolution years before, the courtyard where Mandela and Mbeki had led a group of children from their old cells into the midnight starlight, to make a map of Africa in candles, as they sang the Africa hymn a cappella. While France lit up the night with fireworks spinning around the Eiffel Tower and the celebration in Las Vegas had dancing fountains controlled by a computer integrating the flow to music, South Africa spent a couple of bucks on candles and that is the part of the celebration I will never forget. Improbably, I stood in that very same courtyard, exactly six months later hearing the story of one of the men whose hard time had begotten the freedom of the children. In the tourist shop on the island (of course there was one—even there), they sold souvenirs: Pieces of rock, expensive, warm sweatshirts with Robben Island embroidered on the chest. They were selling mock denim shirts with numbers neatly, discreetly stamped on the breast pocket. And on the rack of postcards, was a picture of the last group of prisoners, eating breakfast in the mess on the last morning the place was a prison for Apartheid activists. And there, in the middle of the group, was the guide—a little younger, not much thinner—spooning gruel from a wooden bowl, leaning forward slightly so it wouldn’t drip onto his work shirt. I have it here. I wish I could remember his name.

Bonnie’s encounter with this guide to Robben Island rehearses the pattern of many tourism encounters; it is a powerful experience—up to a point—and, at least, feels like an “authentic experience” with an “authentic other.” The guide genuinely touches her. Like all guides at 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


meet here was an ANC youth brigade leader, a member of my brother’s cell. He was among the last group of prisoners released from the prison, long after Mandela left. He spent a total of fifteen years there and now he works for the monument service as a guide.

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this UNESCO World Heritage Site, he was a former prisoner retelling and retelling the story of his imprisonment, ensuring that every tour of Robben Island is as different both personally and politically as your tour guide. It was both a unique encounter and a ubiquitous one, marked so powerfully both by the memory of having seen the prison courtyard on American television and by a museum store that could have been anywhere in the world. Excitement at a new and exciting encounter gives way to familiarity rooted in home—the gift store, Robben Island on American television—and not away. Despite the best intentions for a real encounter there is just a forgotten name. Travelers often assumed the priority of certain American attitudes with respect to issues such as civil and women’s rights and race, which heightened tensions between expectations and observations. A guide on a tour of Bo-Kaap, the historically Muslim neighborhood of Cape Town, expressed frustration to me about the attitude of American tourists to the etiquette of visiting religious spaces. She had stopped taking Americans to the Auwal, South Africa’s first official mosque, because many were offended that she asked the women to cover their heads when entering it. American tourists wouldn’t allow for a difference between being respectful of a religious space and conspiring with Islam’s perceived oppression of women. Here, ideas from home closed off any possibility for learning about a different way of thinking or even seeing a new place. The diversity of South Africans always took Allison’s Global Exchange clients aback. Every day during their tours they met South Africans living very different lives and with very different histories, languages, religions, and so on. These were Americans who valued diversity in American life, but this had led to a belief that America was exceptional. They were, therefore, surprised to see such diversity in a country that they characterized in terms of homogeneous blocks— white and black. Allison also observed that Americans tended to see things through their own understanding of political correctness and were often reluctant to submit to cultural rules such as dress codes and expectations for women when meeting a rural village chief. She felt that American travelers did not understand what she called the South African “culture of respect and humility.” Allison was often frustrated by how ill-informed many of her clients were, which made it difficult to make the most of their time in South Africa. Her American clients seldom seemed to understand South African racial categories, and there was always much debate about the fact that black Americans were often labeled colored in terms of South African racial categories. This identity is the most confusing to Americans. It is an identity established as part of the apartheid 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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government’s Population Registration Act, and it has always been extremely contested by and confusing to many South Africans.4 Since the repeal of legal racial categories in South Africa, colored South Africans have struggled to establish a clear identity and role in the rainbow nation. There are increasingly political movements around their bushmen or other indigenous identities based on their descent from the original inhabitants of the Western Cape.5 While some are descendents of Indonesian (called Malay) slaves brought to Cape Town by the Dutch East Indian Company in the seventeenth century and are Muslim, many others are descendents of Dutch and French settlers who married indigenous Khoisan women or slaves. Some have black South African or Irish ancestors. Most share the same mixed genealogy with the elite Afrikaner families that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. They may even have relations who were classified white, while their parents or grandparents were labeled colored during the institution of the 1950s Population Registration Act. It is, therefore, not surprising that Americans would find this category and identity confusing. Calvin, a black American San Franciscan who traveled with Global Exchange on his second visit to South Africa, experienced this confusion. Calvin described his travels to me during two interviews at the St. Francis Hotel and at his home, both in San Francisco. He had only gone to Robben Island on his second visit, as it was too emotionally fraught the first time. Despite being insistent on not going on safari, Calvin bought souvenir glass ornaments of the Big 5—lion, rhinoceros, leopard, elephant, and hippopotamus—as well as calabash ornaments and an Ndebele bead doll. Calvin’s favorite experience in South Africa had been making a connection with a black South African woman from Soweto who was on the same wine tour he was on. He loved the fact that she would come on such a tour despite not being able to afford the lunch. This reflected for him the spirit of the new South Africa—not having much but still being active participants in what the country had to offer. He also asked a white Afrikaans woman if she was colored and was surprised that she was not offended. Visiting Polsmoor (a prison in suburban Cape Town that once incarcerated Nelson Mandela and many other anti-apartheid activists) was also a very moving experience for Calvin, which surprised him. He was angry, however, that tour guides tended to emphasize violence, as he felt that it could not be as bad as it was made out to be by the guides. He was frustrated by what he felt was the noncommittal nature or politically unengaged attitude of the, mostly white, South Africans he met. He felt that internal conflict was destroying the country and was



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frustrated at how South Africans were not dealing with their past. Yet he echoed some of these divisions when he described Indian South Africans as only interested in money and expressed shock that even black South Africans were concerned with accumulating material gain. Calvin had some unpleasant experiences with what he referred to as “incompetent whites and inexperienced blacks” in South Africa. He described himself to me as “black to the core” and was offended when Global Exchange tour leaders, who were colored South Africans, suggested that he might pass as colored. His partner was also a black American, but dark-skinned, and when they traveled together in South Africa they were perceived as an interracial couple. In America there is of course no mistaking that Calvin is a black man. He is tall, over 6 feet, sharply dressed, and comfortable in his sense of authority and class. In South Africa it is possible that this sense of authority contributed to him being labeled colored or even white. Despite his own focus on race when talking to me about his experiences in South Africa, Calvin bemoaned that “race predominated 24/7 365” in South Africa as it was the subject of most conversations he had with South Africans. He felt this was a shame as he believed it detracted from an otherwise beautiful, complicated, and complex country. An important part of the Global Exchange tours to South Africa was a visit to Lusikisiki village in the Eastern Cape. This rural village was especially selected for this tour because it rigidly conformed to customary codes and behaviors and fulfilled tourists’ desires to see authentic African rural life. Yet, ironically, travelers on the Global Exchange tours found their visits very tough, and it caused a lot of controversy because of the requirements imposed on women in how they could relate to the chief—always sitting lower than him, not speaking until spoken to, etcetera. Linda Kurtz, who had participated in a Global Exchange Women’s Tour, wrote in an online journal about how the more educated South African women “have been able to rise above the domination of men over their wives but the cultural norm is as all-powerful husband and his submissive wife” (Kurtz 1998). Her journal underlined how hard it was for her to comprehend a different set of social norms and her insight into her own inability to understand these differences. She wrote about a conversation with a priest and others in the Eastern Cape rural village church in Lusikisiki, again talking about women: “Your culture is so foreign to mine, it is as though you have asked me to stop breathing air and to breathe water instead. But I am trying to understand.” Allison ultimately described how she found most of her American Global Exchange clients quite critical of the South Africans they met. They wondered why South Africans were



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not more militant, not demanding land redistribution or restitution. On the one hand, then, travelers desire encounters with people that conform to their image of African rural life, but on the other hand they are uncomfortable with different lifeways. The breakdown/breakup of the desired travel encounter was marked by Allison’s death in 2003. Allison committed suicide, in part, according to her colleagues, who told me about her suicide, because of a failed love affair with one of her tour’s participants and ultimately the failure of her business. This saddened me immeasurably, which is one reason why I am writing about it here. When I interviewed Allison in Cape Town in 2000 she seemed on top of the world; she had a successful business and was proud of the fact that she had built it in spite of her part in the struggle in the colored schools in Cape Town, which throughout the early 1980s were a considerable force in the anti-apartheid movement. This was focused around school boycotts, and many of the participants suffered not just from the resultant repression but also from missing out on completing their schooling. Allison seemed to me to be one of those people who were making the new South Africa work for them, but her suicide shows just how crushing apartheid was and how difficult it remains for South Africans to rebuild their society as well as their lives. It is also a reminder of how encounters between South Africans and Americans, even with the best intentions, can lead to misinterpretations and even tragedy. Tourists struggled with these tensions between home and away during and after their short visits to southern Africa. While this is sometimes understood as being inevitable for such short visits, the students who spent a month, three months, or even a year in South Africa struggled with similar tensions. As with tourists, some students experienced sufficient-enough confusion about the differences between South Africa and the United States that they began to question the normalcy of familiar categories. One arena that helped students shift their perspective was their surprise at what seemed to them the odd way in which South Africans approached hygiene. Their observations were framed by all the warnings travelers are given about foreign bacteria. Not surprisingly, then, many students remarked on the way sugar is kept in bowls, not in packets. I grew up with sugar standing out all the time in a bowl, often covered with a little doily with beads weighing it down all around the edges to keep off the flies. I simply had never thought about this aspect of South African life, which must have been particularly marked for a generation of Americans who had grown up with antibacterial soaps and cleansers, sugar in paper packets, and vigilance about germs. While they were shocked or amused



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by what they perceived as extremely casual attitudes about health, they did not see this as part of the dangers they were warned against, but rather understood it as illustrating South Africans’ sense of freedom. In this realization, at least, they found the freedom that they sought through travel; it was one of the ways that their experiences in South Arica matched their expectations for the liminal spaces that travel is meant to provide (Graburn 1989). This allowed the young travelers to experience South Africa as a place of few constraints. It freed them up to operate on some levels with fewer restrictions than they were used to in America. This sense of freedom was sometimes marked physically on travelers’ bodies, as with two Californian students: Liz, who spent a year in UCT in 2000 and got her tongue pierced, and Megan, who spent a semester in Cape Town the same year and pierced her nose. For both these women this was a mark of their adulthood and their independence from their parents. It was also something that they could do in South Africa, where they felt there were fewer restrictions on how they should look. This gesture was also a way for Megan and Liz to mark their bodies as proof of having been elsewhere when they got back to California. Such freedom of expression and lifestyle is common among travelers and supports the idea that travel offers a space for discovery and transformation (Harrison 2003). Leah’s experience during her semester abroad opened up a space for her to think differently about gender roles. She approached a moment of culture clash with her usual sweetness and mixture of insight and naiveté. Leah is a beautiful, small woman with a very voluptuous figure that she showed off in sexy clothes. She experienced a lot of catcalls and come-ons by all sorts of men on the streets of Cape Town. She originally found this particularly discomfiting, having never experienced anything like it in California, and was appalled at how passive South African women appeared to be. She, however, listened to the catcalls and discovered that they were basically sweet and funny (when she could understand them) and so started to respond in kind, probably making the day of the homeless men on their street. Leah in no way accepted the inherent sexism and chauvinism of South African society as OK, in a simplistic cultural relativistic way. But she was able to enjoy some freedom from political correctness and the expectations of American gender roles in her interactions with these Capetonians. Despite the challenges for travelers to find spaces to support their desires for life-changing experiences, South Africa did become a place for young Americans to rethink some of their assumptions about the world. Like Betsy here, in her journal entry about her three-week



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Here in Cape Town, if you ask someone what race he is, he’ll likely look at you funny and tell you he is South African, not white, black, etc. They don’t focus on race as ancestry in the way that we do. We use race as such an important defining feature and it serves both to unite us with others of our same background and to distinguish/separate ourselves from all the “others”; this is what I am that is what I’m not. Multiculturalism celebrates this or at least celebrates all of the unique cultures/races that make up “America.”

Leslie Marie describes in her journal how South Africans she met during her three weeks in South Africa made her rethink her expectations about ethnic identities in Africa: There’s another thing about South Africa that surprised me and I’m not quite sure how to deal. I’ve studied “melting pot” versus “salad bowl” versus “TV dinner tray” a fair amount and I had decided that in the US the melting pot seems to be undesirable because in that scenario people lose their cultural identities to just melt into a hodge-podge of society. I had decided that it’s more ideal for people with their cultures to live next door to other cultures and everybody would appreciate the differences and the similarities together. But in South Africa, I hear that the people want to assimilate. They’re sick of Apartheid’s classifications and it seems the tribal identities have been lost through years of townships and being oppressed as a larger “African” group. It’s funny that I’m shocked of their rejection of their tribal ancestry yet I see myself as simply American or Californian but I feel no ties to the western European countries from which I get my fair skin.

Arie, another classmate, reflected in his journal on some encounters that disturbed his way of thinking: Through my experiences, I felt that my outlook towards many issues has changed. For example, I have seen firsthand the tragic effects of racial thinking. In America, it is easy for middle class whites to turn a blind eye towards this issue. But this is a prevalent issue everywhere, one that is more common than many will admit. I have learned something scary about myself, that I am a racist.

While these students’ experiences do teach them something about South Africa, these lessons are turned back home and become lessons about America or about themselves. I met with Amilca, an African American student a year after her return from Pietermaritzburg, where she spent a year on a



course in South Africa, some Americans began to open themselves to different ways of talking or thinking about race:

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study-abroad program focused in part on Zulu language study. In South Africa strangers perceived her as colored and her husband as black, so people spoke Afrikaans to her and Zulu to her husband. She was surprised at the extent of racism that she and her husband experienced, especially from colored and Indian South Africans. She had also struggled against South Africans’ stereotypes of African Americans. These, it seemed, were based largely on the American television programs popular in South Africa. Amilca’s experience taught her two important things; first she saw that she had gotten used to the subtlety of American racism that in fact did affect her life. Second, she realized that part of the reason she had come to South Africa with overly high expectations of the “rainbow nation’s” ability to have eradicated racism was due to her belief that such racism no longer existed in America. South Africa, she felt, had been a good place for her to learn that people do not conform to fixed stereotypes. After her return to America from Pietermaritzburg, Amilca felt much more conscious of her “place in the world” and was able to drop many of the boundaries she had surrounded herself with, especially in terms of the way she used to evaluate people on the basis of skin color. She was less concerned with material things and more open to cultural diversity. She no longer saw issues in terms of black and white or victim and perpetrator. Amilca felt that Americans needed to move away from a culture of victimization and to take responsibility for their lives and actions. Kamika was one of the two black American participants in the international reporting class I participated in during the spring of 2000. When I chatted with her at a group dinner at an upmarket Cape Town restaurant aimed at tourists, the Africa Café, she was determined to come back to South Africa as she absolutely loved it and was regretting how short the trip was. Kamika was finding it very interesting that in some contexts she was assumed to be black but in others she was colored, until she opened her mouth of course. This didn’t seem to bother her; in fact, she had a positive response to the ways that South Africans could not categorize them in terms of American racial or ethnic categories. Kamika used South Africans’ perceptions to reflect more on America and on herself than on South Africa. Her conversation suggested that she was discovering what it meant to be American by questioning her taken-for-granted assumptions about the United States, rather than about South Africa. Dahlia, a Latina Los Angeles native, was also amused by the colored label some South Africans gave her. Dahlia spent 1999 at the University of Cape Town as a study-abroad student. Her first impression of the city was wonder at how beautiful it was. She hadn’t



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expected this, and it seemed like paradise to her. Her experiences of racism as a Latina woman in California contributed to her excitement about spending a year in post-apartheid South Africa. But she was disappointed by what she saw of South African political debate. In particular, she felt that there was a great deal of white liberal guilt accompanied by a sense of victimization and developed a love/hate relationship with South Africans. In her experience, South Africans avoided discussions about apartheid, or the new vision of the rainbow nation. The South African students she knew thought it was just propaganda and wanted to think of apartheid as dead and over. She felt like an outsider in white clubs and only had one real friend who was white South African; her other South African friend was colored. Most of Dahlia’s friends were Africans from elsewhere, for example, Danish/Cuban, Persian/Kenyan, black Namibians, and Zimbabweans. She had met with them through the International Students organization and bonded over their mutual problems trying to understand South African society. She was initially shocked at being perceived as colored since she thought that she would have looked obviously foreign or South American to South Africans. She told me that she eventually just “became colored” after she learned to “trust” the environment, although originally it had scared her. The result was that she learned a great deal about her identity and felt it was in limbo between black and white. Like Dahlia, the American students I worked with made friends either with white South Africans, other exchange students from Europe and America, or with black students from elsewhere in Africa. They struggled to make friends with black South Africans. Phyllis, who spent 2000 in Cape Town on the same program as Dahlia, made friends mostly with students from Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan, Namibia, Botswana, Kenya, and Lesotho. These students could only be attending UCT because their families were relatively well off. South African black students, however, were mostly first-generation college students whose families were not near middle-class and whose lives were still constrained by wider family obligations and lack of funds. Many returned Americans warn prospective students at orientations about the problems of making friends with South Africans who have no money. They had found that these relationships created many awkward situations based on dependency. Class, rather than race or nationality, therefore, limited encounters between Americans and South Africans. Duke, a laidback white student who participated in a semesterabroad program at UCT in 2000, was especially surprised to meet



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black guys in South Africa who were into the same things that he was—the same sort of music, sports, etcetera. He felt that this allowed him to develop a nonracial attitude that he didn’t think he had previously had at his multicultural liberal arts college in California. Meeting guys just like him who were black was partly made possible by the freedom that travelers experienced from the social and cultural expectations that define friendship cliques in American schools (Chideya 2000, 297). This sense of being outside of the normal rules of association and behavior was another important space through which Americans were able to sometimes shift their perceptions and challenge their expectations. While the disjuncture between expectations and experiences sometimes opened up the students to seeing their world and themselves differently as I described earlier, it could also lead to frustration and confusion. This becomes especially marked when American travelers experienced poverty and racism in South Africa. The journalism student Kelly explored rape victims’ and activists’ attitudes to the rape insurance that was being offered to women to cover the cost of HIV drugs after a rape. She could not understand, however, why the debate over this insurance was considered irrelevant by the victims of rape whom she interviewed in South Africa. Kelly was thinking about the challenges facing these women from an American perspective and did not at first realize that paying insurance premiums was simply out of reach financially for the majority of the women she was talking to, so debating the pros and cons of such a program made little sense to them. Her classmate, Julie, who toured Mitchell’s Plain with a Weekly Mail and Guardian journalist for her research on PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante group that had began as a grassroots movement against the control of neighborhoods by drug lords and gangs), didn’t understand the journalist’s negative take on the police. Julie had previously observed a relationship between the community and the police that seemed respectful and comfortable when she had toured with the police, and since they were also black and colored, she assumed that they would have an uncontroversial relationship with everybody. While the concerns of these students are entirely valid, their confusion was based on how they interpreted their experiences in South Africa on the basis of what would be important in an American context. Megan, who spent a semester abroad, struggled with contradictions between expectations and her observations in South Africa when writing her term paper on feminism. She fought the possibility that African feminists might have reason to be critical of Western feminists



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who assume that the issues for African women are the same as for American women. Other students in Cape Town frequently came up against differences in gender expectations. Erika, echoed by classmates Regan, Cory, and Megan, described how different it was dancing in clubs in Cape Town. Although the women had always felt comfortable dancing in a sexually charged way with American men, they felt it was not possible in Cape Town. While American men did not assume that dancing should lead to anything, the students realized that South African men believed that such dancing would be played out in sexual intercourse. As a result, the women were finding it difficult to make friends with South African men whom they found to be conservative in terms of their attitude toward women, and really young/boyish. The students on the semester-abroad program all lived together in one house and were taken care of by a live-in domestic worker who also cooked their main meals. The students really liked this woman and saw her as part of their household, until they discovered that she was stealing from them, directly through the disappearance of backpacks and indirectly in the many loans of cash she ultimately never paid back. When the professor in charge of the program fired her, the students felt betrayed because they believed that they and the domestic worker had been friends. This incident made it necessary for them to consider their relative privilege compared with South Africans and how the people working for them could not also be their friends. Homestays are part of a cultural exchange model of travel and are increasingly incorporated even in brief tourist itineraries to South Africa. They are designed to give travelers the opportunity to spend two or three days or, in the case of students, an extended stay in the home of a local family. In South Africa this generally means that the hosts are a black family living in a township, but elsewhere in Africa it tends to be in a rural village. Homestays can be particularly contentious spaces of contact, especially with respect to male-female relations (McGaddery and Hudson 2000). Such exchanges are invariably based on an unequal foundation. At the least, language barriers mean that there is little to no dialogue between the female household head and her guests. When I interviewed Judy and Jabu in 2000 they were running TALK, a language-training nonprofit in Johannesburg that facilitates homestays as part of American graduate student language learning.6 They described problems with students who “assumed that everybody was the same and that solutions like Western feminism should be the same.” In general American study



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abroad students struggled with the pattern of gender and class roles that they observed in African homes. So American men insisted on helping women in the kitchen, and American women disregarded their position as special guests and were equally insistent on offering help. Phyllis, who spent a year in South Africa in 2000 and traveled extensively in southern Africa, talked about her stay in friends’ homes in Zimbabwe with similar frustration. Since she was a guest, Phyllis was treated as an honorary male but offended her Zimbabwean friend by insisting on helping his mother out in the kitchen. She was appalled at her American traveling companion’s jokes about a woman’s place and his references to his appreciation for a household structure that allowed him to make no contribution to household tasks. Phyllis also experienced some tension within her relationship with a Zimbabwean friend (to whom she was engaged when I met with her a year later in California) over traditional structures. She had, she said, had to realize that “he is an African man despite his British education.” One UCT anthropologist with whom I talked about the international student program expressed anger at how easily Americans were shocked by the way that South Africans discuss race openly. Race was a common theme in the journals and conversation of all American travelers. Many travelers expressed sadness at seeing racialized attitudes among South Africans. Here, Alexander describes in her journal her reaction to the three weeks in South Africa, unconsciously echoing South African racial categories while not necessarily understanding their complex histories and meanings: There was a little girl in the shop with her mother and brother. She was no more than three or four years old, and looked as though she was colored. She was sitting in the chair having her hair straightened. It just surprised me because I have never seen such a young child go through such a long and involved process for their hair. To me, it just showed the lengths some people go to hide their roots. When she walked out, she could definitely “pass for white.”

Her classmate Hyon had thought that South Africans would be silent about race: I was surprised to hear jokes about different races [at a South African standup comic’s performance]. For example, while making fun of the popular African laundry detergent [OMO] commercial, he was saying how black people are still using OMO a lot when OMO’s slogan is “OMO makes whites whiter and colors brighter.” When I looked around to see what the audience’s reaction would be, the entire crowd was laughing at the joke-blacks



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Elizabeth, who was in the same class, though, was just plain angry that South Africans are not angrier about racism past and present: Perhaps the most interesting thing that he [a taxi driver] said was that he was happy to have the opportunity to share his experience with me. He told me that a couple of years ago, he would never have been able to talk to me or even look at me because I am white and he is colored. I didn’t know how to respond to that. I felt guilty as if I had somehow contributed to the oppressions. For the first time, I was ashamed of my “ethnicity.” In the US, I had always accepted racial categorizing for the sake of remedying racial inequalities. Here I must accept that race is not a category it is a distinction—and not a positive one. Eventually, while talking to Doelie the cab driver, I did work up the courage to ask him whether he hated white people. He said no and seemed genuine but I don’t know how that could be true. I hate white South Africans so I have no idea how he couldn’t.

Liz, who attended UCT in 2000 on a study-abroad year from her Californian college, struggled to find South Africans that she would like to hang out with. Her whiteness seemed to make white South Africans comfortable in making offensive comments, such as joking with her that she came to South Africa to date big black guys or talking about how “they [meaning black people] are susceptible to alcoholism” or “elite/middle class blacks are OK but lower classes have no work ethic,” or the use of categories such as “those people,” and “us and them.” Sometimes she would respond, but more often than not she was blown away by the degree of racist comments she heard. Liz was especially disappointed by the fact that, in her words, “even colored” soccer teammates made racist comments. Most of her friends were Zimbabweans, and she was very aware how difficult it was for South African students, black or white, to afford attending UCT. In her second semester at UCT Liz began to date a black South African who lived in the township Langa. She was excited to learn about the Xhosa traditions of his family. But she was disappointed, given the rhetoric of the rainbow nation, that they should attract so much attention as a couple, even though she had experienced the same thing in the United States and Europe. She appreciated, however, that South Africans were open about their discomfort with her relationship. She felt that they did not hide their objections as they would in the United States.



and Afrikaners. Perhaps I am reading too much into this and overanalyzing, but I guess I was surprised by people’s own reactions. I expected this racial oppression that black South Africans suffered to be a taboo subject in this country.

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Jenica, a black American journalism student, wasn’t even able to use the word colored in our conversation and continued to refer to black South Africans only as Africans, seemingly excluding all other South Africans from this identity. Bahar, a Californian student, asked me to read her sociology project for a class at UCT that she was also developing for a class in California. Titled “Race and Racism,” it was a “survey of perceptions from two groups socialized on different continents, South Africans and Americans.” Her questionnaire, however, was based entirely on her own internal definitions of racism and highlighted the very different understandings of race by Americans and South Africans, thus to a large extent nullifying her actual results. South Africans would have read the questions and categories completely differently from the American respondents. As such, the comparison was not really productive, and her conclusions that Americans thought South Africa was more racist, and vice versa, probably said little about what South Africans think of as racist. But after her return to the United States from her year in South Africa, the Iranian American Bahar talked about how the main thing she had learned in Cape Town was how complex most issues are. For example she now saw that the African National Congress (ANC) was good for fighting apartheid but that both the apartheid system and the ANC were sexist. She also saw many parallels between apartheid and systems in other parts of the world, including the United States. Moneer’s journal entry about her three-week political science class in South Africa is typical of her classmates’ reflections, which were often equally critical about the degree of change that they observed in South Africa: “I am not saying that America doesn’t have racial issues to contend with but this society [South Africa] needs to realize that the playing field is now equal and implementation must occur.” Many of the travelers whom I talked to repeated their amazement at the fact that racism and segregation still exist. The idea that the South African government should have solved poverty in less than a decade reflects the extent to which images of African failure are persistent despite the reality of economic growth (Easterly 2007). The travel encounters I observed suggest that such images persist because of beliefs about America and American political change. The frustrations expressed by travelers also stemmed from their confusion when they discovered that American race categories and their meanings did not apply in South Africa. Here, Jai describes his inability to understand that Jill, a South African, did indeed know exactly what her ethnicity was because despite his efforts he could only



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I asked Jill what ethnicity she was. She gave me a weird look. I said “Are you mixed? For example is your dad black and your mom white?” She said, “No, they are both colored.” “And what about your grandparents, Jill?” “They’re colored too.” Before coming to South Africa, I had hesitations about using the word “colored” to describe someone. I know it was because during the 1960s, black people in the United States were described as that and the word became taboo as the decades wore on. So today I tried to get a better understanding of what the word actually meant in South Africa. I realized that it really doesn’t have a definite meaning. You can call someone colored and still have absolutely no idea what ethnicity they are.

A similar disconnect seems to be revealed among African American visitors to the Mayers’ ranch in Kenya. The Mayers, a white Kenyan family, were holding onto their colonial homestead and diminished land holdings by selling Maasai warrior culture to tourists (Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994). The tourist experience at the Mayers’ Ranch consisted of a tour of the highly photogenic and disinfected manyatta (village compound) where women and children, who live separately from the men, pose in studied portraits against the background of huts and brown veldt. Tourists move on to see a display of dancing and are offered the opportunity to buy traditional Maasai and Samburu artifacts. They then return to the green lawn at the homestead for tea and biscuits (cookies) served by non-Maasai domestic servants. African American visitors, though, were ultimately so offended at the way the performances appeared to be based on the production of blacks by whites that their complaints got the tourist venture shut down. Bruner suggests that these tourists were “exporting American political sensibility to an African context” (Bruner 2001, 897). In fact Bruner has argued that travel does very little to change the tourist, but rather that it changes those very objects of the tourist gaze—the ethnic other who are largely defined for the tourists’ benefit as unchanging (Bruner 1991). This is probable if tourists are simply visiting the imagined spaces that they have seen on film, on television, in their schoolbooks, or at Disney World. If home is so present while traveling abroad, it means that “you cannot sell your heritage to tourists: you can only sell their heritage back to them in your country” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996, 66). The young travelers I followed, while stuck to some degree in inevitable comparisons and expectations based on American contexts,



understand the category in terms of the American mixed-race concept and kept looking for a breakdown of her genealogy:

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grappled with their confusions and the ways that experience and expectations did not match up. They were trying to get beneath the surface, something that John, who spent three weeks in South Africa for a summer session class, suspected was much harder than most travelers expected. He writes in his journal about the souvenirs that tourists buy in Cape Town’s Green Market Square: Many of these objects are supposed to yell out “South Africa” to tourists. By buying a wooden giraffe for six Rand or a malachite necklace for fifteen Rand, I can supposedly take home a piece of their culture. I found this thought silly when I saw how all these goods are everywhere and most of it isn’t even made in South Africa . . . . I felt to consume these commodities would only be to consume the surface, a filmy, shallow aspect of South Africa.

John’s fears of being stuck with a filmy, shallow aspect of South Africa certainly reflect most travel experiences. But these stories of and by Americans in Cape Town suggest that there are moments when the worlds of South Africans make an impact on the expectations of American travelers. Yet these are not the simple stories of cross-cultural contact or exchange that are promised by studyabroad programs and tourist brochures. Ultimately, with the best intentions and even at times a critical gaze, Americans find too much of home/America while traveling in South Africa to fulfill these intentions.



Through the Gl ass




5

Disrupting the Hyphen: Identity and Belonging in America

A semester abroad in Cape Town for Corey, an African American

woman, her best friend, Maria, a Mexican-American woman, and their friend Megan, a white working-class American woman, disturbed in diverse ways how they thought about the meaning of America and of being American. Young Americans leaving the United States for the first time in 2000 began their journeys convinced that it was diversity rather than similarities that united them as Americans. They believed that all they really had in common with other Americans was their citizenship. Renato Rosaldo has argued that in the United States full citizenship is inversely correlated with cultural visibility and that ethnic, racial, and sexual identities, among others, make full participation in American citizenship difficult (Rosaldo 1993). The stories of Megan’s, Maria’s, and Corey’s travels to South African suggest ways that travel changed these young Americans’ sense of belonging to America. They found being labeled as just American by a South African reverse gaze disturbing because they had not experienced American citizenship as an equalizing category. These young women were from a generation of Americans that had taken their hyphenated identities for granted, and until their studyabroad experiences in South Africa, they had never thought of themselves as just American. But travel to South Africa led many Americans to question some of their assumptions about home. As it often does, travel abroad offered opportunities to search for an authentic other, but ultimately produced an encounter with an authentic self (Ware



Chapter


and Back 2002). Learning about who you are is a familiar story for young adults and was in part, as Chapter 4 suggested, the goal of such study-abroad programs. But it is significant that this particular journey became a lesson about citizenship and belonging for this group of American travelers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The following narratives explore why “[a]long with ‘our’ supposedly transparent cultural selves . . . , borderlands should be regarded not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production that require investigation” (Rosaldo 1993, 208). I describe Corey’s, Maria’s, and Megan’s journeys separate from the more general narrative about travel between America and South Africa and its impacts because they present a crystallization of the meaning of these encounters. They represent my most productive and in-depth ethnographic encounters and are the stories of the three women I got to know the best and became particularly close to, not just through extended interviews and contact both in South Africa and the United States, but through my most intense participant observation period of four months with Californian students in Observatory in Cape Town. It is no accident that I tell only women’s stories here, as it was only with women that I felt the level of intimacy that is the basis of my interpretation of their experiences. These stories are enriched by intensity rare in research on travelers who have not become rooted through exile or migration. Although their responses were very different from each other, Megan, Maria, and Corey learned that being American was not an artificial, hyphenated extension of their true identities, but as much part of that identity as any of the other markers they have been linked with or enacted in their daily lives. This chapter and the next are about how some of these identities can be recognized in conjunction with others. It is about the intersection of the many different ways that individuals can be American. Each of their identities is not easily understood, and this work cannot contribute to what it specifically means to be black, Latina, or even American in America. I suggest, however, that for a moment in South Africa these young Americans get to feel more comfortable in their whole bodies and with their whole histories and genealogies than they have ever felt before. This is possible because travel produces experiences akin to living along borderlands for those Americans whose lives are generally far from the places and experiences that might otherwise mark their cultural selves.



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Disrupting the Hyphen

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Megan was the first student to come to be interviewed in my office in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in April 2000. My office was borrowed and very bare. It was stuck at the end of a corridor between the anthropometry lab and the building’s inner courtyard. Its window had a view into the offices on the other side of this courtyard. My computer (borrowed) sat on one desk, but otherwise little else was mine in this tiny, darkpaneled room. Megan was a dark-haired, pale young woman, slim but very concerned with what she perceived as overly large hips, at least in relation to the accepted norm among her peers. Megan’s story was mostly about clothes. When we were first getting to know each other she talked a great deal about how she enjoyed shopping in South Africa, where clothes catered for women with hips and bums, in fact any curves. She had very little money compared with the majority of her classmates and clearly felt self-conscious about not being able to afford the fashionable clothes worn by most of her peers. Megan always carried a stamp of the outsider among her classmates. She felt smarter than most of them. Yet she was intimidated by the easy confidence that she felt stemmed from their privilege and class status. It is hard for me to reconstruct our first meeting as I got to know Megan so well and met with her again just before completing my dissertation to talk about her application to law schools, almost exactly three years after our first meeting. At that first meeting we talked a lot about her classes and her reason for coming to South Africa. Megan is from a logging town in Oregon, and she is the first member of her family to go to college. She was the most politically oriented of her classmates, and her reasons for joining the study-abroad program were in part to visit and learn about a place where she believed politics would be a constant aspect of everyday life. She was fiercely intense about politics and feminism and was very frustrated at the superficiality of so many of her classmates. Despite her passionate sense of the importance of thinking politically, Megan was always looking for guidance or support of her views of the world. She looked up to the program’s South African coordinator, whom she saw as a woman of deep conviction and interesting political experience. Despite this close relationship with a white South African, she wasn’t sure how she would deal with white South Africans more generally, because she had assumed that they would all be racists who had supported apartheid and would be resentful of change.



Megan


Megan and I developed a close relationship through spending a fair amount of time together as, unlike many of her housemates, she could not afford to do too much traveling. She was also, I think, very interested in the process of my research. We took a couple of day trips during the midterm break, when most of her peers were on safari. We went with Maria on a tour of the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s “Malay Quarter,” the neighborhood where descendents of Indonesian slaves brought to the Cape by Dutch settlers have traditionally lived, and with both Maria and Corey on a day trip to the Worcester Kleinplasie Museum, a pioneer farm museum. In June 2000 I drove Megan up to Johannesburg, where I was going to do some interviews and where she would join a friend to travel to Namibia. Taking a long, scenic route, we drove up the Garden Route on the East Coast to George and then cut into the Karoo to stop at Graaf Reinet, before driving along the edge of the Drakensberg Mountain range in the Free State and Golden Gate Park. Once in Johannesburg, we took a day trip to the Pilansberg National Park, as Megan had not been on any game park trips because of lack of funds. Three days of driving across country through ever-changing landscapes highlighted something I had observed frequently over the months spent with Americans in South Africa. Megan was mostly completely uninterested in the world outside the car window. Places and people that I would assume would be fascinating to first-time viewers, and that certainly bought a lump to my throat, appeared to be of little interest to her. As with most other travelers, I observed, Megan’s internal landscape was much more interesting to her than the one outside. Megan assumed that growing up in South Africa would produce more politically active young people, unlike her own peers. She was hoping to find a better understanding of globalization, a phenomenon that interested her deeply but also confused her. In particular she carried an unresolved guilt over the role the United States played in the negative effects of globalization, while fervently believing in the values of American development agencies such as the Peace Corps and in other ways to bring the democratic politics of America to the rest of the world. She really believed in the American political process and was insulted and hurt by criticisms of America from her South African classmates and teachers. Yet her own liberal convictions, in combination with these critical discussions, were undermining her confidence in the American government and its role outside the United States. We argued often and intensely over political issues as Megan worked out, through me, her frustration at the complexity of the world that was becoming so apparent in South Africa. And I confess that I used



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her, sometimes unfairly, to work out some of my frustration and anger at the naiveté and ignorance of many Americans in South Africa. She was, though, working really hard at trying to resolve her internal conflicts and possibly the loss of her political innocence as she became politically more self-conscious. In my little red Mazda (borrowed from my father) we drove into the ugly/beautiful cityscape of Johannesburg. At the end of our road trip our conversation became very heated over the role of the Peace Corps, which she still saw as a good option for working out her sense of political responsibility. I was describing how the Peace Corps was perceived in some countries as a wing of the CIA. Megan was furious that I seemed to be shutting the door on something that she wanted to see as a worthwhile and good thing. I offended Megan again while we were waiting for the use of a terminal at an internet café in one of South Africa’s grandest shopping malls, Sandton City. We had been staying with a single friend of mine who hired a live-in male domestic worker from Malawi to take care of his house and garden. This was still unusual in South Africa, where women almost exclusively do domestic work, at least in the house. The night before, my friend had described a conversation about safe sex that he had had with his employee, as he was concerned about the employee’s relationship with another domestic worker. Megan was shocked that such sexual liaisons would seemingly be encouraged given his married status and his role as breadwinner for his wife and children back in Malawi. She took a strong stand against any suggestion by me that there may be different perspectives in a region so dependent on migrant labor. Megan wanted to hold on to a sense of solid and unchanging moral values. In struggling between her desire to respect others and her own values, Megan was able to establish more clearly for herself what she believed in and what was important to her. Megan was simultaneously assertive and insecure. I came to see this contradiction as being based on the combination of intelligence and her feeling that she was a “poor relation” to the well-off students at her college. She never seemed all that comfortable with her political ideas, which were liberal, even left-wing, and at odds with the community she had grown up in, and so she felt the need to explain and justify her politics. As a white American from a rural conservative town, her ideas did not fit with most of her classmates’ expectations of her. Her whiteness and class marked her as belonging to a particular category, and she was always chafing against this. Megan was struck by how in America only black Americans were “allowed to speak about Africa,” and she always thought that that was correct. But in South Africa, she





felt that now she had actually been to Africa, maybe she had more to say with more validity than Americans who had never visited the continent. Related to this struggle over her right to speak about Africa was her desire to buy and wear a West African-style shirt. But she thought that on a white woman this would be considered inappropriate in the United States. When I met with Megan in Washington DC in October 2000 she was no longer dressing the way she had in South Africa. She described to me how she had been terrified of returning home. She felt that she had become a different person, and she believed that it showed, and was worried that she would not be able to be the person she had grown into in South Africa once she was back in the United States. On her return she felt that she could still be herself but could not dress to express that person or her personality. She was, however, much more confident about her own set of values, and especially of her right to be successful and to be simultaneously proud of being American and critical of the United States. Megan was uncomfortable about how quickly she had become desensitized to the poverty and suffering she had seen in South Africa. In fact, living in South Africa, where a small amount of dollars went quite far in terms of life’s little luxuries, had given her a taste for what it would be like to be rich. Her focus was on raising money to do more traveling, which she eventually did achieve, visiting Vietnam and China with Regan, another alumnus of the study-abroad program. My notes on Megan are dominated by discussions concerning clothes. For many of the young American travelers, there was a more relaxed element associated with being outside of a home environment. The feeling of being on holiday from everyday life extended even to the way they dressed. Bodies do tend to be an integral part of experiencing travel. Julia Harrison’s work illustrates how returned travelers speak of their experiences as being deeply linked to bodily function, reactions to different foods, heat, and water (Harrison 2003). But when Megan took part in these conversations with her friends and classmates, or talked specifically to me about how she was being affected by her time in South Africa, clothes seemed to signify something closer to her self-identity. Her perception was that in California she had to somehow conform to a stereotype, particularly a stereotype of a smart redneck. But in South Africa she felt free from the expectations created by this stereotype. Beyond just the betterfitting clothes, she talked about how she had enjoyed being able to wear what she wanted and how in South Africa she was able to feel



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comfortable wearing clothes that matched her own sense of who she is rather than the expectations of others. Jonathan Friedman argues that “[c]lothing is the constitution of self, a self that is entirely social” and so is used as a representation of social identity and as the hallmark of the hypermodernity of the third world (Friedman 1995, 181). Yet Megan’s responses to escaping American perceptions and assumptions suggest that these pressures also operate at the center. In the United States her dress and deportment, and often her ideas, had to conform to the image of a working-class, rural, conservative girl who was making good by going to college on a scholarship. In South Africa she got to wear bohemianstyle cotton shirts and clothes and even got her nose pierced. She felt that she was able to “dress for herself” because South Africans did not have any preconceived ideas about her class or race or even personality. In South Africa, therefore, Megan discovered a space where she felt she could be herself in ways that were impossible in America. Therefore, the time must come when there will be in North America one hundred and fifty million people all equal one to the other, belonging to the same family, having the same point of departure, the same civilization, language, religion, habits, and mores, and among whom thought will circulate in similar forms and with like nuances. (de Tocqueville 1988, 412)

Contrary to Alexis de Tocqueville’s eighteenth-century prediction about white America, Megan’s experience of class means that she did not feel part of a single and equal family. Similarly to the experiences of many Americans, whose skin color or genealogy lend them “too much culture” to be full participants in American citizenship, her class compromised her sense of belonging in America. Megan’s class, of course, is a product of and produces her whiteness in ways too complex to understand solely through her experiences in South Africa and their impact (Roediger 1991). But in South Africa, Megan did learn that she wasn’t just a marginal American—white but working class— but a full participant in the privileges of American citizenship. Megan highlights this in her application to law schools in February 2003: I have gotten to do all these things because by some accident of fate I was born into the world’s wealthiest country at a time when a woman traveling the globe is not at all uncommon. There are many privileged American and European women wandering around the world with backpacks. I never lose sight of the fact that my travel is a way to learn about the rest of the world so




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As with so many of her fellow travelers, Megan’s discovery of American citizenship and privilege led her to feel responsible for the plight of others.

Maria Maria is a tall, pretty, sandy blonde with blue eyes. She was a sociology major in her junior year when she participated in the study-abroad program. Most of her family still lived in Mexico, and she had grown up spending her summers with her grandmother there. College had been an enormous culture shock for her as her upbringing had, as she described it, been “traditional Mexican.” Her semester in Cape Town was Maria’s first experience outside of either the United States or Mexico, two places that her Mexican-American identity offered her a comfort zone. When we were all back in California, Maria lent me her journal, written before, during, and after her stay in South Africa. This was a handwritten album full of photographs and brochures and tickets, more of a memory book than a detailed travel journal. In her entries before leaving California she wrote that she saw Africa as the “Dark Continent” because Africans’ inability to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic showed how ignorant they must still be. She was hoping that her experience in South Africa would dispel these ideas. As with many of her peers, it took her a while after arriving in Cape Town to really feel as if she was in South Africa as she had expected to see only black people and was surprised by the urban landscape. A lot of what she saw in Cape Town, however, reminded Maria of Mexico. She felt that male-female relationships, as well as the hierarchy of whiteness in South Africa, had similarities to Mexico. She found South Africans generally friendly but thought that they seemed suspicious of why she was in South Africa. When I first interviewed her she was looking forward to seeing the “real Africa,” meaning wildlife and grasslands, on her Easter break trip with Corey to Chobe Game Park in Zimbabwe and the Victoria Falls. During her five months in Cape Town, Maria became very frustrated with South Africans who refused to believe that she was Mexican because she was so fair. Maria’s best friend, Corey, described in her own journal in more detail a typical encounter for Maria:



that eventually I will be more able to help the women I have met and talked to on my travels. I believe that it is my duty as an American to find out about the world around me, and to study the way that my very powerful country fits into the international community.

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Today a few of us walked to Pick and Pay [a grocery store] and while we were there one of the women working there stopped me and asked if my white friend needed someone to cook for her. I was completely caught off guard because she was talking about Maria and I said that she was not white but Mexican but she insisted that she was white. (Journal #161 )

Not only did South Africans assume that Maria was American and white, but, as she wrote in her journal, their overall response was, in her word, xenophobic. She describes how, when she spoke, South Africans would say, “Oh no, not another American.” Her explanation for this xenophobia was that the history of apartheid had made South Africans resentful of “losing to other countries.” Maria wrote in her journal about how she felt intimidated to speak although she believed that her accent was not “so American.” Yet she eventually realized that whether she spoke or not, South Africans would identify her as American. This reaction, though, made her aware of how much she loved the United States and yet uncomfortable with this feeling of belonging in America. Maria frequently made reference to the importance of her Mexican family and her upbringing in Mexico, fighting against the possibility of being what she called “just American.” This frustration played itself out in concrete ways through her relationship with food during her five months in South Africa. As with most travelers, all the students found the lack of familiar foods stressful. They were happy to celebrate the end of their semester in restaurants serving “traditional African” food from all over the continent, especially those aimed at an up-market tourist crowd. But they never really explored any of the local food opportunities. The students all got food parcels with chocolate-chip cookies and Dorritos from home. But Mexican food was especially missed. They were amazed at the price of tortillas in the supermarkets. I was amazed that it was possible to buy them at all. They found endless amusement in the one Mexican restaurant in their neighborhood. The food wasn’t right, and nobody knew how to pronounce the names of dishes anyway. Maria wrote in her journal how her desperate search for some sort of familiar food even took her to a McDonalds in Cape Town despite her fears of bombings at these icons of American culture.2 She found South African food universally bland and drenched everything in sight with hot pepper sauce. Maria’s need for hot sauce was so pronounced that it became a bit of a joke for everybody, one of those household/traveling group jokes that help to cement relationships both





positively and negatively. I suggest that Maria’s need to not only put hot sauce on everything but also make a performance of doing so at every meal went beyond issues of taste and familiarity. Maria needed to perform her Mexican identity as it was increasingly being threatened by the way that South Africans labeled her simply American and certainly not Mexican. The strength of her feelings may have been in part because of her own sense of not quite belonging even among her own family because of her fair skin and blond hair. South Africa crystallized this sense of otherness in ways that she possibly wouldn’t have been able to identify before. While Maria’s experience was a familiar one for many Americans in South Africa, she was especially upset by it in comparison with her friends because she had felt so strongly that her identity was primarily Mexican-American, with an emphasis on the Mexican. Certainly in California there was no doubt of how she was different from her peers. But toward the end of her stay in Cape Town she wrote in her journal: “Are you an American?” I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. (Anzaldúa 1987, 17)

In South Africa Maria encountered “this place of contradictions” between her Mexican and her American identities and struggled with her “mestiza consciousness” (Anzaldúa 1987). Like Esperanza, the main character in Sandra Cisnero’s The Fading of the Warrior Hero analyzed by Renato Rosaldo, Maria “inhabits a border zone crisscrossed by a plurality of languages and cultures” (Rosaldo 1993, 163). She felt “the weight of the multiple identities that intersect through her person” (Rosaldo 1993, 166). What each of these identities has in common, however, is how culture is the resource with which they engage to develop a politics of identity for any time or place and the prominent use of “borders as sites where identities and culture intersect” (Rosaldo 1993, 149). Maria actively mobilized her taste in food as a cultural representation of who she believed she was and as a way to resist the identity that South Africans seemed to be imposing on her. Maria found in her taste a way to assert the complexity of her identity. Food became the signifier of otherness for her and marked her separateness from her American classmates. By being confronted with her Americanness, Maria chose to assert her Mexicanness. Hot sauce,



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and the joke surrounding it, was a simple material marker unique to her, and yet it was a powerful barrier between her and being lost in this strange world where her identity was questioned or, worse, lumped in with people she would normally not see as sharing her identity. I do not believe that Maria was rejecting or denying that a part of her is American but asserting that it is possible to be both American and Mexican, a result of the to-and-fro relationship across the border between the United States and Mexico (Alvarez 1995).

Corey I first really noticed Corey when I attended a Brentwood braai (BBQ in South African vernacular) for the first time. She was standing on a chair so she could handle the huge amounts of red meat that she was cooking on the outside grill in the tradition of a South African braai. Corey was a small, dark-skinned African American woman, and she and her best friend, Maria, who was tall and fair, made quite a striking pair. Since coming to South Africa, Corey had had her hair braided so that it hung down her back. She cut quite a figure standing on that chair, cooking over the hot coals. Her enthusiasm for braaing had already caused some amusement in the house. Some of the South African students had assumed that she was a local working for the American students and had initiated some embarrassing conversations. They were trying to appear democratic in their social interactions, wanting to be respectful of this fellow South African who, unlike them, was apparently in a servile position to these exotic American visitors. A few of the American exchange students from other universities made similar assumptions and asked Corey about being black and South African. Corey was quite happy to encourage the joke, but her classmate, who told me about it, was uncomfortable with it. In our first interview, Corey described how she had always wanted to go to Africa but had associated this with going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids, since “Africa is Africa.” She was planning to do graduate work in criminology and so was interested in studying crime and deviance in South Africa. She talked with frustration about the medical anthropology course at UCT that she had chosen to drop. She knew that she was supposed to “leave her culture at the door,” but she could not understand how Western biomedicine wouldn’t be the first choice for everybody. Corey was surprised that Cape Town was so Westernized; she saw the influence of American culture everywhere. But it still felt sufficiently different that she knew she had left America and the West. The drive from the airport the first day had really “blown her





away.” She expressed wonder at how the South African government could let such shantytowns grow, but then corrected herself, saying that the United States government also seemed to “allow homelessness.” She had organized a trip with Maria to Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia for the Easter break. The trip was a seven-day, four-byfour camping trip to Chobe, Victoria Falls, and included an elephant ride. She had also tried to organize a trip to Egypt. She was hoping to come back to Cape Town to work on her senior thesis on PAGAD (People Against Drugs and Gangsterism). Her mother was going to be coming out to South Africa in June, and they were planning to go to the Grahamstown Festival, an Edinburgh-style annual arts festival. Corey’s journal entries were particularly eloquent about her encounter with her identity and the way that South Africa was disturbing the categories that she usually took for granted. Here are some telling extracts from her five months in Cape Town: While I was at the beach I asked [their teacher] how I would have been treated had I come here during apartheid? She said that I would have been an honorary white, because I would only be here for a short time. This perplexed me, because I would have to leave the US to be treated like a first class citizen and of all places South Africa would be that place. It would not be because I was considered equal but because I was an American I guess there are some benefits of being an American, one just has to leave the country to receive them. (Journal #4) [The hairdresser] wanted to know if I was colored because the front of my hair was wavy and she was having a hard time getting it to go straight. I thought for a moment before I answered then I said no, then she wanted to know what I call myself because she knew that I was American. I told her that we call ourselves African-Americans but it did not sound right so I changed it to black. For the first time it sounded strange saying that I was African-American. Here I am in Africa and I have no ties with the people here and it just does not sound right saying that I am African-American. (Journal #11) Tonight I went over to my professor from Tanzania’s house and met his wife and one of their friends. As I was speaking with the friend she told me that I was the most American person that she had ever met. I was speechless, but it made me think. What else could I be but American? America is the only country and culture that I know. To say that I am African-American does not sound right because a white person from Africa could call themselves AfricanAmerican and they would be, because they are from Africa and I am not. Now I am left with the question of what to call myself.



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On the other hand, I can not just say that I am American. In Africa yes, I can say that I am American and leave it at that. Once I go back home the label American does not include people of color. When someone is of color in the U.S. they become a hyphenated-American, implying that they are not truly Americans because they are not of European descent. It should not matter what a person calls himself or herself but it does because it allows one to identify with a group. It makes no sense for me to use the label African-American. I have no idea what country in Africa my family is from and I/we have been living in America for at least 5 generations. I do not want to say that I am Black because the label still does not connect me to any country or continent. Plus Black people in America are not like people anywhere else. We have no language but American and Black English; we know no culture but American culture. We are truly a construct of American society. However, I can’t say that I am American because the label is reserved for people of European descent. I have no idea at this point of what to call myself. (Journal #22–24)

Corey’s changing responses to the questions she raised in her journal about identity could be visibly read through her changing hairstyles. About a month after arriving in Cape Town, Corey had her hair braided, having had some adventures with keeping her hair chemically straightened as she did at home. She frequently talked about her choices in terms of hair care and wrote about it in her journal: Now that while I am here I must figure out what I am going to do with my hair because it needs to be washed. I asked [the student’s domestic worker] where I could go to get my hair done and she wanted to know what I wanted done. I told her that I need to get it washed, blow-dried and flat ironed. This is going to be a problem because they do not know what a flat iron or hot comb is but thank God I bought mine with me. I will try and find a place to go in the next few days because I do not want to do it myself. Hopefully, I will find a shop that can do my hair the way I like, if not I have to get it braided. (Journal #6) As we were talking [with a vendor at the Waterfront] she asked me about my hair and how I got it so straight and what type of hair products I used. I told her that I used Paul Mitchell and that you buy it at white hair shops.



I do not want to say Black although it is a self prescribed label, meaning Blacks started calling themselves by that name. However, if I call myself that it ties me to a larger community of Black people worldwide. This leaves the question of power, just because there is a large amount of Blacks in the world we are some of the most powerless people concentrated in the least powerful countries.

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This afternoon on the way to varsity I saw a place where I can go to get my hair done. I am not sure if they flat iron your hair. I walked down to the hair place and asked if they flat ironed your hair after they wash it and the woman had no idea what I was talking about. Then I asked if they used a hot comb and she still had no idea what I was talking about. This is going to be a long five months if I can not find a place to get my hair done. I went ahead and let them wash my hair. (Journal #11)

More than a year later, when I joined Corey and her family for her graduation, she was sporting a short afro, looking gorgeous and comfortable in her skin. Her style was a big topic of conversation for her family. Her mother and her aunts, as well as her uncles, were all hoping that she would get over her need to wear her hair in an afro. They described this as a gesture representing that she had “been home to Africa” and believed that she was expressing an African identity through her hairstyle. Given the way she described her experience to me and in her journal, as well as our conversations after her return, I believe that it was something quite different. It is not in the scope of this project or appropriate, given my own white South African appreciation of the afro style that black South African activists often adopted, to speak in any general way about the meaning of this style for black American women (Jacobs-Huey 2006). My interpretation here is about Corey’s understanding of her changing hairstyles. Kobena Mercer does suggest that the afro “engaged in critical ‘dialogue’ between black and white Americans, not one between black Americans and Africans” (Mercer 1987, 42). It does indeed seem that Corey was showing the extent to which she had worked out the answer to the question about who she was that was generated by her encounter with South Africa. She was making neither a fashion statement nor a specifically anti-white statement, both readings of such a “do” (Davis 1994). Her braids might have been an experiment with being African and a direct result of her encounters with hairdressers in South Africa, but her afro was a sign of how comfortable she felt with being both black and American. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature) understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to



As soon as I said that I paused because I realized what I had said and the not so distant past here. She did not say anything but I felt bad, I was just talking like I would in the U.S. to one of my friends or anyone on the street. (Journal #7)

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the resident black population. Race, in fact, now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of Americanness that it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed racisms whose dynamics we are more used to deciphering. As a metaphor for transacting the whole process of Americanization, while burying its particular racial ingredients, this Africanist presence may be something the Unites States cannot do without. Deep within the word “American” is its association with race . . . American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen. (Morrison 1993, 47)

Corey’s journal entries show how she struggled with this relationship between Americanness and whiteness and may have found a way for herself to be both black and an American. Corey, like many black American travelers, encountered the double consciousness described by W. E. B. Du Bois thus: “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognized strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder . . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” (Du Bois 1996, 5). Given the importance of hair in an African American sense of identity, it is not surprising that Corey focused on her hair throughout her time in South Africa (Ashe 1995, Davis 1994, Jacobs-Huey 2006, Mercer 1987). Through her changing hairstyles, Corey’s journey to South Africa and back to America became a negotiation between these two warring ideas. Sandra Gunning argues that, while it might seem like a contradiction to both nationalism and imperialism, black diasporic identification is in part structured by the rhetoric of both nation and empire (Gunning 2001). Corey’s experiences suggest how her black American identity is not antithetical to empire or nation but rather emerges in a tense and complicated relationship with them. Corey’s journey to South Africa was an engagement with home, with her American identity, and centralized rather than decentralized the United States.

The Meaning of America Corey, Maria, and Megan struggled against the ways that they were perceived as tourists and as Americans while in South Africa. But each of them also had very particular encounters based on their identities back home that shaped their ongoing relationships with America. So for each of these young women, South Africa was a space where





they came up against South African perceptions of what it meant to be American. These produced feelings of liberation from expectations, a space for some to explore and test their identities; for others, being seen as “just American” generated fears of losing their previously taken-for-granted sense of self. While it was common for American travelers in South Africa to discover their Americanness and to re-assess their relationship to American citizenship, for travelers like Megan, Maria, and Corey whose Americanness was hyphenated, this discovery was profoundly disturbing. In being reminded that they were American, it felt for them as if a part of who they were was eroded for good or bad by the ways that South Africans positioned them as “just American.” In her ethnography of the journeys to China of young Chinese Americans from California, Andrea Louie reflects on the multiple ways that Chineseness is constructed and experienced (Louie 2004). Her work has historical depth and also explores the different ways of being Chinese in both America and China. But I am interested in the young participants who traveled to their ancestral villages through an In Search of Roots program and who made journeys, much like the ones I describe, back to America in the beginning of the twentyfirst century. These Chinese American travelers had, to use Rosaldo’s vocabulary, too little culture to be Chinese and too much culture to be American. The young travelers’ references were more likely to be popular culture forms that they already knew of or enjoyed in the United States and found echoes or copies of in China rather than a nostalgic trip to a past that their families shared with families in China. They also had to deal with being told “but you are not Chinese, you are American,” in contrast to the labels bestowed on them back in America, where they were most likely told “but you are not American, you are Chinese.” This began their process of developing new identities and relationships with both China and America. First they realized that they did not fit in anywhere; there was no home. As with homecoming tours to Africa (Ebron 1999, Holsey 2008), these homecoming tours produced an ancestral China, not a contemporary one. They were focused on the point on a timeline that linked families on mainland China to their relations in America, at the time that they split. This therefore, produced an imagined China with little contemporary politics and economics. In finding their roots in China, they were seeking to place themselves not in Chinese society but within American society. As a young traveler, J. O., who participated in the homecoming tours described by Louie, wrote, “Home. I certainly don’t need to travel overseas



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to find myself. I know who I am, where I stand. Some people like to put it in words. To please you, I’ll say this: ‘I am proud to be a Chinese American’ (notice, no Hyphen). But words don’t define me. Inside, I’m at home with who I am, without having the need to place labels on it” (Louie 2004, 186). Louie discusses how these young people felt obliged to seek ways to be “authentically Chinese” while simultaneously asserting their Americanness. What is important here is that “finding themselves” in China did not translate into becoming Chinese, but in finding ways of being Chinese and American (notice, no hyphen). It reshaped what it meant for them to be Chinese and American. Louie’s work emphasizes that no matter what the meaning of Chinese identities becomes to different people of Chinese descent, and what the impact of globalization, the importance of place and rootedness remains paramount. This creates a tension between movement and rootedness, home and away, that is familiar in studies of migration that show that “being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached” (Ahmed et al., 2003, 1). Americanness as experienced by American travelers is much like the Chineseness described and explored by Louie, a dynamic formation “produced simultaneously on local, state, and transnational levels” (Louie 2004, 20). It is “a dimension of identity that is contested and shaped within power relations and becomes salient in different ways in various contexts” (Louie 2004, 21). This challenges the common assumption in the politics of identity in the United States that relies on multiculturalism and hyphens and that suggests that identity is something to be “found out there” if you just think about it enough (Louie 2004, 104). Drawing on Stuart Hall, Les Back suggests that the “new ethnicities” he describes among British youth were “in part produced through a productive tension between global and local influences” (Back 1996, 4). This means that they challenged not only what it meant to be black but also what it meant to be British. For Back the new racism in Britain stemmed from the lack of a clear-cut sense of what it meant to be English, so that Englishness and blackness were being constructed as mutually exclusive identities by confused youth trying to establish a sense of self in opposition to the others that were streaming into their country. Back, though, also saw a contradiction in the claims of the British youth to diversity and argued that despite a wealth of diversity that they represented, “we cannot dispose of national identity altogether. On both the left and the right, the besieged British way of life and its attendant logic of cultural purity





still provides an organizational skin to be stretched over the frame of the state” (Back 1996, 250). The identities of Americans in South Africa, though also no less complexly inflected than at home, also got an added dimension—that of being American. As with young people in Britain, Maria, Corey, and Megan experienced an “organizational skin” that was stretched over their identities by encounters with others. Their stories evoke a mirror of Fanon’s description of black men who, having lived in France, return to Martinique and “convey the impression that they have completed a cycle; that they have added to themselves something that was lacking. They return literally full of themselves” (Fanon 1967, 19). For a moment in South Africa, and sometimes when they returned to America, these young Americans felt full of themselves. Julia Harrison’s interviews of experienced and frequent travelers from Canada suggest that the sort of aesthetic, sensual experiences her informants described allowed them to experience not only the landscape they were viewing/visiting but also to experience “heror himself in an unusual and vivid way” (Porteus 1996 quoted in Harrison 2001, 167). This was made possible in part because travel offers “[t]he opportunity, even accidentally, to bump into parts of yourself that you did not even know that you had. In a sense it is like having a limb go to sleep then discovering it anew. By traveling places I have an opportunity to discover part of myself because of the way that I respond to something foreign” (a traveler quoted in Harrison 2001, 167). The linked but different paths followed by Corey, Maria, and Megan between California and Cape Town reveal how, for some travelers, the sleeping limb encountered is indeed the recognition of something that has always been there, and not a prosthetic as they had tended to view it. Being American became not an artificial extension of their “true identities,” but as much part of that identity as any of the other markers that they had been linked with or had enacted in their daily lives. In his preface to Errand into the Wilderness Perry Miller wrote that “[t]he adventures that Africa afforded were tawdry enough, but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany . . . of the pressing necessity for expounding my America to the 20th century” (Miller 1978, vii). In this founding text in American Studies, Miller illustrates the extent to which Africa is central to the question of what it means to be American. Megan, Maria, and Corey found an Africa that both defined and threatened to destabilize the carefully negotiated boundaries of their American identities (Kaplan 1993). They learned that, although while at home they lived and performed hyphenated identities, in



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South Africa they were just American. Their stories emphasize the possibility of being American, while also being black, Mexican, and/or working class. Megan’s, Corey’s, and Maria’s lives in America after their return were informed by a changed perspective on their relationship to other Americans and to the U.S. government. Like Miller’s discovery from the remote vantage of the Congo, from the rather less remote vantage of Cape Town, these young women “discovered themselves at home with a coherent national identity; there, like the Puritans in the wilderness, they found themselves ‘left alone with America’ ” (Kaplan 1993, 4). The American identities they found on the slopes of Table Mountain were firmly articulated with nation, and especially belonging to a nation in ways that many young Americans had never considered.







6

“ H ow D o T h e y K n ow I a m A m e r i c a n ? ” T r av e l a n d t h e D i s c ov e r y o f H o m e

Clifton number 4, a tiny beach nestled in a cove on the cold so-called

Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula, is the playground of the wealthy South Africans that holiday in Cape Town during the summer. Despite its freezing cold water, it is nicely sheltered from the wind that tends to dominate beach holidays in the Cape. A steep stone staircase that winds down to the sand past old wooden bungalows built long before the beach became fashionable ensures that it is mostly the young and beautiful who soak up the broiling sun here. Volleyball is the game of choice interspersed with quick plunges in the freezing water. Clifton is one of the many small towns that lie between the beach and the mountain along the Camps Bay Road, which winds dangerously and picturesquely along the coast of the Cape peninsula. It is dominated by spectacular houses of the style that gets written up in architecture and design magazines and that are increasingly owned by Europeans. These overlook a view of a shocking blue sky meeting a darkly green ocean. Clifton is on the tour of the peninsula that introduces many travelers to Cape Town. The study-abroad students that I spent the most time with in Cape Town remember their first visit to this beach at the beginning of their semester in South Africa. It was an experience that dominated their conversations with me about their introduction to Cape Town. For many of them the bars and restaurants along this coast would become popular haunts during their stay in the city. But this sightseeing tour also marked them clearly as tourists. They frequently brought it up



Chapter


in the next five months, worrying how their cameras, their backpacks, and their clothes had made them stand out as visitors. This encounter with the perceptions of South Africans set them on the path of finding ways to dress that would ensure that they would not immediately be recognized as tourists. Young Capetonians dressed differently than they did, and the students made a quick study in order to try to fit in. It was a challenge few were ever able to master for reasons that were, some realized, more complex than fashion accessories. Many of the students continued to feel marked by the way that South Africans perceived them. Like Corey, Megan, and Maria, whose journeys I described in Chapter 5, they began to see themselves differently than they did at home. The contact zone of contemporary tourism is complex and not entirely in the control of tourists and travelers. All the travelers to South Africa with whom I worked struggled with the reality of experiences and encounters that did not simply fit their expectations and images of Africa or of themselves. The gaze, a fundamental trope in both historical and contemporary travel writing as well as tourism theory, was disturbed by these encounters. In some cases it was even reversed. In Chapter 3 I described how travel to Africa is beset by a tension between the expectations of American travelers for a particular vision of Africa formed through schooling and media and a reverse gaze from Africans who not only belie the travelers’ expectations but look back at them in unexpected ways. In this chapter I will take a closer look at the ways American travelers responded to the reverse gaze of South Africans that marked them as American. This is a common experience of course for all American travelers. One study-abroad student, for example, described how the most important impact of a year abroad in Scandinavia “was my dramatically increased understanding of America as a nation and Americans as a people and why they are as they are” (Mortensen quoted in Pires 2000, 42). Travel to South Africa had such a fundamental impact because it exposed these young Americans to sufficiently different perspectives about home that they began to recognize that the differences within America, although profound and meaningful, did not entirely mask the privileges of belonging to a particular national community. Tourism or travel is often defined by the collection of border stamps in one’s passport, and the experience is even felt to be lessened by diplomatic relations that create the possibility of moving from one country to the next without obtaining a stamp. Traveler tales often include a border-crossing trope that is used to underline



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the excitement and the danger of a trip abroad, at least for those who don’t really believe that they will be turned away. Without such a tale to relate to family and friends back home, the legitimacy of the experience becomes questionable. Crossing borders were always moments of intensity described with much retrospective amusement by the travelers that I interviewed, as when Phyllis told her story of needing the “extra visa” (a pay-off or bribe) at the border between Zimbabwe and Botswana. Most of these stories hide feelings of fear and a strong sense of being required to identify with a nation-state. Since these are also the times that a passport is necessary, it is not surprising that the requirement of such a material representation of the nation-state should make traveling so revealing of these Americans’ own position in the world (O’Byrne 2001). It may be a deceptively simple story, but living or traveling in a foreign environment cannot but make individuals more aware of their personal and national identity (Fey and Racine 2000). The journeys of Corey, Maria, and Megan and of their classmates illustrate how “social borders frequently become salient around such lines as sexual orientation, gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, politics, dress, food, or taste” (Rosaldo 1993, 207). In Chapter 4 I explored the assumptions that underlie the expectations that travel should be a life-changing experience. While the specific expectations of travelers and tour companies are seldom fulfilled, it does seem that in removing the traveler from a known space, travel can provide a mirror on that space and reshape it in the minds of travelers (Desforges 2000, Koshar 1998, Li 2000, MacCannell 1999, Urry 1995). Travelers, positioned as they are at least in the moment in the interstices or liminal spaces, between a place that they perceive as home and a place that they perceive as away and other, have to negotiate their identities through cross-border interconnections (Clifford 1997, Lavie and Swedenburg 1996, Malkki 1995). Scott wrote in his journal during his three-week program in South Africa: I felt a little intimidated on our first drive through town. I felt the tourist stamp on my forehead glowing bright like a torch even more so than in other places I’ve traveled.

In trying not to be recognized as tourists, as they were on their initial tour of the Cape Peninsula, American students in South Africa began to hide their cameras and bought second-hand leather pouches and other sorts of bags to carry their books. Travelers were thrilled



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Americans seem to be a big novelty here and people think we’re cute. I just wish we weren’t so obvious. I want to blend in so nobody changes their behavior around us. That’s the point of traveling. We were in a small group yesterday and a security guard spoke to us in Afrikaans, which made us so happy. Once you get past the video cameras and tourist traps, you can see what is really going on.

The study-abroad students’ attempts to embody a non-tourist identity were similar to the travelers that Nancy Frey observed on the Camino to Santiago. While not always driven by religious faith to participate in the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James, they worked hard to construct themselves as pilgrims (Frey 1998). Repeated stories of suffering and pain, blisters, swollen feet, etcetera, became part of the pilgrim’s sense of authenticity. The route/the Camino became the primary figure in the lives of travelers. It was the process of getting to Santiago rather than the arrival that was important in both the identification of participants as pilgrims and in the impact of the experience on their lives. Like tourists in South Africa, they recruited and mobilized symbols, including the scallop shell, the staff, and the backpack, to ensure that others also were able to recognize them as true pilgrims. American travelers to South Africa were not, therefore, unusual in wanting to blend in so as to experience an authentic, backstage encounter with South Africans (MacCannell 1999). This was seldom achieved, however, as their interactions with South Africans constantly reminded them that they were other. It became very clear, very quickly, in fact, that many of the students, no matter how comfortable they became in South Africa, remained somehow marked as not just foreign but also specifically American. Once they spoke, all Americans were of course immediately identifiable as American in South Africa. But they didn’t always have to speak. Tiffany wrote in her journal reflecting on her three weeks in South Africa how she still hadn’t “figured out how they [South Africans] can tell [that she is American], even when I’m not talking.” A lot of American women also talked about how they were especially marked as American because they moved and lived in the world in a manner that South Africans expect



when confused with locals and disappointed when South Africans asked them where they were from, but then happy again when it was assumed that they had been in South Africa longer than they had been. As Anne wrote in her journal about her three-week summer session tour of South Africa:

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of white men. This marked them as different in the context of a society that remained patriarchal and sexist despite the major changes introduced by the new constitution after 1994. American women moved with a silent sense of confidence and belief in their right to be in that space. Black Americans were both less and more noticeable in South Africa. Black American travelers often described uncomfortable encounters in combi taxis or grocery stores when South Africans spoke to them in Xhosa or other local languages. But in more personal spaces, such as the classroom or at student parties, black Americans were recognized as American. In a country where black bodies were so recently repressed, black Americans often appeared particularly confident, taking up space as if they belonged in a way that in South Africa had generally been the province of white men. Liz, in a conversation back in California after her study-abroad year in Cape Town, was convinced that South Africans did not need to hear Americans in order to identify them. She thought that it was because Americans “walk like Americans,” that the way that they take up space, in fact command space, marks them long before they actually speak. Liz was unconsciously echoing Pierre Bourdieu: “Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into permanent disposition, durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Bourdieu 1990, 69–70). Although Bourdieu was writing about the way men and women embody their roles within a society, the experience of Americans in South Africa illustrates the ways that national identities can be built into a body’s movements. It highlights the extent to which it is possible to understand the body as fully integrated with social relations rather than simply reflecting or countering them (Turner 1995). In writing on the efficacy of commemorative rituals in building and sustaining national identities, Paul Connerton argues that such ritual performances incorporate social memory through performative memory. This is in fact “bodily memory encoded in postures, gestures and movement” (quoted in Foster, 1991, 243). Marcel Mauss suggested this when he described techniques of the body as “ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies” (Mauss 1973, 70). According to him “[t]hese ‘habits’ do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, and prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties” (Mauss 1973, 73). His description of these habits, though rooted in a





much older conversation in anthropology, very much echoes the ways that American bodies were marked in South Africa as particularly American. The last thing I want to do is suggest that Americans can be assigned a particular national character. How an arbitrary set of characteristics are made natural, and more to the point made to appear linked to a particular nation-state, is a contentious question (Alonso 1994, Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, Chatterjee 1993, Foster 1991). It has been made even more difficult to answer by rising tensions between the demarcation of boundaries essential to forming national identities within the global ecumene, and the ways in which boundaries are made to seem porous by various flows of people, media, and objects (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, Hannerz 1996). That the United States and American corporations are often seen as the site or source of the global culture that results in or causes this flow makes talking about an American national identity especially complicated. This makes American identity appear arbitrary because it is the source of a global flow of culture; its borders are so porous that everybody and nobody can be American. Yet in the encounters between Americans and South Africans in the contact zone, the reverse gaze of South Africans marked Americans not just as other but also as belonging to a particular nation. It disrupted this easy flow and showed the extent to which place and home continue to matter in the global ecumene. This at least was how these young Americans understood their encounters with people they met in southern Africa. They felt labeled, categorized, and, worse, judged, whether that was the intention of the Africans or not. Maria’s, Corey’s, and Megan’s experiences showed how such encounters caused stable identities to be re-imagined. But for many Americans in South Africa their experiences stabilized what appeared to be fluid identities. This was possible in part because the objects of a tourist gaze returned this gaze and influenced the way tourists experienced the places and people that they encounter. Moneer reflects in her journal on the lessons learnt from her experience in South Africa for her summer session class: It seems to me the more I travel the more I learn about myself and my country (USA). Today I learned the great lesson of proper hospitality and just how far Americans are off the mark. Most Americans have very little sense of being part of a large community, individuals that work towards satisfying the common good.



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I found the people very friendly towards us “yanks” and felt a much better vibe than I did when I first arrived. I think it has to do with the fact that I felt assimilated rather than a casual observer. When people heard my accent they were excited to talk to me which differed from my initial perception of how people would react to finding out I was an American.

But Americans in Cape Town did not always benefit from the acceptance described by Scott or this travel writer, John Flinn: Fortunately, most of the rest of the world has the wisdom and grace to do something we Americans aren’t very good at: They can treat a person as an individual, without investing him with the sins of his government. I’ve traveled to places, where frankly, the United States has a lot to answer for— Central America, parts of the Middle East—and if anyone I met there held me personally accountable, I’m unaware of it. But the rest of the world doesn’t automatically hate us for being American; neither does it love us for it. This, I think, is what really bothers some American travelers. More than the citizens of other nations, we want—need, even—to be liked. (San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 2001)

In fact the student travelers often encountered negative perceptions of America and Americans that they found deeply disturbing. Many of the students resented the fact that the identity with which they felt saddled by South Africans was based on television shows—shows such as Beverley Hills 90210 (which was dubbed into Afrikaans in South Africa) and Friends and soap operas such as Days of Our Lives. It was even more confusing for American travelers that young South Africans expected Americans to have watched South African television and listened to South African music, just as South Africans pay attention to American pop culture. I doubt that when these shows were being discussed that South Africans believed them to be documentary evidence for life in the United States, but they certainly contributed to an image of America as wealthy and homogeneous in terms of class and culture. Many South Africans also evoked these shows ironically when Americans suggested an understanding of South Africa based on what they have seen on television or in film. It was generally disappointing to travelers from America that South Africans and other Africans watched and admired American pop culture. Sometimes, though, students recognized the irony about who gets to produce images



Some students were pleasantly surprised at the responses of South Africans to their identity, as Scott, who spent three weeks in South Africa for a summer session course, shows in his journal entry:

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However, I didn’t like how some of the urban youth seemed to be Americanized. I also didn’t like those youths’ perception of us. They believed the stereotypical images of African Americans presented in the media. I know that they can’t be blamed for it, because most of us from America have the same negative stereotypes about Africa, which are, unfortunately portrayed through the media and educational institutions. (Dawson 2000, 128)

The image of Americans as all wealthy was often the students’ first encounter with the need to rethink what home and America meant in their lives. It was also one of the most talked-about aspects of an “Out of Africa” safari to Kenya described by Ed Bruner that is otherwise specifically planned to protect tourists from African realities and the hassles associated with traveling in a developing country. Typically this tour offered the beauty of the savannah, the excitement of Maasai dancers, and the luxury of a gin and tonic, all while tourists watched the sunset far removed from the contemporary politics of twentyfirst-century Kenya. But as their cars drove past Lake Manvara to Ngorogoro Crater, they could not avoid passing some poor Tanzanian villages from which young children came running to beg for money from the tourists (Bruner 2001). The tourists commented on how ashamed they felt at spending so much money just on a holiday and were made particularly aware of their wealth relative to the poverty around them. To some extent, Bruner suggests, they responded so positively to being included in dances with Maasai at another point in their trip because this seemingly personal encounter offered some absolution for their privileged position. Bahar, an Iranian American student who spent a year at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2000, described how she had found living with South Africans difficult because of their perceptions about Americans and in particular the assumption that all Americans were rich. Dahlia, who had attended UCT for a year in 1999, also described how she had to be careful in her house about using cosmetics and other products that were perceived as expensive in order to not offend her housemates. Dahlia believed that South Africans felt a great deal of animosity toward the United States. She felt that it was largely based on perceptions developed by television. Val, April, and Scott, young professionals who had traveled for five weeks through South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe as part of a group of eight friends, talked



that have power, as this student who participated in a study-abroad program to Ghana attests:


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I wasn’t really aware about how much the world puts the US up on a pedestal until I saw the disbelief in these students’ eyes when I dispelled their beliefs about the US being a utopia for all. Maybe its because I am from the US, but hearing people have such misconceptions about my country seemed really awkward.

Monica, who spent three weeks in Johannesburg and Cape Town with Jenshu, expanded on this frustration in her journal: Sad enough that most people presume that most Americans are wealthy but how wrong they are. But I don’t blame them, I blame television, as one beggar confirmed it. What else are you supposed to think about an American when you never met one but only saw American television programs? I would also think that most Americans are well off, and we are in comparison to South African living conditions in the townships. But my family is very proud to be workers that prefer to sweat and go hungry than to take handouts from someone. They believe in earning your bread and water. And as I was in South Africa, many able-bodied children would come to us, Americans, to beg for money. Although I understand that there is a limited amount of jobs, I felt I was doing more wrong by giving the children money than right.

The journalism student Kamika was confused by the ideas of a group of young homeless kids, rap artists, and musicians that she interviewed for her international reporting class project in South Africa. She did not understand how they could really believe that America was the land of milk and honey, where music contracts abound and success is easy. Kelly, who was part of the same international reporting class, described how she felt singled out as an American when she spent a semester abroad in Zimbabwe as an undergrad. When she was mugged, it felt as if her perceived wealth was a negative. But ideas about Americans mostly worked to her benefit as she was treated better by most Zimbabweans than she felt she otherwise would have been. Most of the students whose study-abroad experience I observed appreciated the extremely luxurious life they were experiencing due in part to the dollar-rand exchange rates and in part to their privileged position as full-time students with no dependents. Liz was especially conscious of this shift in class status from being average and middle



about how they were immediately identified as American and thus as wealthy. Here Jenshu writes in his journal about encountering the unexpected perceptions about Americans during his three-week course in South Africa:


class in America to occupying a particularly wealthy and privileged position in South Africa. Her relationship with a black South African man, who could not attend university because he had to support an extended family, made this shift clear for her. Many of the students were given an opportunity to experience a lifestyle that they might not have in the United States, yet they still felt angry that South Africans saw them as being privileged. These disconcerting perceptions extended beyond being marked as privileged. Americans, similarly to Megan, Corey, and Maria, found that their particular hyphenated identities were seldom recognized by the people they met in southern Africa. Val, April, and Scott described how they were perceived as outside of the local racial categories during their five-week tour through southern Africa. They were simply American, which to the Zimbabweans and Botswanans meant that they carried no distinct identities. In the southern African context they were not even white—an identity reserved for settlers and ex-pats. These encounters were especially difficult for African American students, whose lives in the United States were often marked as marginal to mainstream America, but who were often seen in South Africa as simply American and the same as their white classmates. Black American travelers noted how Americans were treated as automatically privileged or at least rich and often felt uncomfortable when given special treatment and being treated as white. As Marissa’s journal entry shows, being black but American mattered in her interactions with South Africans: Anyway, for the rest of the night, the soccer member who I had met preached on how white South Africans couldn’t help feeling superior and how this was instilled since they were kids. This all seemed so ridiculous to me. I asked him if he would ever come talk to me at a bar not knowing that I was American— he said no. I have never experienced anything like this. At the bar we had been before (mostly black), the people seemed to not want to approach us and at Barney’s it was the same . . . that is until they found out we were Americans.

Phyllis’ experiences in southern Africa followed a familiar trajectory— recognition of her Americanness and of the responsibility that that entails. She had traveled with friends through southern Africa after her year of study abroad in Cape Town. She described conversations with Zimbabweans that focused on her clothes and expressed frustration that Zimbabweans considered the way she dressed as an aspect of her culture and specifically of her American culture. Phyllis was told that “you American Negroes are a different race,” and she felt that she was



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treated better than other people because she was American. The fact that Zimbabweans recognized her Americanness simply through the way she dressed and assigned to her a culture to which she did not feel she belonged was surprising to a young woman who thought of herself as African American and of America as cultureless. Phyllis was also frustrated at how much her hosts in Zimbabwe and Mozambique knew about the United States compared with what she knew about their countries. The second half of this story comes from the ways that Americans were not just recognized as “just American,” but the meaning of that identity to Africans. Southern Africans were often better informed about American society, politics, and culture than their American visitors were of the local situation. While it was exciting for young Americans to be in a country where young people took politics seriously, it was hard to be constantly reminded of their American identity. They felt even worse when they were made to represent a nation that was often simultaneously despised and adored, and sometimes envied by the people that they encountered. This was not long after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, so it was not surprising that South Africans were particularly sensitive to the value and power of being able to vote. This meant that travelers were being exposed to their own lack of political engagement in a society that was particularly concerned with political and social debates. In 2000, before the events of September 11, 2001, this negative perception of the United States was a disturbing revelation to many travelers. The idea that they should be responsible as citizens and, presumably, voters in a democratic country was quite shocking. After 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, conversations about traveling abroad were characterized by the anticipation of being hated and Americans felt that they needed to prepare for animosity. But the overall feelings among American travelers, that the actions of their government were not something they should have to defend, remained the same. Rya, whose study-abroad semester in Cape Town was so powerful that she returned the next year for another semester, felt that she learned a lot about South Africa as well as herself from conversations she had had with South African students in and out of class. She was surprised at the level of debate just in casual conversations. It seemed to her that living in a country with political turmoil made people much more aware of and interested in the world around them than are Americans. Her classmate Katie, who was often the center of all the parties during her semester abroad in Cape Town, was deeply moved when she participated in a Free Zimbabwe march. The marchers were





attempting to deliver a petition to the South African parliament asking it to take action against the farm invasions that had then recently begun in Zimbabwe. Katie was struck that so many people—black and white, Zimbabwean and South African—would take action for something she considered hopeless. She talked about how this experience had taught her that it was important that individuals do something to change what they see as wrong even if they feel powerless to do anything effective. This was a common experience among the students who went to South Africa for a summer political science class, judging from these excerpts from their journals: Johanna: The most amazing aspect of South African politics and culture that I have found so far is its highly engaged, extremely dedicated “culture,” if you will, of political activism. Amy: It seems that no matter where we go, whether it is McDonalds, a bar, an amusement park, or the train, people know what is going on politically in their country. I feel that this is a big advantage for someone like myself who is a Political Science major and interested in discussing politics. It is possible to get a random person’s perspective. It is not like in the United States where the average person would not be able to start talking about the structures of the American government and go into detail about our country’s history. Betsy: We ask why doesn’t the Constitutional Court serve for life (in South Africa)? That way the judiciary would be independent and could more objectively implement the laws. In essence we’ve been asking why don’t they just do what we’ve done? It works so well for us, or so we think . . . Now I realize I shouldn’t just assume that the US is the right model to follow, and I should be more aware of just how complex all of South African’s problems are.

The students on all the programs I worked with talked a great deal about what it felt like to be an American visiting or living in a developing country. They were often challenged by South Africans to take responsibility for American corporate/cultural imperialism. Some of the students were confused about why this was such a problem, asking, for example, “Why can’t they just eat at McDonalds?” This confusion was related to their bewilderment about globalization. They were puzzled by the seeming contradiction between the way South Africans love to wear icons of globalization such as Nike shoes, drink coke, watch American soap operas, and the way that they criticize the United States for imposing American culture and values on them. The South Africans they met on campus and in bars and clubs told them that they, as Americans, held a dominant position in the world that required responsibility.



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Mostly, Americans were confused and frustrated by the images South Africans had about the United States, and they felt that they were unable to escape what they saw as prejudice and ignorance about America. When I first met with the college students in Cape Town in March 2000 they had been in South Africa for about a month and many of them felt that they had experienced some form of xenophobia. This was in a country becoming marked by an increasingly violent level of xenophobia toward, mostly African, migrants and workers (Mathers and Landau 2007). Katie, for example, asked for my help in writing her paper on xenophobia for her core class on her semester-abroad program in Cape Town. Her challenge was that she had decided to write about xenophobia experienced by Americans and especially study-abroad students, and she couldn’t find any references to work with. All the papers she had found dealt with South African xenophobia against immigrants and exiles from elsewhere in Africa who had become an increasingly large group since 1994. Katie was confused about why nobody cared about xenophobia against Americans or between white people. She kept asking herself why South Africans seemed to love foreigners but to hate Americans. She wondered if they were “feeling the pressure of the global village.” Being recognized as American was, therefore, only one aspect of the reverse gaze experienced by Americans in Africa, as these travelers also got a lesson in what that identity seemed to mean to South Africans. As Johanna, who spent three weeks in South Africa, wrote in her journal, Perhaps it is only my paranoia, as one who feels like an accomplice in the great injustices many South Africans have suffered, but I thought I read on the faces of black South Africans passing my window both fear and revulsion. I also saw, from my comfortable, well-fed perch of complacency, abject poverty.

What was so tough then for many of these travelers, as well as the wider population of study-abroad students to Africa, was not just that they were seen as part of an American culture but the way that that culture was perceived (Pires 2000). These young American travelers found, like black Peace Corps volunteers in Africa, a “new cognizance of their fundamental Americanness” (Zimmerman 1995). Peace Corps volunteers in Africa between 1961 and 1971 were profoundly affected by the way Africans perceived and responded to them. First, they were not recognized as black, let alone as being the same as the Nigerians, Ghanaians, or Cameroonians with whom they were working (Zimmerman 1995).





Second, they were often perceived as part of the U.S. military complex. Third, America was perceived to be a place of enormous inequality, oppression, and violence, and far from seeing theirs as a shared struggle, Africans could not understand why black Americans were either not fighting this oppression back home or staying in Africa to escape it. Black Peace Corps volunteers could not, therefore, easily maintain any of their illusions either about Africa, blackness, or even the United States in the face of a reverse gaze. Just as “the relationship between imperial expansion and Englishness is central to the story of what it means to be part of English society” (Back 1996, 15), I suggest that American travel and especially cultural exchange programs such as study abroad play a part in reflecting and building what it means to be American in an imperial age. Even during colonial travel to Africa, crossing boundaries allowed travelers and adventurers to “sometimes blur distinctions between home and away, centre and periphery, colonizers and colonized, destabilizing rather than reproducing those dualisms” (Phillips 1999, 84). In 2000 a gaze back by Africans shook the taken-for-granted intimacies at home of young American travelers and positioned them in unfamiliar ways with America. Borders need to be maintained, and it is travel across them that does this work—helping travelers to see who they are more clearly. A focus on exchange across borders, however, can obscure the ways that they continue to enforce fragmentation and difference. Movement needs, therefore, to be understood in terms of both mobility and enclosure (Cunningham and Heyman 2004). The Canadian frequent travelers that Julia Harrison interviewed were also more likely to change their perceptions of home than away. These travelers already had a strong sense of national identity, which was affirmed on the other side of a border. They used this new awareness to position themselves within a national and global landscape. Such international tourism shows how “[t]he border is [not a] place, but the discovery of place . . . . [It] is not difference; it allows difference to appear” (Angus quoted in Harrison, 2003, 143). While it seems that borders should no longer be salient in a globalized economy, they are, in fact, increasingly being controlled against the flow of people and in favor of the flow of currencies. Borders quite literally and rather effectively encircle centers of wealth (Bennington 1990, Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, Cunningham 2004, Vila 2003). As they prepared to travel to South Africa American travelers had no sense of belonging to a larger national community (Anderson 1991, Foster 1991, Kearney 1995, Mudimbe 1995). While the United States does appear to have most of the trappings of a nation—a language, a



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common past and destiny, heroes and villains, exhibitions and museums, a folk culture, sacred lands, a national bird and flower, a flag and an anthem—this group of Americans was uncomfortable with an identity based on national belonging. Indeed, narratives of national identity and homogenization in the United States often “deny the reality of elements that constitute ‘an American way of life’ ” (LindeLaursen 1995, 1147). America, therefore, makes few claims to the imagined homogeneity that is supposed to characterize the nation as community (Foster 1991: 250). Narratives of homogeneity often depend on a significant other against which members of an imagined community can construct their identity (Alonso 1994, Goldmann, Hannerz, and Westin 2000, Linde-Laursen 1995). Canadian identity has its significant other in the form of the United States of America and is unimaginable without that border between the two countries (Harrison 2003). The young Americans I worked with, however, had no experience of a significant other. They had grown up with no clear memories of war or conflicts that were not structured as internal, such as the “war on drugs.” In post-9/11 discussions with my students at Berkeley, this obfuscation was underscored by their lack of any knowledge or memory of the first Gulf War, let alone the Cold War. They, therefore, tended to find spaces inside their borders in order to identify the role of nation in their lives (Todorov 1999) and built their identities on internal differences. They had learned to view the world not with a nationalizing eye, but rather a racializing or ethnicizing eye. These young Americans, who traveled to South Africa in 2000, therefore, really needed the blurring of distance and border crossings to see what they could not see at home. By crossing a border they recognized themselves as American. Travel is a cultural experience that produces identities not places, yet place remains important. The identities produced by travel are located in relation to America, and this is an America that is seen, sometimes for the first time, by these young travelers as being globally positioned. The travel journalist Walter Kirn reflects on the challenge of having his sense of self disturbed by travel abroad (New York Times, February 2, 2003): I’d wanted to be above it all, sporting and good-humored and sophisticated, but I saw now that I was an American after all (an American in my own fashion, of course, just as the Constitution allows us all to be) and that dancing around this fact connoted a shame that, at bottom, I didn’t feel. . . . My own experience has taught me that I can’t, and don’t want to, sidestep my own




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But unlike Kirn the young Americans, whose understanding of Americanness was disturbed by the gaze of southern Africans in 2000, built on this challenge to locate spaces where they needed to take some responsibility for their privilege. At the first study-abroad orientation I ever attended, I heard for the first time how much backpacks were recognized as particularly American paraphernalia. When I first arrived in America as a student, I do remember remarking that American adults, undergraduate and graduate students, carried their stuff around in backpacks, not a common sight among South African and British adults. At the time, though, I was more intrigued by the ubiquitous super-size vacuum cup of coffee or water bottle that Californians seemed to never be without. But the returned students at this first orientation and their program officer were adamant that American students should avoid carrying their stuff around in backpacks because these marked them as tourists and specifically as American tourists. This evoked Peggy McIntosh’s description of white privilege as “an invisible weightless knapsack of provisions, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, compasses and blank checks” (McIntosh 1988). Being American in a global context seemed a lot like being white in a local context. By examining American identity as a coherent social category, like race, it is possible to observe how Americanness operates as a normalized identity for Americans in relation to the world (Mahoney 1997). Americanness, like whiteness, is unmarked and unnamed by Americans through the simple expediency of denying the existence of an “American culture,” of claiming corporate culture as the entity people hate about America and of embracing an acknowledged American identity as fragmentary and, therefore, nonexistent (Mahoney 1997). Although we all perceive our own home cultures as normal, Americanness has become especially invisible, normal because it is understood to be culturally neutral (Hartigan 2000, Rosaldo 1993). The world outside America can only be and must remain simply “other.” The travelers started their journeys believing that Americanness was an unquestionable category—simply the dominant background norm that allowed them to create a sense that the rest of the world was naturally and inevitably undeveloped and underdeveloped (Mahoney 1997). As Cathy Thomas says in her conversation with Ruth Frankenberg, “to be a Heinz 57 American, a white,



Americanness in order to placate the country’s blunter critics, who frequently make fewer distinctions among us than we like to make among ourselves.

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class-confused American, Land-of-the-Kleenex-type American, is so formless in and of itself. It only takes shape in relation to other people” (Frankenberg 1994: 66). Young Americans who traveled around southern Africa learned that their Americanness was not so formless. More importantly perhaps they realized that their real backpacks marked them for South Africans as carrying similar but invisible backpacks of privilege. In this case this privilege included very real passports, visas, and check cards. One morning in Cape Town during the Easter break, Corey, Megan, Regan, Leah, Maria, and I sat around the big, farm-style table in the dining room of their house enjoying quesadillas and guacamole, home fries and tortillas. This was an expensive (in South Africa) Mexican treat celebrating the holidays and fulfilling Maria’s yearning for a taste from home. The conversation circled a great deal around men, boyfriends and home, South African men versus American men, buying clothes in South Africa, and feeling different in South Africa. Much of this exchange revolved around the way they were labeled American. Maria talked about being seen as “white American,” something Corey had commented on in her journal, when in fact she felt really different in America, where she saw herself as a minority. Regan, who had always identified herself as Creole in America, talked about how she loved the differences in American society and how she hadn’t previously ever thought of herself as American. She was, however, beginning to think that there was something “American” about all of them but that she couldn’t say what it was. They all joked about how I should write a book about what it meant to be American. This moment was definitely an ethnographic “ah ha moment” (apologies to Oprah and the O Magazine), when for the first time I realized that I might actually have to think about and write about American identity rather than representations of Africa in the United States. In suggesting the possibility that Americans perform a single national identity I do not disregard that this is in many ways in contradiction to the daily, lived experiences of many Americans. Travel is not a daily experience but is, as these stories show, a place to reflect on different identities than those that one lives every day. Crossing borders and encountering others in southern Africa led to a discovery of America, and the mechanism that throws into relief the presence of the United States as nation-state. Like the interstices described by Homi Bhabha that “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal— that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself”





(Bhabha 1994, 1–2), the in-between spaces inhabited by travelers rescripts the meaning of being from America and of home. This meant that the encounter at the periphery of a twenty-first-century empire between Americans and South Africans required, first and foremost, recognition of a nation as a prerequisite to recognizing that the nation also exercised power outside of its boundaries. This journey required passports, and these not only acted as declarations of citizenship but marked for young American travelers the boundaries of their own identities. By unsettling the traveler’s assumptions about home, travel disturbed the naturalness of belonging to nation.



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7

S u f f e r i n g B e au t y : H o w t o S av e Africa without Changing It

In 2006 Hollywood consistently rewarded Rachel Weisz’ perfor-

mance in an otherwise largely overlooked film in the United States, The Constant Gardener. The film mixed action adventure with political thriller embedded in a critique of the global pharmaceutical industry’s use of Africans as cheap test subjects for new drugs. Rachel Weisz played an idealistic activist who dies in her crusade to expose corruption at the heart of the deals between the government of Kenya and an industry giant. In a year in which Hollywood congratulated itself on its representation of tough issues (Crash won best picture Oscar), its singling out of this portrayal of an aid worker in one film about Africa shows the extent to which humanitarian engagement in Africa had become an important story in America. The stories that Americans tell about travel to Africa all follow a similar trajectory. First, Africa is a mess, people are devastated, AIDS is killing them, war is destroying them, environmental horrors are overwhelming them, and economic hardship seems to control their lives. Second, despite this poverty (or maybe because of it), there is so much good. People are working tirelessly to overcome the awfulness; there is kindness, laughter, smiles, all apparently so unlikely amid the mess. Alongside this narrative about Africa, though, American travelers encounter a reverse gaze from South Africans that requires them to reflect on what it means to be American and the responsibilities that come with that identity. This realization leads many travelers to find ways to save Africa, a desire that gives meaning to being American.



Chapter


Indeed saving Africa is often made possible by mobilizing the tensions between stories of suffering and stories of smiling in the face of that suffering. This seeming contradiction helps to render African people as not just close to nature but as nature itself. These gestures of erasure, or assimilation of people into the landscape, are not only woven through the stories told by travelers about their encounters with Africans. The growing celebrity and media engagement with the continent and the more and more popular images of celebrities saving Africans do the same work of erasure. Celebrity narratives, television, film, and other popular culture come together with traveler encounters to turn Africa into a pristine landscape on which Americans can find their true and good selves. Americans and Africans have had a long and vexed history, as I briefly showed in Chapter 2, one that has often made Americans the saviors of Africans. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century this role expanded to a formidable extent, leading Alex Williams to write “[t]hat Madonna should suddenly be casting an ice-blue eye toward Africa should hardly be surprising. After all, she has always known how to spot a trend” (New York Times, August 13, 2006). This trend is fast surpassing any other moment of celebrity engagement in humanitarianism or diplomacy, including USA for Africa and Live Aid’s response to the Ethiopian famine in 1985 (Cooper 2008, Drake and Higgins 2006). Over the first decade of the twentyfirst century, celebrities like Oprah, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (Brangelina in the entertainment magazines), Bono, Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake (when they were together), and Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow encouraged Americans to become part of some campaign or project to help Africans. Television shows like ER went to save Sudanese refugees and American Idol went to Kenya. Films like Sahara, The Constant Gardener, and Blood Diamond brought African environmental, political, and economic challenges to the multiplex. American political life is, in fact, increasingly covered by entertainment media, and politicians are more than ever being seen as celebrities whose families, back stories, and personalities are just as important as their policies (Drake and Higgins 2006, Gamson 1994). It perhaps, then, seems less odd than it should that television and film stars and the products of their labor are more and more engaged with what are political, economic, and social issues. Such films, television shows, and celebrity campaigns are creating shared spaces and ways for all Americans to do what the famous are doing for Africa. These shared spaces and claims over Africans suggest that everyday Americans are no longer peripheral to the “power



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networks that circulate in and through popular media” (Holmes and Redmond 2006, 2). Sherry Ortner’s research with the children of her New Jersey classmates showed how they genuinely experienced the anxiety that was being attributed to their generation by popular media and journalism, despite their middle-class status and jobs (Ortner 1998). She suggests that this is one reason why anthropologists need to take popular culture seriously. But the relationship between the desires of young Americans to save Africa and the saturation of popular culture with these desires is more complex. While travel to South Africa marked the boundaries of what it meant to be American, images of celebrities in Africa do what Richard Dyer has argued is the work of stars—to “articulate what it means to ‘be human’ in capitalist society” (quoted in Holmes and Redmond 2006, 9). Indeed Sean Redmond argues that contemporary fame culture, very much like travel as described in this book, “destabilizes the borders and boundaries of identities, and . . . energizes or electrifies one’s experience of the world” (Redmond 2006, 27). This is possible because encounters between celebrities and their fans or even critics create a space in which an intimate encounter that “electrifies one’s experience of human relations and the material world” is possible (Redmond 2006, 36). The very public journeys that celebrities make to Africa, then, not only take their audiences with them but ensure that the meaning these journeys have for them becomes part of the lives of everyday Americans as well. This highly exposed celebrity engagement emphasizes how poverty has become the entry point for an encounter with Africa, whether virtual or physical. If they do not fly directly to and from a game park, most travelers to South Africa are exposed to horrendous levels of poverty, which becomes an important part of the stories they tell about Africa when back home (Mathers 2004). The study-abroad students I studied found this poverty, especially the ever-present homeless people in Observatory where they lived, very shocking. Many of the students dwelled a great deal in their journals on the awfulness of the poverty, the dirt, the squalor of the townships. Travelers in general were especially shocked at the contrast between the lives of poor South Africans visible in the sprawling townships most of them visited and the extreme wealth of other South Africans seen in the largely white suburbs and luxurious shopping malls. Journeys to Africa by celebrities and other Americans were often framed by stories about this poverty. On arrival at Cape Town International Airport the traveler, exhausted, sweaty, dehydrated, shaky on her feet, climbs off that plane



S u f f e r i n g B e au t y


and picks up luggage in the seemingly continuously refurbished international terminal. The American traveler negotiates customs perhaps for the first time ever, moves through crowded hallways packed with welcoming family and friends, none of them for her, and meets a tour guide or orientation officer who takes the traveler to the minibus that she will soon learn to call in South African vernacular a combi. This combi takes the traveler on a road that, for many, will be the beginning of their journeys in South Africa. Time and again travelers told me, “I realized for the first time that I was actually going to be in South Africa on the drive from the airport to the hostel.” Besides bringing the traveler to the foot of a unique mountain, it winds through some of the most overcrowded townships of the city and the country. Shacks spill over the walls that were built to protect the driver from all that poverty and ugliness. These corrugated iron shacks, pasted together with cardboard, scavenged tarpaulins, road signs, and advertising billboards tumble down the slopes on either side of this highway. Along with these odd structures compounded from the detritus of the more affluent portions of society are people—mostly people, as sometimes there are cows and goats—crossing the highway. American travelers’ comments about their arrival in South Africa express their shock and surprise, especially at the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth. Betsy’s journal entry about her first impressions arriving in South Africa at the beginning of her three-week summer class shows how, as was true of many of her classmates, her expectations were confounded by what she saw: Even though I knew in my head that Cape Town was an industrialized city and that the townships of Cape Town were very poor communities, I am truly shocked by the dramatic stratification of wealth here. Driving to UCT [the University of Cape Town] from the airport the cab passed a beautiful golf course followed minutes later by hundreds of shacks that look like they could fall apart at any moment.

The beauty of the Cape made the inescapable poverty more shocking for her classmate Peter: On the way to [our dorm], I saw numerous shanty towns that starkly contrasted with the beautiful Table Mountain in the background. On the freeway the shantytowns became blurred images of poor South Africa as the shuttle bus picked up speed.

This shock often led new arrivals like Jai to find familiar comparisons and framings from home to make sense of the contrasts:



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His classmate John, on the same three-week program in South Africa, reflects similarly about his arrival in Cape Town: As the transport vans took us to the dormitories, shantytowns started to sprout up on the left side of the highway. On the other side of the road, I saw houses akin to the homes found in a typical American suburb. The road reminded me of how the railroad tracks used to divide the good and bad neighborhoods in the United States.

American celebrities mobilize the same analogies with home to show how the terrible poverty they see in Africa leads to life-changing experiences. The comedian Chris Rock writes about his trip to South Africa in the Vanity Fair (Product) REDTM issue: There’s nothing like the poverty I saw in Soweto. Imagine the worst ghetto in America. Now set it on fire. Now try to put out the fire with shit—and it’s still not as bad as how people live in parts of Soweto. . . . After spending 10 days on the most beautiful continent in the world, I realized I had been on one of the most incredible journeys of my life. It made an indelible impact on my psyche. I got in touch with my ancestry, and in a small way I felt like I had gotten closer to God. (Rock 2007: 152)

Travelers’ evocation of home when trying to come to terms with poverty and contradictions in South Africa often frames their experiences in terms of American meanings. Kamika, a journalism student, whose international reporting class brought her to South Africa for ten days, told me that poverty in the United States, “where it means sleeping in a hallway,” is nothing to poverty in South Africa, where a seven-year-old who grew up being sodomized could tell her a perfectly articulate story about his need to sniff glue so that he didn’t have to feel the cold or the pain. Experiences of African poverty can overwhelm American travelers. During two interviews in Berkeley, Rachel told me about her three months in Kenya in 1999 over the American summer teaching English. She expressed guilt at how frustrated she got with the constant requests for money. While recognizing how poor her host community was, she felt that they should also understand that she was a poor student back in the United States. This was



Driving to UCT from the airport, we had seen the seemingly endless ocean of shanties and shacks lining the roads from Cape Town. They wizzed by, though, like some history video in the eighth grade that captures your attention but seems unreal and unfathomable.


made even harder because in her mind it was supposed to be the best time of her life. She resented her mzungu (foreigner/white) status and her lack of privacy. She felt that the students she was helping to teach would never get educated, never get out of poverty or the village. Rachel felt that despite the beautiful tourist spots, Kenya was a horrible, poor, badly managed country with helpless people. But soon this horror at the poverty that American travelers see becomes qualified by their encounters with the real people amid it. The particular stories of the Africans whom they met were not about hopelessness and did not show them to be victims to their living conditions. American travelers to South Africa consistently expressed surprise at meeting people who showed a diversity of responses to living under awful conditions and even seemed happy. Travelers began by noting only the poverty and the difference from their lives of privilege and luxury. But they quickly went on to notice that South Africans could be ambitious, even content, despite their seemingly hopeless situation. And so the travelers’ stories became about South Africans’ resilience and hopefulness. Here Peter, who completed a summer political science class in South Africa, describes this confusion in his journal: The condition of the entire house was bleak and unsanitary by any standard, however, the family greeting us looked surprisingly joyful. Whether the emotion was a front or not, it was encouraging to see that these people tried to make the best of their economic and social situation rather than simply despair and depression.

This is a common story for American travelers to Africa. Students on a study-abroad trip in Ghana were surprised that they could feel tranquil and safe and be welcomed with warmth and openness by Ghanaians given how poor they were (Day-Vines, Barker, and Exum 1998). Another group of students who went to Kenya were equally surprised that poverty did not completely crush people and learned to “realize that Africans are not simply helpless people unable to feed themselves, but they too struggle to improve their lives as do so many others around the world” (Pires 2000, 41). Or, as this student on the same study abroad trip said, “This definitely confirms my previous opinion that the media portray one-quarter of the picture of many societies around the world—and now, with this experience I can believe that African, or at least Kenyan, life isn’t all miserable” (Pires 2000, 41). The study-abroad students to South Africa whom I worked with were frequently astounded that people living in townships might be 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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house-proud, work on a garden, and be hospitable or positive about anything, let alone their lives. During her three weeks in South Africa, Amour wrote in her journal that “in some of the townships some people had built their own small houses. Although the conditions were horrible, people still had high spirits.” Her classmate Elizabeth wrote that “the abject living conditions I expected, the uplifted spirits of the residents were a surprise.” As Kyle, who spent a semester in Cape Town, put it, “people seemed happy despite having nothing.” A common refrain among these students was that people were “surprisingly generous given where they live.” Other students’ journal entries kept coming back to what they perceived as a disjuncture, such as Alexander, who wrote, “I expected to see more sadness, loneliness, anger and hopelessness. It’s hard for me to realize that people in this situation don’t know anything different from it and can make the best of it. I was surprised to see kids running around and playing, and the people smiling and chatting.” Linda, who published her journal online about the Global Exchange tour she took in 1999, also reflected on this contrast: “We did drive by squatter camps which were very poor and without utilities or roads, but generally the village did not make you think of poverty. Lawns were well kept and homes appeared painted and cleaned” (Kurtz 1998). These images of people who are house-proud and generous in the face of what should be overwhelming lack remind Americans how beautiful poverty can be. In the Emmy-winning episode American Idol Gives Back on April 25, 2007, Simon Cowell, the pop singing competition’s judge, heads to Kenya to look on morosely as young children scrabble for food in a waste dump. He is horrified, shakes his head, talks about how he simply cannot believe that people (although we only get to see and meet children) can live like this. He reaches out to touch a young boy who is the sole provider for his brothers and sisters since their parents died of AIDS, and the viewer is reminded of the child’s beautiful soul. In an almost identical insert on Oprah’s (Product) REDTM show on October 13, 2006, Alicia Keys meets a young boy in South Africa who is supporting his AIDS-devastated family. He weeps, she weeps. In each segment the lives of Africans, besides being devoid of adults, are shown as unremittingly hard, and yet the audience always gets to meet these great, strong, smart, charming, pretty children who are persevering, smiling in the face of what to Americans looks like devastating poverty. Muhammad Ali emphasized Africa’s suffering beauty in the Vanity Fair (Product) REDTM issue: “It is true, Africa has endured famine, drought, and the AIDS epidemic, but what is more important is that the people have endured . . . . with dignity and hope” (Robinson 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers




2007, 45). Celebrities faced with Africa’s poverty, then, also reach for the smile amid the sadness, thus reminding their audience how beautiful poverty can be. Alicia Keys, in the same magazine, sounded exactly like the young travelers who marveled at how generous and happy the poor South Africans they met could be: “When you go to Africa, there is a spirit that is very resilient and it is very inspiring thing to be around; it definitely gives me a sense of purpose, something to work for” (Robinson 2007, 56). David Jefferess describes a similar set of responses on World Vision Canada’s television show on “Canada’s Day to Care for the Children” (2002). The program’s featured celebrity, the singer Jan Arden, begins by listing everything lacking in the Tanzanian Massai community she was visiting—lack of food, material goods, formal education, adequate shelter—but concludes in tears with an exclamation that “[t]hese people are so happy” (Jefferess 2002, 10). This constant return to the African smiling in the face of terrible conditions helps to define how Americans should help Africa. In some ways this is a refreshing lesson learnt by American travelers, who are required to reevaluate their understanding of poverty as creating an undifferentiated mass of helpless victims (Mathers 2004). As a study of the impact of diasporic travel on American students to Ghana suggests, “Americans equate poverty with shame, culpability, and lack of personal agency. . . . In a society which emphasizes the accumulation of material wealth a poverty of hopelessness and despair is expected. As such, students expected Ghanaian poverty to assume similar likenesses” (Day-Vines, Barker, and Exum 1998, 464–468). But with their realization of dignity in suffering there is also a sort of sigh of relief that living without is somehow OK, even redeeming, at least for “others.” For example, Linda in her online journal about her experiences on a Global Exchange tour wrote about their tour of Alexandra township: “The poverty is incredible, and yet, the richness of spirit, and the enthusiasm for building a new nation, this is a wealth I have never seen before” (Kurtz 1998)! This realization that a kind of richness comes from poverty highlights an important aspect of the responses of travelers to African poverty; it is consistently characterized not in terms of structural conditions, history, or politics, but as a lack of things. More importantly it’s a lack that does not crush the real wealth of Africans—their spirit. In resolving the tensions between African suffering and poverty and African resilience and beauty, Americans produce images of Africa that have no specificity. Travelers to particular regions and countries in Africa can still see Africa as a space of no geography or politics



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or agency despite having been there. It is well known that tourist experiences of a place are often conditioned by the images already seen in guidebooks and other preexisting stereotypes (Andsager and Drzewiecka 2002, Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994, Haraway 1990, Little 1991). When American students were asked to compare the cityscapes of New York and Johannesburg, they used an ethnic or tribal cultural frame to describe images of the entirely urban South African spaces (Andsager and Drzewiecka 2002). These potential travelers looked for the essentialized stereotypes that they associated with their destination on the basis of more familiar images of Africa and that marked the destination as different from America. One student traveler, Amyra, supports, though inadvertently, this conjunction of a generalized African culture with the continent: I also see Africa as a place of rich culture. It is there where culture was invented and influenced millions of people. My example of this is how many people in America wear African clothing and try to duplicate the culture of black Africans through song and dance. Africa must be a powerful place if it has this amount of influence on the people of America.

South Africa was perceived as more cultural (not meaning ballet, opera, theater, etcetera, but ethnic/tribal) than New York, thus indicating the common perception that culture belongs to others (Rosaldo 1993). Despite its urban scapes South Africa is still produced and consumed as an exotic space, a cultural landscape. This is a peopled landscape, but one where the people are perfect embodiments of the landscape, rather than moving on or through it. African landscapes must be cultural because this marks how exotic and natural people are in Africa. Given these expectations and potential disappointments, the bulk of tourism marketing for South Africa focuses on safaris and wildlife. Yet The Official South African Travel Planner distributed by the South African ministry of tourism in 2000 describes South Africa as “[a] land of rich cultural diversity and exquisite natural beauty that welcomes visitors as a nation reborn.” It evokes the calling card of the South African tourism industry since 1994: “One Nation, Many people” (see also Rassool and Witz 1996). South Africa has more recently been branded by the South African Tourism Board, now Brand South Africa, on its websites as “A World in One Country” and as “Alive with Possibilities” and “South Africa, It’s Impossible.” Such branding consistently embeds culture into the South African landscape. Africa is where rich cultural diversity is a bonus added onto the natural wonders





you can always expect on any visit to this continent. In an advertisement in the New York Times magazine in February 2000, the South African tourist board played on the two goals of travel by telling Americans to “[f]ind yourself hoping you never reach your destination.” Americans are explicitly reminded that they can find themselves in Africa while of course also enjoying an amazing journey. In one of the stories she wrote about her Global Exchange tour to South Africa, “Hazel’s Women and the Dream of Home,” Bonnie describes the head of a South African NGO that builds houses for women on the Cape Flats, in terms of a primordial rhythm that she, as an American, cannot quite grasp: I never figured out why Hazel didn’t answer our questions directly. I thought at first that she really didn’t understand what we were asking her, but of course she did. She told us the whole story. Then, I thought that she simply didn’t want to be rushed by us, to be side tracked. She had her story to tell and she was going to tell it to us in her own terms, no matter what we said. But, then I realized something else, something more important. Hazel wasn’t operating on my principles, she was not born into an Aristotelian-based culture which was trained from Good Night Moon onward to tell stories with a beginning a middle and an end. Hazel’s story was tied to geography, to place, to associations to connections that we simply couldn’t fathom, probably never could. That we wanted her to sound like some fundraising brochure was our fault, not hers. We just couldn’t get it and we were too out of it to even know that much. We couldn’t didn’t hear her rhythm.

An echo of this faith in the primordial rhythms by which Africans are meant to live was reflected in the journal of a young professional woman who traveled in South Africa and Namibia with her boyfriend and his family. An Asian-American veterinarian, her primary interest was the wildlife she might see, although she did write about her encounters with historical and cultural aspects of life in Namibia and South Africa. Like many other travelers, she had clear expectations of one aspect of African life. As a veterinarian she was excited about meeting Africans who would carry a sort of primeval knowledge about wildlife and the environment. It was deeply disappointing for her to discover that Africans’ knowledge of the environment depended on their education and experience and not on their birth. But this traveler ultimately rejected her actual experiences traveling in Namibia in order to maintain the assumptions with which she was more comfortable. She decided that she had just not met the right locals who carry with them the primeval knowledge of the environment that she assumed was the benefit of being African.



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This is Tanzania. It is a country rich in beauty—in its landscapes, its raw nature, and in the faces of the friends we make along the way. I came here to learn about “conservation”—that Western catchword that has people in far-away countries saving the big animals that I have been lucky enough to see with my own eyes. But now this seemingly simple and righteous concept is not just talking at me from a nature program on my television set. (Young 2005)

While acknowledging the tension between conservation and human needs, this young traveler finds herself caught in a classic African story pitting man against beast and Africa against conservation. She continues: I remember our recent trip to Ruaha and Mikumi National Parks, where we rode around in open-top Land Rovers, scanning the vast savannah for the biggest elephants and the smallest of colorful birds. To us, all of this was beautiful and majestic—an image of freedom. Through a new lens, tinted by the shadow of struggle, this freedom becomes an affront to coexistence. The experience of wildlife by the village is one of confrontation and competition, and the law of the state and the ideals of a society half a world away are not on their side.

Expectations of travel to Africa invariably have this hope for some kind of naturally driven personal connection to oneself or basic humanness, a natural humanity unfettered by constraints of technology and modernity. The online brochure of the safari company Deeper Africa asks a set of questions about Africa: “Do zebras bark? Is there snow all year-round on Kilimanjaro? Do lions laze in the tall grass?” But it illustrated these questions about wildlife and nature’s landscapes with a picture of a young black girl in the beadwork that marks Maasai culture in the United States. This brochure is aimed at the travelers who desire an Africa characterized by an unchanged and unchanging space. But when travelers came home, America definitely seemed different and so did they. Aviva, who spent three weeks in South Africa for her summer session class, described how she felt on coming back to California: To say that I am experiencing culture shock would be an understatement. After returning to Berkeley a day and half ago, I am disoriented and tired, annoyed with American culture yet thrown into it like a fish to a dolphin . . . .



A young woman writing in a study-abroad magazine expresses a related lesson, while flattening people and land into a single entity:


On the plane home, it occurred to me that people would ask me how my trip was, and I wouldn’t know quite how to respond. So far, “amazing,” “incredible” and “powerful” are the only words I’ve been able to use to describe how I feel about my time in South Africa. For the most part, though these words are true, they do not adequately represent how changed I feel, how much more critical of our society, how much I saw and learned about racism, how much I long to go back and learn some more.

Her classmate Johanna wrote in her travel journal: At the end of my first day, I already realize, there is no way I am ever going to be able to tell anyone about this trip. I can tell people what I have done, but that will not tell the story. It is the feelings I am having that make up the essence of this adventure, and there are simply no words that I can describe my feelings. When people ask me “How was South Africa?” I hesitate before answering, because it is impossible to synthesize all of my experiences and impressions into a tidy, compact sound bite.

Many returning travelers felt this reverse culture shock as they struggled with a sense of confusion about who they were. It is a common experience for Americans who travel abroad as they first realize that their Americanness has meaning. A student in another study described what he felt when he came back from a semester abroad: “and I remember just watching all the people more than the basketball game—just watching the people in the crowd. They all looked so American: more chubby, and everybody had their sweatshirts on, kind of acting cool and that type of thing” (Laubscher 1994, 88). Other studies illustrate student travelers’ sense of frustration at seeing their home as disappointing: “It seemed to me that we had so much waste and so many things that we really didn’t need” (Kauffmann, Martin, and Weaver 1992, 10); “I said that in the U.S. time is money, and information is free . . . . In Tunisia it seemed to be the reverse. Time was free, but information was money” (Kauffmann, Martin, and Weaver 1992, 28). Similar feelings were expressed to Julia Harrison by Canadian travelers about their new sense of the privilege of living in Canada and their frustration at friends who moaned about conditions in Canada (Harrison 2003). For many of the students I followed to Cape Town and back, the initial return from South Africa was marked by their sense of discomfort and sometimes even distaste with their life in the United States. Tia, who spent two semesters in Cape Town, described how when she went home the world seemed so much more constrained and restrictive in Oregon. Her classmates during her second semester, Corey,



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Regan, and Megan, laughed during a dinner at my house after they were back in California at how big everything had seemed when they first arrived home in America and more importantly how unnecessarily so. This group, as well as their classmates Rya and Katie, complained that their friends who had stayed in America seemed so different from them as they were only interested in shallow things. They were frustrated at not being able to talk about their experience with friends and families because it was so foreign that too much had to be explained. The students were overwhelmed by the brashness, the size, and the busyness of the United States, and they had become disgusted at the insularity of their friends. In other words, young American travelers began to see America in much the same way as did their contemporaries in South Africa—as a place of privilege that came at a cost for others. These feelings translated into positive change for many of the student travelers. When Americans experienced African poverty as something that strengthens Africans and as a reminder of American goodness, they achieved what many travelers are looking for when they travel—the discovery of themselves. Chapters 5 and 6 showed how important self-discovery was for travelers like Corey, Megan, and Maria, who grew more confident and comfortable in their skin through a realization of their Americanness. For others it was less comfortable, especially when this lesson came with accusations from South Africans of their responsibilities as American citizens. One young traveler, Teresa, describes her discovery of self during her summer session political science course in South Africa: Has South Africa changed me? I told him that while I was there I was in many ways a very different person. I felt more carefree than I have in a while. Each day was fascinating and exciting and so different from the day before. Each day I felt we experienced the one thing I would hold onto as the most memorable part of the trip and then the next day we would do something else that I was convinced would be the most memorable. That sort of existence changes a person. It makes life seem so exciting and interesting. And above all, everything we did was imbued with a sense of urgency. Perhaps being in a country where incredible amounts of change have occurred so recently creates that sense of urgency.

Culture shock, and more importantly surviving culture shock, became a powerful player in the narratives of these Americans’ lives. No matter what they felt or thought about South Africa or what they learnt about the country or the continent, their experiences of having survived an ordeal created nostalgia for this place. Ultimately they embodied it





with great virtues. It is not so surprising that when a place is where you “had the best time of your life,” it will always carry a special place in your life. Study and travel in South Africa was, therefore, a “lifechanging experience” for most Americans. Many young travelers who chose to go to South Africa were civic minded with an already strong sense of political responsibility. But their encounters with Africa often led to a shift in their priorities. Theirs are stories of self-discovery founded on a desire to help. Travel to Africa led to a recognition of America’s problems but sometimes also to a simultaneously renewed faith in American values. Rachel, for example, who spent a semester in Cape Town got quite irritated at how patriotic she became. She commented on realizing for the first time just how lucky she was to live in the United States especially as a woman, given the level of sexual harassment that she observed in South Africa. Another young woman who spent three months in Kenya with the volunteer organization Global Routes decided that she “did not mind being an American” despite her uncomfortable sense of being somehow responsible for the poverty she observed in Kenya and her frustration at having to bear the burden of American wealth. Casey is a dynamic young woman whom I met while attending the Berkeley School of Journalism’s International Reporting Class. Her love affair with Africa began when she was twenty-one and spent a summer in Kenya studying Swahili. She felt that a vital connection had been forged then, although she believed it would have been forged with any place where she spent such a formative time of her life. However, having been “bitten by the Africa bug,” she committed herself to working toward better understanding and contributing to this continent. She worked for a number of volunteer organizations and NGOs, mostly in Nairobi, running volunteer projects and writing and editing funding proposals. She had not expected to find South Africa familiar and was convinced that it would not be “African.” She was extremely well informed politically and had a drive to do good and to contribute to society. Yet she chose to do this work and make this contribution to East Africa and not to the United States. In contrast to Rachel, Casey said to me a couple of times in our various interviews that “once you have traveled you hate the U.S.” and that “nobody thinks that they can change America, or perhaps nobody feels that they can change their own home.” Many travelers came home inspired to be better people and to work toward helping Africans. When I met Joan for lunch in San Francisco to talk about her experiences on a Global Exchange in 1999, she told



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me that her life had changed and that she was personally very proud of what she had done as well as more reflexive. She was sending books and clothes to NGOs in South Africa. At the same time, she did not particularly want to read a lot more or study up on South Africa. At a party at Val’s house with her professional friends who had traveled to southern Africa with her earlier that year, I was especially interested in a discussion about how their trip had been a life-changing experience. The conversation revolved around how Africa (which still existed as this single entity even though they had traveled to South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe) had changed the travelers’ lives. It had had such an impact on all of them that they wanted to go back; they loved it. Scott was even contemplating joining the Peace Corps, or at least searching for ways that his professional life as an architect could be more socially responsible. He felt that the trip brought to a head preexisting frustrations with his work and life and his desire to do something more worthwhile with his life. Val felt similarly, but took pleasure in the fact that her job as a fundraiser for a children’s hospital could be perceived as community spirited. She was, however, considering exploring possibilities for doing NGO work in Africa. In general everybody felt a little bit more dissatisfied with life in America. The students from the University of California (UC) who spent a year at UCT responded in a variety of ways to their experiences in South Africa. What they all had in common, though, was a revitalized or new desire for careers that made a contribution to Africa. Dahlia, who was in Cape Town in 1999, found a place of rediscovery and healing in South Africa and felt she had changed enormously as a result. At the time of my interview with Dahlia in California she was working on her senior thesis, researching the CIA’s involvement in Angola. She had become extremely interested in United States’ foreign policy in the third world and wanted to go back to South Africa as soon as possible. Her career goal was to become a journalist covering world affairs, and especially Africa, to fulfill her personal crusade to make the rest of the world understand the continent. Phyllis was amazed by many of her fellow students at UCT during her study-abroad year in 2000. She realized that they had beaten incredible odds to be in university. After her return to California, she was increasingly inspired by this lesson about her relative privilege to follow a career in public administration, which she thought could link policy and implementation. Her classmate Liz was deeply frustrated with national politics in the United States by the time we talked six months after her return from UCT. She was looking for “a country where I can impact the politics.” Although she was also frustrated about how the South African





government was not dealing well with opposition from party members, she was on her way back to South Africa to do an internship in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This realization of their place in the world was sometimes a confirmation for travelers of the feelings that drove them to South Africa in the first place. For some, these feelings wore off as they became integrated back into their old lives. But for many of the young Americans who traveled to South Africa, this experience was ultimately used as the foundation for finding their better selves. They were inspired to consider taking on political responsibility either local or global that they had not previously considered an important part of their lives. Some travelers took to heart the criticism of their peers in South Africa or what they learned in the courses that they took at UCT; they shifted their graduate studies or their career interests to foreign affairs or development studies, as they were inspired to try and make things better in Africa. These selections from journal entries by students who spent the summer in South Africa illustrate the ways in which travel to South Africa influenced Americans’ life goals: Caroline: I’m going to apply for positions with USAID [United States Agency for International Development] in hopes of getting sent to Africa. I want to pursue a career that will allow me to travel to Africa and possibly influence issues that affect Africans. Betsy: I wonder if the Peace Corps sends volunteers to South Africa. I would like to find a way to go back and help some of the communities we visited. Hyon: I would like to get to know other parts of Africa as well. I am seriously considering focusing on African politics and/or development work with NGOs in Africa for my future. Arie: Oukasie [a village they visited to the North of Pretoria] represents an example of what great responsibility we have as a first world nation to reach out and help those who are not so fortunate.

The student travelers’ journeys of self-discovery and global responsibility was echoed by Worlds Apart, The National Geographic Channel’s fish-out-of-water reality show that represented American travel to Africa and back home (Vernon 2003). The series’ website describes the show as one that “transplants American families into remote cultures to experience authentic lifestyles firsthand.” The producers worked quite hard to find the spaces where just such a juxtaposition



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can be experienced. They even transplanted English-speaking families from their city homes to the rural villages where they grew up (Roy 2007). One episode sent the Palmers, a family of five, to Kenya from their suburban New Jersey home to experience life with the Orgubas in a rural village in the northeastern Kenyan desert. There they struggle with the daily tribulations of having to do everything for themselves—no takeout, no electronic entertainment, no domestic help—as well as the sand and unfamiliar foods. The children are bored, get upset when a goat is killed for dinner, and resent having to fetch water or practice spear throwing. Their parents fight over their determination to respect traditional gender roles—mom must do all the domestic chores, while dad simply plays the role of a senior man. But by the end of a week under these trying conditions, the New Jersey family believes that they have made real friendships and have learned some important lessons about valuing what they have and how to recommit to their family. Like other travelers to Africa whose encounters with the friendliness of poverty-stricken Africans led them to question their own values and the importance of materialism, the Palmers confront very briefly the possibility that their lives are contradicting their values. Ishita Roy’s analysis of this series suggests that it is structured through these encounters between Americans and others to show its audience how to value their Americanness (Roy 2007). First it highlights how Americanness is strongly defined through material aspects of commodity culture such as refrigerators and microwaves and vacuum cleaners that are missing in the lives of the non-American families. This program’s representation of culture shock does not draw on the shock of encountering different cultural, social, or political aspects of life outside America. Rather, it is the shock of living without the material amenities so important to American family life (Roy 2007). Yet the foreign families simultaneously embody the values that are affirmed as important to Americans: emotional warmth, family. But, argues Roy, while Americans are reminded of their own values by these “primitive” and, therefore, “better” Africans, they are also reminded by the burdens of this primitiveness of how great America is. In the case of the Palmers this was especially seen in the domestic labor required of women while men sat and talked. This is an encounter, Roy argues, more about how a U.S. brand is built, redefining or reminding American viewers what their values are—good American values such as family, community, integrity, balance between work and life, and security. It established “a vision of America(ns) moving





outwards from an insular nationalism and triumphing in the global arena” (Roy 2007, 571). The Palmers from New Jersey went home with their sense of how great America is confirmed by the only partially shared values they saw in their host family. The journalist Thomas Swick suggests that this lesson is a common characteristic of American travel in that it “is simply a confirmation of the belief that ours is the greatest country in the world. We compare, often unconsciously, wherever we are to where we come from. This teaches as much about home as it does about abroad” (San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 1999). In the encounter between the Orgubas’ rural village and the suburban Palmers and especially the realization of the seemingly problematic gender dynamics within this Kenyan community, a “rural backdrop of the Other’s space confirms that modernity and urbanity only belong to developed nations” (Roy 2007, 573). Laura Hubbard and I have argued how in 2000, Survivor Africa, a reality television show that pits its contestants against one another in a competition for a million dollars within a desert island survival environment, was able to insert encounters between its contestants and modern Africa—a Kenyan town, an HIV hospital, etcetera (Hubbard and Mathers 2004). This was not possible in other seasons given the program’s dependence on the idea that the participants had been abandoned in the wild—in the case of Survivor Africa, a Kenyan game reserve. This paradox suggests that African modernity is so incomplete that it does not disturb the show’s conceit of contestants surviving in a resolutely primitive and natural environment (Cooper 2001, Ferguson 1999). While the Global Exchange tours introduced their participants to South African politicians and activists and made South Africa’s democratic transition and urban life an important part of the experience, one stop on the tours consistently resonated with participants, fulfilling their expectations for a rural/real “African” experience somehow unchallenged by their urban encounters. This was Lusikisiki, a community in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Visits to this rural and poor village are designed to offer tourists encounters with traditional AmaMpondo life, which made some travelers uncomfortable, as I showed in Chapter 4. The people in this village are described on the South African tourism website SA-Venues.com as “a welcoming people who traditionally live in huts; old-style and beehive-shaped. Traditionally they have a love of ornaments and beadwork, and are very involved in welcoming visitors to this part of the country.” Travelers like Calvin who participated in a Global Exchange tour in 1999 were especially pleased to have this encounter with what



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he experienced as an “authentic Africa.” He was saddened by the poverty he saw in South African townships, which he described as typical city ghettoes spoilt by Western commodities. But the devastating poverty that dominates the lives of most rural South Africans seemed to him as authentically African rather than under-resourced. This sense that Africans should not change too much from some sort of idea of a pristine primitiveness is reflected in the way that American travelers responded to young South Africans’ attraction to American lifestyles. In Chapter 6 I used some of the student travelers’ comments to show how South African perceptions of American life frustrated travelers’ understanding of their home and of who they were. But these responses also illustrate another frustration—the fear for a loss of authentic Africanness. Here Peter, who was in South Africa on a political science course, expresses this fear: “I think it is sad that so many young South Africans have been attracted to that part of American culture [gangs]. I wish I had the time to tell them of the daily humanitarians and the other lifestyles in the United States that they should emulate instead.” Ronald Brownstein’s article in the South African newspaper the Sunday Independent about the 2002 international reporting class’s trip to South Africa reflects on one of the participant’s fears about what American modernity might do to South Africans (January 6, 2002). He wrote, “In contrast to the common perception of Americans as cultural imperialists, Terry [a UC journalism student] is concerned about South Africans’ aspirations to an American-style culture. ‘It worries me, the full embrace of capitalism and consumerism. It’s not necessarily the way to go but it’s understandable that you want to “catch up.” But that makes it hard to tell people of pitfalls. Our lifestyle is portrayed as the pinnacle, but we have just as many problems that people don’t see, and that we haven’t solved.’ ” This same tension plays out in concerns about the impact of aid on tradition. Julie Patel’s article about the San Jose˙ retiree Patrick O’Sullivan’s donations to a Kenyan school concludes by encouraging people to continue helping Africans by sending computers and funds for lighting schools. But her piece on O’Sullivan’s journey to Kenya and back home is, typically, framed by his fear that lights and computers in the school might undermine Maasai tradition (Mercury News, 26 April, 2006). The idea that despite centuries and more of engagement by Africans in global economies and political structures, it is still possible to ruin the tradition of Africans suggests how helping Africa remains constrained by American desires not to change it.





Travelers like these, and shows like Worlds Apart and Survivor Africa, suggest that the encounter between Americans and Africans makes most sense to Americans when it negates African geography and particularities. This helps Americans to know where they belong and who they are. Underlying these lessons, though, the thing that makes it possible for Americans to learn to appreciate America is that Africans must remain, mostly, outside of modernity. The Peace Corps recruited volunteers in 1999 with a brochure that included an image of a school class taking place under a tree and a poem that, despite not having any volunteers in South Africa at the time, claimed: You will learn lessons Upon the dirt floor Of a poor South African school That you could never learn Inside the ivy covered walls of The finest American university.

What is being promoted here is a familiar story about travel to Africa even if only imaginary. It builds on an ethos of caring and shows how traveling to Africa is primarily about an inner journey. The message is clear that you can save yourself so much better under a tree in Africa than in an American classroom. Africa, then, becomes an emptied and natural landscape on which Americans can find ways to do good. In the United States it is possible to navigate good American values amid the temptations and challenges of material things. But, as the show Worlds Apart also underscores, what is good about Africa— the values that match American values—is best achieved as long as Africans do not have too much access to all those bad commodities that confuse Americans’ lives. In the end the New Jersey mom Susan Palmer returns home from Kenya thinking about how to help Africans (Vernon 2003). The participants in Survivor Africa set up a fundraising organization to help prevent AIDS in Africa, and many of the travelers I followed wanted to find ways to do good in Africa. This trajectory linking a belief in the good values of the United States with a simultaneous decision that it needs less help, to the almost commercial pleasure of working to save Africa, is reflected here in Jai’s comments about his experience in South Africa: Today I realized that anyone living in the United States, be it millionaire or a beggar, is lucky . . . . I would seriously consider helping out a cause in a country such as South Africa or Mexico before helping out one in the United States.



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The lesson is not that there is anything wrong with Americans having all this stuff that Africans don’t have, but that Africans should stay as African as possible but just stop dying. The conviction that a primitive life characterized by a lack of consumer commodities was not an impoverished life but was in fact an authentic and, therefore good, African life was voiced by many of the travelers with whom I worked. This encounter with America and the meaning of Americanness, then, does not end when students and other travelers leave Africa to return to the United States. It seems that while the colonial erasure of Africans in European and American representations taught the viewer to find their inner savage or express their dark impulses, contemporary representations of this Garden of Eden that is Africa leads not so much to the discovery of their inner savage but to a discovery of an American self as a humanitarian aid worker (Cooper 2002, 12). What makes it possible for these young Americans to find a way to fulfill their desire to be responsible citizens in Africa? A Vanity Fair piece on Jeffrey Sachs describes the poverty he is trying to eradicate in these terms: “There is not much of anything in Ruhiira. No electricity or running water. No roads to speak of. We’re in a place of lack, of deprivation, of absence” (Munk 2007, 141). The construction of poverty as an absence makes aid, and not political or economic change, the ideal form of intervention in Africa, even for a man like Sachs who made his reputation with hardnosed, market-based economic solutions for the rest of the developing world. The idea seems to be that if they have nothing, what they need is something: a drug, a well, a mosquito net. This is possible because, as Worlds Apart and American Idol Gives Back show American audiences, a lack of things that would crush any American does not make Africans miserable. The smiling faces of the young children, so central to the celebrity-televised and tabloid-ready journey to Africa, and their soaring voices as they sing songs of redemption for the foreign cameras point to how saving Africa does not have to change Africa or America. Travelers like Amyra can be critical of the ubiquity of these images, as her journal entry shows: You see I was not one of these people although I knew about Africa as the birthplace or should I say the original homeland of my people I had



If I helped just one family out of these conditions, that would be worth more than a million dollars. These last few days have began to shape my career path and my life’s goals.

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Amyra is referring to the ubiquitous child sponsorship fundraising programs for organizations like World Vision whose coordinator in Zimbabwe told Erica Bornstein: “It seems that people the people we get the funding from can’t relate to a big problem and feel like they can have some kind of import. Whereas if you give them one child they think, yes, I could make a difference in that one child’s life” (Bornstein 2001, 606). This is possible because “children are seen to embody all of humanity” (Bornstein 2001, 601). A link between children and a generalized humanity, therefore, helps travelers to believe that poverty creates resilience and even happiness. African challenges and African joys are often represented by children, and saving children has become the easiest way to help Africa. This gesture was made particularly central by Angelina Jolie’s adoption of an Ethiopian girl, Zahara, and Madonna’s adoption of David, a young Malawian boy. The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains in an article in the Washington Post that her discomfort with Madonna’s action is not because her intervention will not ensure that his life will be more materially comfortable but, because of “the underlying notion that she has helped Africa by adopting David Banda, that one helps Africa by adopting Africa’s children” (November 13, 2006). Surely, she writes, “the future for Africa should be one in which Africans are in a position to raise their own children.” Yet so much of the relationship between Africa and the rest is founded on the idea that helping Africa’s children in fact does help Africa. The emphasis on children and their resilience is too often the backdrop for humanitarian intervention in Africa. Angelina Jolie has both adopted an African child and gone to Africa to give birth to a child. More than most celebrities, Jolie blurs the boundaries between political and entertainment celebrity, using each arena to further her goals in the other (Cooper 2008). As a result she has become a powerful spokesperson for African concerns, turning up as a speaker at economic summits as well as the United Nations. Yet in an interview with Anderson Cooper on a CNN special in 2007 she exhibits a degree of ignorance about Africa that is terrifying: The borders were drawn in Africa not that long ago. These people are tribal people. We have—we colonized them. There’s a lot of changes that’s



no overwhelming desire to go. My reason for this is simple. I have seen over a hundred television commercials and shows in Africa which picture an American going to Africa and asking me the viewer, to send money to help feed a child or provide shelter for a family.


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Despite Jolie’s claim to expertise and for her right to represent African concerns in America, her analysis exhibits a total lack of knowledge of African histories, both general and particular, and makes the, all-too-familiar, claim that only Western help can solve African problems. Bob Geldof, most famous of the charitainment celebrities after Bono, and one of the first, defends his decision to include no African artists in his Live 8 charity concert by saying that African artists have no political traction. He is interpreted by Nightline’s host Sue Ellicot as saying that “[his] point is that the future of Africa is ours to shape. His, yours, and mine, whether we are famous or not” (quoted in Magubane 2007, 7). As William Easterly bemoans in the Washington Post, “Everyone, it seems was invited to the ‘save Africa’ ” campaign in 2005 except for Africans (February 13, 2006). The increasing presence of Africa in American popular culture remains about who Americans are as people and what helping Africa can do for their lives. Bono, interviewed for NBC News by Brian Williams, answers the question “What’s in it for America?” (to give to Africa) by arguing that “it might be important for Europe, it is important to me, we might actually find our own soul there. Something about serving the poor that you rediscover your reason to be. Americans don’t wait for the right time to be great” (quoted in Magubane 2007, 6). But this move obliterates, rather than engages, with politics. Even before celebrity activism in Africa became a dominant trend, the travelers I worked with demonstrated why these erasures have become commonplace. The renegotiation of their relationships to America and Africa after their return to the United States shows that in order for Americans to come to terms with their role in the world, Africa must become a place to save. Africa, as Bono perhaps recognizes, speaks to Americans’ imaginations of self more than anywhere else: But Africa, or so Bono feels, needs what only a certain kind of world figure can give—a call to conscience, an appeal to the imagination, a melody or a lyric you won’t forget. The cause of ending extreme poverty in Africa speaks to Bono’s prophetic impulse. (Traube 1996, 87)



happened, even just between the blacks and whites so recently. There’s a lot we need to—understand and be tolerant of, and help them to do. They have just recently learned to govern themselves. (quoted in Magubane 2007, 7)


In making Africa a place for fulfilling one’s own prophetic impulses, however, the continent itself disappears. As Heike Härting shows in his analysis of Western representations of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the ugly beauty of this manipulation of images is that they produce social relations “in which the African is at once abandoned by and in need of Western aid and compassion” (Härting 2008, 66). In his analysis of Gil Courtemanche’s novel Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (One Sunday at the pool in Kigali), Härting shows how the main protagonist’s account of his experiences in Rwanda “ends with his symbolic rebirth as a human rights worker . . . [whose] narrative of Rwanda’s genocide undergoes a cathartic conversion into a humanitarianist narrative, which ultimately rehabilitates the West” (Härting 2008, 71). This was a narrative that characterized the stories travelers told about their journeys between America and South Africa. Travel to Africa on multiple terrains is often effective at negating the people, histories, and geographies of the continent. Erasures in the interest of helping are part of an all-too-familiar story in the relationship between Africa and the rest (Ferguson 2006). These desires were present in colonial imaginings of Africa and are just as present in the multiple ways that North Americans represent the continent. The gaze back of grateful Africans, or at least of Africans constructed so as to be needy, onto American travelers provided a mirror for reflecting back an idealized vision of a good American (Magubane 2007, 7). The gaze, though not quite the seemingly undifferentiated and unidirectional gaze of the colonial era, as it is often applied to tourists, was an important part of the experience of travelers to South Africa that I described in detail in Chapter 6. They struggled both to control their gaze and the reverse gaze of South Africans and to control its impact on them. Finding their philanthropic self through an encounter with Africa depends on this manipulation and the illusion of control over the gaze. As these young Americans were facing their responsibilities as American citizens in the world and looking to Africa to try to fulfill them, America itself was changing. William Easterly told the journalist Alec Williams that “Africa is filling a sort of existential vacuum for Americans struggling in a post-Sept. 11 world” (New York Times, August 28, 2006). Easterly even suggested that “the continent could be benefiting from an American public that is antsy to feel its goodness and influence, yet is simultaneously feeling itself shunned around much of the rest of the world.” America and its landscape of global responsibility would alter dramatically in the year after the travelers



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I studied returned to America. September 11, 2001, and its aftermath created an encounter between Americans and the world that, like travel to southern Africa in 2000, asked Americans to take responsibility for their Americanness. Africa thus became one of the spaces through which Americans shouldered this burden.





Saving Africa: Love in the Time of Oprah

Take up the White Man’s burden Send forth the best ye breed Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait, in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child. .... Take up the White Man’s burden The savage wars of peace Fill full the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest (The end for others sought) Watch sloth and heathen folly Bring all your hope to nought.

These two frequently quoted stanzas were written at the dawn

of the twentieth century in response to America’s colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War (Kipling 1999, 334). Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” asks Americans to remember the lessons learned by the British Empire—that the responsibilities of empire are unrelenting and unchanging. The white man’s burden, sometimes invoked satirically, sometimes in great earnestness, has come to stand in for a highly problematic relationship between those with power and those they exploit. The phrase was often invoked in the conversations I had with travelers and crops up frequently in the political and entertainment news media surrounding Americans in Africa. The poem’s ambiguity when it was first published is echoed in how it is used more than a hundred years later, sometimes to underline the racism of the relationship between rich and



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The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville’s words, bears “the ark of the liberties of the world.”

Michael Ignatieff’s commentary in the New York Times Magazine, published a century after Kipling, critiques the recent American invasion of Iraq under the guise of restoring/building democracy (January 3, 2003). Ignatieff is clearly attuned to the ways that the language of democracy invokes Kipling’s “burden.” He goes further to suggest that at the very heart of this empire, the thing that both makes it possible and makes it invisible, is something like a white man’s burden. What “The Burden” dangerously involves is the manifestation of (American) empire without (American) acknowledgment. This moment in the twenty-first century, when Americans are taking on more responsibility in the world, is shaped by the same blindness and ambivalence witnessed in the imperial expansion of the United States more than a century earlier. The stories and experiences in this book belong to Americans who traveled to southern Africa and back just at the time that, as Ignatieff describes, a new formation of imperialism was being forged between America and the rest of the world. Their stories illustrate what happens when the white man’s burden, whether as critique or as personal responsibility, becomes part of a generation’s sense of who they are. In Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa I have shown how young Americans living and traveling in South Africa came face to face not only with America and their Americanness but with something that could be called empire and the burden of its recognition. Despite Kipling’s warnings a century earlier, these young Americans had not grown up with this mantle of responsibility, and their burden was not constituted by a prior experience in colonial subjecthood. While American-linked neoliberal economic policies in Africa can look like colonization, it is not apparent that



poor in the world, and at other times as a call to relieve the suffering of others.

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Americans ought to bear a burden in relation to the continent. If colonial travel writing, as Mary Louise Pratt argues, was “the project whereby . . . Europe takes consciousness of itself . . . as a planetary process rather than [as] a region of the world” (Pratt 1985, 125), travel to South Africa at the beginning of the twenty-first century was an opportunity for Americans to become more conscious of the place that they came from. Recognizing this new consciousness required these travelers to reconsider their ideas of self and other and resulted not in greater knowledge of their host countries but in a greater understanding of Africa’s relationship to them as American citizens and to the United States. Although this is a generation that happily quotes the Spiderman movies—“With great power comes great responsibility”—it is important to try to understand why the contact zone in which Americans encounter Africans in the twenty-first century seems so similar to colonial contact zones. While this book tells the stories of travelers to South Africa, their journeys became about something else, working through their larger preconceptions and expectations about Africa and coming to terms with a broader relationship between their American identities and Africa. The United States did not colonize any specific African nation, but Africa is written deeply into America’s past. Africa provided the labor and later the resources that helped the United States become a wealthy and powerful nation. But though American identities are intertwined with the continent, Africa’s importance in America has largely remained in the past—whether imagined or actual. This positioning of the African continent in the past is due in part to the presence of the descendents of enslaved Africans in America and their essential (though marginalized and devalued) role in the foundation of the United States. As the brief discussion of images of Africa in the United States in Chapter 2 showed, representations of Africa often speak more to the concerns of many African Americans than to Africans (Clarke 2004). These desires construct tourism to Africa as journeys to a pristine past rather than as engagement with contemporary African nations and people (Bruner 1996, Clarke 2004, Ebron 1999, Holsey 2008). In the decade since I started following American travelers to South Africa, however, Africa became a powerful presence in the lives of many young Americans and in American popular culture. The continent’s present and its people’s helplessness and need spilled over from news to entertainment and back again. Africa and Africans in the present were becoming more and more visible as undifferentiated rhetoric and imagery in American conversations on world suffering.



Conclusion


Africans are now especially and abundantly present, but seldom as central characters, in stories about Americans’ charity and philanthropy. While these desires to help Africa have a long history, the ubiquitous presence of celebrities helping AIDS orphans or handing out mosquito nets in Uganda, or Angola, or some other often unnamed African country, is remarkable. So too is the ease with which any American can help Africans—by buying (Product) REDTM or calling in to American Idol Gives Back. These moments reiterate the ways that Americans continue to engage with a homogenous and often imagined Africa and seldom with any specific African nation or people. In fact this enthusiasm for helping Africa has not erased the other powerful images of Africa in the United States—the continent is still represented in the very same magazines and television shows that decry America’s love for Africa as a place of hopelessness, violence, and death. The urge to send money and other resources to Africa remains joined with questions about why foreign aid just doesn’t seem to do any good in Africa. Representations of Africa in America are dominated by endless repetition of the same stories of lost children, of unconquerable odds and resilience, and by the centrality of the celebrity or American visitor/aid worker. These make it possible for Americans to never have to question why such enormous disparities exist to begin with and why African lives require saving. This evidence of the good that Americans are doing in Africa also makes it possible for Americans to see themselves on a world stage in a positive way. Africa is the place where Americans can be good Americans. Both the desire to save Africa and the way that saving Africa gives meaning to being American, however, are made possible by the way that African people are rendered as present but irrelevant, leaving a pristine landscape on which Americans find their true selves. The ways that Americans encountered the continent, even when they physically went there, created a narrative of dependency and hopelessness, leaving Africans powerless in their own salvation. While incorporating the experiences of a wide range of American travelers to southern Africa, this book was largely based on an ethnography of Americans born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This “Millennium Generation” is the most racially mixed generation that America has ever seen, and Farai Chideya predicts that they will achieve color equality (Chideya 2000). While I am not as hopeful as Chideya, my young American informants were driven by their encounters in South Africa to find ways to negotiate the relationship between their individual identities and their Americanness. As I suggested in the introduction to this book, this generation’s desire for what



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manifested in the 2008 presidential campaign as something called hope was in part revealed, even made for some, by the encounters and struggles of a small group of them in southern Africa in 2000. Although I was watching young Americans in southern Africa as they negotiated a new perception of America, I believe that this was just an extreme version of what became a new generational reality after September 11, 2001. It was no longer possible, as it had seemed in 2000, to imagine an America and an American identity as separate from the wider world. The young Americans I observed and talked with, though almost all college students, were a diverse group, ethnically, racially, and in terms of class, gender, and sexuality. None of these categories, however, formed the focus of my work with them. My attention, instead, was on the way that their Americanness emerged as a set of clashes between their understandings of themselves and of the United States and its international role on the one hand and the ideas expressed about them by South Africans and other Africans on the other. These encounters formed a basis for exploring how Americans dealt with the shock of alternative perceptions of imperial privilege and mobility and how they then reconciled conflicting perceptions to become more comfortable with their Americanness while seeking ways to acknowledge the privileges that came with this identity. At first as Americans explored southern Africa through township tours and safaris, they worked hard through collecting photographs and stories about serendipitous encounters to control their experiences so that they matched in part their expectations. Americans’ expectations were contradictory, requiring both seeing in real life the images they already knew of Africa and Africans and at the same time wanting to learn something new and unexpected about their destinations. Travelers, therefore, tried to control their encounters in Africa as well as the way that they were seen and understood. In engaging with both the unexpected and the expected experiences that complicated their images and understanding of Africa and Africans, Americans found that they could not entirely control the lessons they learned. The descriptions in Chapters 3 and 4 of the journeys of young Americans to South Africa and back to the United States showed how they made sense of encounters that were ultimately less about Africa than about America. While they often managed their experiences in order to fulfill their expectations for traveling to an imagined Africa, the reverse gaze of Africans destabilized in part their ideas about Africa and, more profoundly, what it means to be American.



Conclusion


First they needed to rearticulate their relationship with Americanness because a simple hyphen no longer satisfied their understanding of belonging to America. The experiences of Corey, Megan, and Maria, which I described in detail in Chapter 5, illustrated the various trajectories through which travel to South Africa affected young Americans. Maria, Corey, and Megan each came face to face with their membership of a national entity. The young Americans who went to South Africa as they were coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century had not experienced their membership of a nation as part of their everyday lives. They tended to identify themselves solely in relation to diversity within the United States rather than in relation to neighboring nations. Their identities were largely based on intranational rather than international differences. But, as Chapter 6 showed, the gaze back of South Africans required that they recognized that they were identified primarily with a particular nation and that this identity came with a set of imperial privileges. This was a deeply disturbing discovery for Americans who had grown up with hyphenated identities and did not believe that they were “just American.” In finding where they belonged in America, the younger travelers especially were driven to take responsibility for their citizenship. Travel to southern Africa disturbed their sense of what it meant to be American while also producing a desire to reassert a sense of national pride. Many American travelers to Africa returned home to become fundraisers for development and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), join the state department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), or try in their jobs and their personal lives to teach people about their responsibility for helping Africa become more like America. It was exciting to see, as I increasingly did while teaching on American campuses and watching American television, young Americans coming together to raise money, to organize, and to educate. No doubt the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), mosquito nets, and water taps being provided to Africans through campaigns like Save Darfur, American Idol Gives Back, Keep a Child Alive, etcetera, are changing the lives of many people for the better. But there is also something deeply disturbing about the ways that African people and landscapes are being claimed in many of these representations and discussions around helping. These are gestures that, despite their good intentions, effectively make Africans disappear. This book used observations of American travelers to southern Africa to ask, Why is Africa so important to Americans? Why, despite



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decades of criticism of development and aid policies, is Africa once again (still) positioned as hopeless and needing to be saved? How and why do Americans find themselves in Africa? The travel stories have shown how an encounter with a place can lead to the potentially problematic desire to use that place as a space for personal salvation. This particular relationship between Africa and America has a long and complex history. Yet, it is being reinvented in a way that depends on both this history and its revision. This is the reason why one traveler to South Africa—Oprah Winfrey—so powerfully echoes the contradictions and multiple strains of this new version of the white man’s burden, one that a black woman can ultimately come to define. It has become almost commonplace to evoke the media and business phenomenon that is Oprah Winfrey in order to understand the pulse of America and American values and attitudes (Harris and Watson 2007, Illouz 2003, Peck 2008, Wilson 2003). Sheryll Wilson argues that part of Oprah’s success lies in her ability to conflate media icon with self and in making her audience believe that the person they see on television is Oprah Winfrey herself (Wilson 2003). More importantly she makes her audience believe that she is just like them. The audience of The Oprah Winfrey Show is dominated by white middle-class women, not all that different from the demographics of daytime television viewers in general (Harris and Watson 2007). But through a decade of building an incredible brand, her audience and influence extends far beyond this group to incorporate a wide swath of the American public. When Oprah goes to Africa or talks about saving Africa, therefore, she is more than just a television talk show host sharing her ideas on African suffering. Her genius lies in part in guiding the ways her viewers think and what they value, and in reflecting what feels right and what makes sense to them. I am not denying all those Americans who are impatient with the talk show model, with the soap opera that is Oprah Winfrey’s weight and sexuality, and of course those who simply do not watch television for entertainment or guidance. Nor do I believe that her viewers and fans respond to her like automatons, but part of her success lies in the ways that her audiences believe that they are engaging with her and her ideas, much as they would with another friend in their living room. When Oprah goes to Africa she is more than just guiding her audience; she is embodying them. Oprah is not an exception—that lack of exceptionalism is where her power lies; she is not the one black woman that white Americans can relate to, though this might have been why she first gained popularity. Oprah has the



Conclusion


ability and the power to take on the role, deeply and problematically, of “The American.” Oprah Winfrey, herself, first traveled to South Africa in 2000 to interview her “soul mate Nelson Mandela” and returned in 2002 to celebrate Christmas with him and 50,000 schoolchildren (Winfrey 2003). Subsequently, she has made frequent trips to South Africa for more Christmas parties and for the planning and opening of her school for girls outside Johannesburg. She described her goal for that second visit in her magazine as follows: “not to eradicate AIDS, end poverty, or stimulate economic development. I simply wanted to create one day that the kids could remember as happy” (Winfrey 2003, 174). Ms. Winfrey, however, had already established just how she was going to help South Africa—through her Leadership Academy for Girls. This eventually opened in 2007 to great fanfare—in the United States at least. It is this project, developed despite her travels to the country and her avowed closeness to former South African President Nelson Mandela, that encapsulates why many other Africans and I am squeamish about the ways Americans are helping Africans. Other famous black American travelers like Maya Angelou, Don Cheadle, and Chris Rock share an ancestral relationship with Africa and have grown up with the experience of discrimination in America. They have also all lent their faces and names to Bono’s (Product) REDTM campaign to save Africa, as illustrated by their presence on the various covers of the special edition of Vanity Fair, which he helped to edit (Robinson 2007). Their histories and identities could be the foundation for constructing a different set of relationships with Africans, than say Angelina Jolie or Bono, despite the latter’s claims to a similar experience of marginalization as an Irishman (Magubane 2008). Oprah especially perhaps deserves to be placed outside of the general criticism of celebrity engagement with Africa, not just because she is a black American but because, as Zine Magubane argues, of her very evocation of personal history alongside the personal histories of South African girls. As Oprah explains in a 2007 interview in O Magazine, her academy represents a very important trajectory in her own life: It is a complete full circle for my life, because I was raised exactly like them, by a grandparent, poor, in a rural community in a state of apartheid. I understand where they come from. They’ve given me a sense of great hope! Their names are unusual, some are hard to pronounce—Lindiwe, Thando, Lebohang—but I’m looking into the face of myself. (Gien quoted in Magubane 2008, 102.7)



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Magubane draws on Johannes Fabian’s critique of ethnography to suggest that this description of shared histories allows Oprah (and possibly her audience) to find a coeval space, a space that recognizes the other as sharing the same space and time and that acknowledges shared pasts as well as a shared present. This is a space in which Oprah and South Africans exist together (Magubane 2008). In this light Oprah can produce a philanthropy motivated by recognition. It would be disingenuous to deny that Oprah in her various incarnations can and does undermine certain black stereotypes for American women, especially the idea that black American women are required to support and sustain white women as they did as nannies and caretakers (Harris and Watson 2007). But I believe that it is in fact this very call to a shared suffering and a common selfhood between Oprah—American media mogul—and young South African schoolgirls that recreates the same disturbing relationship between Africans and Americans I described among other travelers. The shared history on which the claim is built, of racialized discrimination and suffering, is of course real, but Oprah’s gesture toward South African girls ignores their particular histories and lives and the particular history and social/political context of South Africa. But this very use of shared suffering in order to engage her audience is a central factor in her success and a fundamental aspect of her relationship with her audience. Oprah made the discovery of self the cornerstone of her reinvented show and person in the mid-1990s, with travel to Africa becoming a huge part of her transformation. Much as it was for the travelers that I observed, “Oprah finds her ‘true north’ in South Africa” (Barnard 2006, 14). Like so many of the travelers I worked with, Oprah feels she can be herself in South Africa; this is where she feels most comfortable in her skin. This true self she proudly announced to South Africans in 2005 is a Zulu, as Lin Sampson reported with some irony in the South African Sunday Times (June 26, 2005). Speaking on a tour of the country sponsored in part by the South African version of O Magazine, Oprah announced this discovery of her supposed genetic ancestry as a celebration of her deep connection to South Africa. This new way to connect Americans with their African past through genetics and genealogical study is one more strand in the complex relationship between Americans and Africa. Like heritage tourism, searching for specific African roots in genetic code has become an industry and focuses on links between Americans today and Africans in the past. Oprah is not the first, and nor will she be the last, to find her past in an admired ethnic group and a particular, if unrealistic, geographic space.1



Conclusion


Henry Louis Gates, Harvard professor and host of the controversial television show Wonders of the African World, has subsequently come along to teach Oprah about her correct ancestry. Gates met with Oprah in an emotional episode of a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) special, Oprah’s Roots: An African American Lives Special, which traced her roots in Africa, through a more sophisticated analysis of genetics and genealogies. Oprah, it turns out, has African roots in Liberia. But her declaration of Zuluness to South Africans in June 2005 eradicated politics, history, and geography in her relationship to Africa. Oprah made her claim to Zuluness just when Xhosa President Thabo Mbeki had fired his Zulu vice president, Jacob Zuma. (Zuma later became the head of the ANC and president of South Africa in 2009.) At the time, though, the country was animated by perceived tensions between Xhosa and Zulu, tensions that have at times erupted into some of the worst violence in South Africa’s recent history (Donham Forthcoming 2011). More recently it has fueled schisms and tensions within South Africa’s ruling party. The ignorance of South African politics and history and insensitivity displayed by Oprah’s love affair with the cliché embodied by the “Zulu warrior” would become increasingly apparent in the way she handled the negative criticism of her leadership academy for girls in 2007. On January 2, 2007, Oprah opened her school for girls in Henleyon-Klip, a historically white semirural town outside Johannesburg, where for 40 million U.S. dollars 152 young South African girls would receive an education in the South African national curriculum for five years. The school’s opening was a major television event in the United States and led to substantial online debate about the value of Oprah’s giving. These debates, however, seemed entirely focused on the amount that Oprah spent on luxury fittings for the students’ bedrooms, their closet size, and the school’s kitchenware. At least that was how Oprah herself characterized the criticism, expressing bewilderment at why it is not OK for “African girls” to have luxurious surroundings (Samuels 2007). Rebecca Trasier argues that Oprah’s focus on thread count and closet size reflects the extent to which Oprah is trying to fulfill her own childhood dreams (Traiser 2007). It was OK to recreate her own childhood desires in this way, says Trasier, because after all “[w]hen we do good things for other people, it’s almost always in part a narcissistic act—it makes us feel good to make other people feel good. Why should Winfrey’s ventures into philanthropy be any morally tidier than anyone else’s?” But this makes it possible to see Oprah’s problematic engagement with South African



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girls as more of a public relations faux pas than an issue of integrity or international aid. But Oprah’s concern with beauty and material luxury does more than just raise questions about her motivations; it blinds her, as well as her critics in the United States, to the possible reasons why South Africans might object to her Leadership Academy. Oprah says she cannot understand why people object to African girls enjoying beautiful things. First I believe her very use of this general category, “African girls,” to describe her students flattens out the diverse group of South African students and suggests that all “girls” on the continent suffer the same lack of access or rights to schooling. This labeling of South African schoolgirls as part of a generalized category of uneducated African girls must have seemed especially egregious to South African educational authorities given that the “African girls” who were accepted into Oprah’s Leadership Academy—a high school—had already benefited from an excellent set of public and private elementary schools. The school uniforms that the girls were wearing when Oprah ceremoniously announced their admission into the academy show them all to be already pupils in good primary schools, many supported by the government. This would have been necessary for them to be able to fulfill the academic requirement for entry into Oprah’s Leadership Academy. Oprah conveniently forgets that the objections to her academy are coming from a society and state where many “African women” have positions of power and authority. This allows her to ignore the particular South African government policies and constitution guaranteeing every South African child’s, including girls, rights to education. Oprah exhibits an incredible blindness to the particular context she is speaking from when she claims that she is giving these girls an education denied African girls. Given the struggles of the South African education system to fulfill their policy goal, they would surely have appreciated an injection of cash and inspiration from the world-famous Oprah. But Oprah’s school was ultimately not developed through consultation with South African educators or government. Indeed while she began the process in talks with the government, these soon broke down, although it is unclear why. Oprah and her supporters always come back to the argument that South African officials and educators were too limited in their vision of the comforts that Oprah’s “girls” deserved (Samuels 2007). For Oprah, as much as for her viewers, South Africa (or some other African nation that has captured their imagination) stands in for the whole continent. This collapse between continent and specific



Conclusion


country was a common thread even in stories about travel to a specific country like South Africa, where helping South Africans translated, for many, into helping Africa. South Africa certainly seems to stand in for Africa in Oprah’s lexicon in both its great hopefulness embodied by “her good friend, Mandela,” and its helplessness as seen in her ability to bring joy to children by throwing them a Christmas party. Rita Barnard, similarly to Zine Magubane, sees in Oprah’s gestures toward South Africa the opposite of neocolonial relationships between Americans and Africa. She suggests that Oprah’s book club treatment of Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country reverses the standard colonial novel’s appropriation of other spaces by making a moment of self-recognition possible for its American readers (Barnard 2006). Yet it is this very emphasis on finding an American self in a story about apartheid’s impact on black and white South Africans that does such a formidable and neocolonial job of appropriation. Oprah’s book club’s discussion of this South African novel, much like her Leadership Academy, does not just empty the African landscape of people but makes it stand in for the inner landscape of Americans. Oprah’s discourse of suffering and struggle as the ultimate source of empowerment pervades her discussion of Paton’s text (Barnard 2006). Suffering, and perhaps more importantly the act of overcoming suffering, is central to Oprah’s biography, repeated over and over again through her show and numerous other media outlets. Her story does not dwell on the real material deprivations she faced and overcame growing up, but on the psychological challenges she has experienced and conquered. As Eva Illouz argues, “Oprah’s life really changed as she grew ever more thin, successful, glamorous, and self confident. She thus became her own ideal typical guest in that she showed repeatedly on her body and psyche that television can and does change lives” (Illouz 2003, 38). The psychological traumas she faced are presented as so much tougher than material or structural barriers to happiness or self-fulfillment, and yet overcoming them rests solely in the hands or minds of the individual; they are, therefore, entirely manageable. By relentlessly domesticating social and political issues—war narratives become stories of intimacy and love, for example—she creates a remarkably trusted space in which her audiences can find their true selves through committed self-reflection in the face of the fear and uncertainties that structure life in late modern America (Illouz 2003). This narrative of suffering also characterized her choices for the Leadership Academy. Indeed, in her lexicon, South Africa is a privileged site in the geography and narratology of suffering (Barnard 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


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2006, 12). All her “girls” appeared to have histories of abuse and suffering that are universal or at least echoed her own, as she explains: “I wanted this to be a place of honor for them because these girls have never been treated with kindness. They’ve never been told they are pretty or have wonderful dimples. I wanted to hear those things as a child” (Samuels 2007). Oprah interviewed all of them personally, and it seems that those with stories that echoed her own well-publicized history were given priority: “I see myself in all these girls—the struggles and the hardships that just seem unbearable,” she says. “I have nothing but respect for them. I can’t understand how someone’s who’s been there can’t want to reach back and do something.” (Samuels 2007)

Their challenges, though real, seem to have little to do with a particular South African situation, other than perhaps stemming in part from the impact of AIDS on families. Theirs is a form of suffering made familiar and understandable to American audiences and has little to do with the particularities of growing up in South Africa. Oprah’s genius lies in her ability to make everything about herself, and she filters her understanding of the needs of the world and of South African girls purely through her own experiences and history. This, indeed, ensures that her interventions remain rooted in the desires, fears, and identities of her American audience and in their relationship to her, not to Africa. Oprah’s gestures toward South Africa are, therefore, particularly illuminating of the extent to which encounters between Americans and Africa, especially when framed as charitable, require a denial of the local in the interest of an American set of concerns. Such concerns become burdensome decrees, usually involving ideas about who deserves to be saved and who doesn’t, posited very much on a racialized measure of suffering and a world cultures vision of what Africa needs. Oprah is not bringing her billions to South Africa and saying, Here, build your new society; she is going to South Africa to build her own vision. This vision is characterized by Oprah’s particular relationship with suffering—based very much on her own history of abuse and empowerment. Here in Oprah’s narrative of her own suffering is the basis of the tough love stance that so characterizes the way she structures her and Americans’ relationships to each other and to the world. This particular approach to life repeated on The Oprah Winfrey Show claims that there are no victims, no politics, no society, no culture, just choices, choices to be fat or thin, rich or poor, happy or unhappy, 10.1057/9780230115583 - Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa, Kathryn Mathers


Conclusion


abused or free. Oprah extends this individualizing and depoliticized framework to the way she teaches Americans to engage with Africa through South Africa. In a New York Times article, “The Rock Star’s Burden,” Paul Theroux argues that “because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth” (December 15, 2005). Though Oprah might not be quite the villain that Theroux is suggesting her philanthropy makes her, the way she engages with Africa does erase the continent’s geopolitical particularities. In their place she creates a globally imagined space of feisty young women and AIDS orphans. Oprah’s Leadership Academy may be in South Africa, but it is not, and is unlikely to ever be, of South Africa. In Oprah’s incredibly adept hands, television becomes an extension of identity that has troubling implications when she turns her gaze away from the daily trials and tribulations of being middle class and American and onto Africa and Africans. Oprah uses experience and especially an imagined shared experience of suffering as a commodity. And as Arthur and Joan Kleinman argue, this makes it possible to evoke moral sentiment in support of certain forms of social action (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996). But because this experience of suffering is so individualized, Oprah successfully creates a space where her African girls appear to exist with no local support and no local institutions. This classic gesture of consuming the suffering of others—as if it’s just like ours—pathologizes these individual girls and renders the South African political and social landscape completely powerless (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996, 9). Didier Fassin argues that humanitarianism requires the presence of essentialized victims marked solely by their suffering (Fassin 2007). As long as Africans are, as Achille Mbembe and others have shown, the absolute other or nonsubject, Africa is the “natural” space for humanitarianism (Mbembe 1992). As with other arenas of suffering on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Africa becomes another and highly productive space through which American identities can be realized. The journeys I have described in this book suggest that a need to reconfigure their relationship with their own country and citizenship drives the intensity of American desire to save Africa. By taking the idea of America seriously as well as putting Africa center stage through a study of travel and tourism between these two spaces, I show the global connections and disconnections on which contemporary identities are formed (Ferguson 2006). This makes it possible to develop



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an understanding of the rootedness of Americanness and the importance of Africa in Americans’ ability to dwell in the United States. I do this in part to fill in what has been missing in anthropologies of America, which is the ways that the geopolitical boundaries of the United States constitute a highly mobile national cultural space where Americanness is endlessly constructed and contested. Americans have been experiencing a deep confusion about their place in most of the world since September 11, 2001. This tragedy and its equally violent and ongoing aftermath led to fragmentation and increased fears and confusion. On both a global political level and a deeply personal front, Americans found themselves unsure of who they were and what their country was about. The ways that young Americans responded to a similar confusion in South Africa suggests that one response is a clearer understanding of belonging in America, which often includes a sense of global responsibility. Helping Africa thus became one way in which Americans generally are responding to their confusion about their country’s place in the world. But like the gestures of travelers who bungee-jump at Victoria Falls, this work to save children smiling in the face of poverty makes Africa a space of no geography or politics of any other kind.



Conclusion




Introduction 1. Thanks to Zeynep Gürsel for bringing this press conference to my attention. It was distributed by MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn. com/id/30065504/. 2. Barack Obama’s speeches are available online at obamaspeeches.com, specifically http://obamaspeeches.com/E05-Barack-Obama-A-MorePerfect-Union-the-Race-Speech-Philadelphia-PA-March-18-2008.htm. 3. This speech is also reprinted at obamaspeeches.com: http:// obamaspeeches.com/E11-Barack-Obama-Election-Night-VictorySpeech-Grant-Park-Illinois-November-4-2008.htm.

Chapter 1 1. Amanda was sent to a Kenyan village by her parents, who thought this would teach the spoilt young woman to be more appreciative of her life: http://www.mtv.com/shows/exiled/episode.jhtml? episodeID=138573. 2. This campaign is recorded on the Keep a Child Alive website, http:// keepachildalive.org/i_am_african/i_am_african.html. 3. The ITA Office of Travel and Tourism Industries (OTTI) is an office of the U.S. government and makes inbound and outbound statistics available on its website, http://tinet.ita.doc.gov/. 4. Two Dogs and Freedom: Black Children of South Africa Speak Out, by The Open School Soweto, published by Foxrock Books, 1998. 5. All data on study abroad was obtained through the Open Doors online Reports on International Educational Exchange, available at http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/, and published by the Institute of International Education. 6. Information available at The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/getpubcats.asp?sid=091#, a program of the U.S Department of Education’s Institute of Education Science.



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1. Chevron had been accused of murdering activists in the Niger Delta, a case that is still being prosecuted: http://www.earthrights.org/legal/ bowoto-v-chevron-case-overview. 2. African activists were very concerned about the distribution of this company’s genetically engineered seeds to African farmers. See Benso, Susan, Rachel Burstein, and Mark Arax, 1997. A Growing Concern: As biotech crops come to market, neither scientists—who take industry money—nor federal regulators are adequately protecting consumers and farmers. Mother Jones January/February, http://motherjones. com/politics/1997/01/growing-concern. 3. Analysis of Visitor Attitudes about Africa for the Africa Exhibit Field Museum of Natural History. People, Places & Design Research. Unpublished Report 1991.

Chapter 3 1. This is from the online brochure for Tanzania Serengeti Balloon Safaris, which offer an hour-long flight over the Serengeti, followed by an “Out of Africa” champagne breakfast. Details can be found at http://www. balloonsafaris.com/. 2. Park East Africa brochure, 30th anniversary edition, From Cairo to Cape Town, 1999–2000. 3. Mountain Travel-Sobek brochure, March 3, 1999. 4. See, for example, a typical tour at http://www.getawayafrica.com/ index.php?id=911. 5. See http://www.athlone.co.za/heritage/history/0604200601_history. php. The small memorials that we visited in 2000 have now been substantially upgraded by the City of Cape Town Memory Project.

Chapter 4 1. This is an odd usage; no South African would call a female manager by the Afrikaans word for boss used by black South Africans generally to address white men during the apartheid era. It is much more likely that Anna addressed her boss as “Madam.” See Cock, Jacklyn. 1990. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid. London: Women’s Press Ltd. 2. Penguins and other sea birds were often the victims of oil spills from sinking or damaged ships around the peninsula. At the time there had been a particularly bad oil spill, and thousands of birds were being rescued and cleaned by volunteers. After this particular cleanup it was possible to go online to track a pair of a group of penguins that had been dropped off further north up the coast and were swimming back.



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3. 4.

5. 6.

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The plan was that they would arrive “home” by the time the waters were cleaned up. See http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/stats/adu/oilspill/ wwfweek2.htm. Meaning Walter Sisulu, co-founder of the African National Congress. See the Capetonian novelist Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light for an insightful portrayal of the tensions resulting from living with this identity both in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. This history is complex and displayed at Cape Town’s District Six Museum and online: http://www.districtsix.co.za/ TALK is now part of Phaphama Initiatives; http://www.avp.org.za/

Chapter 5 1. This was the form of numbering Corey used to organize her journal. 2. In the late 1990s and 2000 Cape Town was the site of a number of bombings, including at Planet Hollywood at the Waterfront, as well as at the Obs Café, a bar and restaurant where the American students I spent time with hung out a lot. These were believed to be part of a campaign targeted at American businesses by PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs).

Conclusion 1. There are now multiple organizations and sites that help Americans find their genetic roots in Africa—for example, African Ancestry (http:// www.africanancestry.com/), Geogene (http://www.geogene.com/), and Genetic Genealogy (http://www.dnaancestryproject.com/).



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214

9/11, 4, 151–2 September, 11, 2001, 7–9, 147, 185, 195 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 17 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 176 adventure tourism, 51, 64–6, 80–3 bungee jump, 44, 81, 87–8, 195 see also safaris; township tours African American identity, see identities African identity, see identities African National Congress (ANC), 53, 67, 86, 100, 113 Africa: One Continent, Many Worlds exhibit, 55–7 Africa, see authentic Africa; ideas of Africa; images of Africa; imagined Africa aid becoming an aid worker, 175, 178 critiques of, 21, 186–7 impact on tradition, 173 policies, 1 representations of, 155, 184 see also development; humanitarianism AIDS, see HIV/AIDS Alexandra, see township tours Alex Haley Foundation, see McDonalds, homecoming tour American culture as cultural imperialism, 125, 127, 148, 173 denial of, 146, 153 recognition of, 129, 149, 165–6 studies of, 2

American identity, see identities Americanness ideas about, 12, 152 meaning of, 166, 171, 175, 182, 185 performance of, 14 realization of, 7–9, 47, 126, 130–3, 146–9, 167 as social category, 152–3 see also backpacks; backpacks of privilege; identities; whiteness American values, 4, 11, 168–74, 187 Animal Kingdom, see Disney World’s Animal Kingdom; safaris anthropologists, 2–4, 14–22 see also ethnography; fieldwork; halfie anthropologist; native anthropologist Anzaldúa, Gloria, 12, 126 apartheid activism in America, 6, 28, 42, 83 anti-apartheid movement, 5, 16, 23, 27, 33, 100, 104 ideas about, 108, 113, 125, 192 life during, 58, 65, 77–8, 128 organizations, 16–17 tourism, 66–7, 84–6 authentic Africa, 64, 75, 103, 173, 175 authentic encounter, 73–5, 83, 89, 96, 100 authenticity, 140 authentic other, 100, 117 see also culture authentic village, 76, 170 see also political tourists; Global Exchange



Index

Back, Les, 17–18, 117–18, 133–4, 150 backpackers, 73 backpacks, 123, 138, 140, 152 backpacks of privilege, 153 backstage, 73, 89, 93, 97, 99, 140 balloon safari, 73, 84–5 see also township tours; photography; safaris Barnard, Rita, 189, 192 Barrow, John (1764–1848), 43–4 Bay Area, 3, 27, 38, 50, 53 Berkeley, 13, 16–17, 77 San Francisco, 51, 54, 74, 77 beach boys, 44 Berkeley, see Bay Area Bhabha, Homi, 153–4 blackness, 64, 79, 133, 150 bodily appropriation, 44 bodily functions, 122 bodily memory, 141 see also embodied experiences; hexis; techniques of the body Bo-Kaap, 96, 101, 120 Bono, 21, 156, 177, 188 see also aid; celebrity; humanitarianism border crossers, 12–13, 18 see also passports; visas border cultures, 126–7 borderlands, 12, 118 borders, 2–3, 20, 87, 139, 150–1, 157 see also frontiers Bourdieu, Pierre, 141 Boyer, Dominic, 21 branding Africa, 89 America, 171 Oprah, 187 see also Winfrey, Oprah Bruner, Edward, 89, 114, 144, 183 bungee jump, see adventure tourism Burton, Richard (1821–1890), 47

Index Bush, George W. (United States President 2000–2008), 1 see also PEPFAR bushmen, 48, 102 Cape Peninsula, 137–9 celebrity, 20–1 see also fame; Winfrey, Oprah celebrity activism, 156–7, 175, 177, 184 celebrity adoption, 176 Chicago Field Museum, see Africa: One Continent, Many Worlds exhibit Chideya, Farai, 11, 109, 184 Chineseness, 132–3 see also Louie, Andrea citizens American, 1, 7–8, 143 global, 12, 59 responsibilities of, 147, 167, 175, 178 citizenship, 18, 117–18, 154, 186 American, 123–4 Clarke, Kamari, 183 class, 18–19 in Africa, 111 in America, 143, 152–3 belonging to, 121, 123 effects on travel encounters, 48, 139, 145–6 in South Africa, 108, 112 Clifford, James, 3, 13, 19, 139 Clinton, William Jefferson (United States President, 1992–2000), 50–1, 53–5 clothes as better in South Africa, 119, 153 as constituting self, 122–3 as marking difference, 72, 137–8, 146 see also embodied experiences colonial encounters, 12, 43–4 colonial explorers, 42, 47 colonial gaze, 43, 49, 178



216

colonial missionaries, 4 colonial relationships, 46–7 colonial representations, 47, 49, 175, 178 colonial travel, 150, 183 colonial travel writing, 43, 183 Comaroff, Jean, 12, 42, 142, 150 Comaroff, John, 42, 142, 150 commodity culture, 171 Connerton, Paul, 141 Constant Gardener, The, 21, 155–6 consumerism, 173 contact zone, 13, 49 colonial, 183 tourist, 45, 138, 142, 183 see also Pratt, Mary-Louise Cooper, Brenda, 175 Crick, Malcolm, 14 Cry the Beloved Country, see Oprah Winfrey Show, The cultural citizenship, 123, 132 cultural competence, 78 cultural exchange, 79, 93, 96, 110, 150 culture authentic, 163 clash, 105 disturbed, 12, 103 exchange of, 12 exposure to, 92 global, 142 lack of, 42, 147, 193 as natural, 66 political, 148 tribal, 54 see also American culture culture shock, 33, 37, 92, 124, 165–7, 171 see also reverse culture shock Daily Show, The, 21–2 Darfur, see Save Darfur dark continent, the, 42, 124 Davis, Angela, 130–1

217

democratic transition, South Africa, 142 development, 97, 120, 170, 186–7 see also aid development organizations, see under individual organizations diaspora, 55–7 see also homecoming tourism; Africa: One Continent, Many Worlds exhibit; Elmina Castle Dinesen, Isak, 47 Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, 61–4 Easterly, William, 113, 177–8 Ebron, Paulla, 45–6, 132, 183 educational exchange, see study abroad Egypt, 63, 127–8 Elmina Castle, 45–6 see also Ghana embodied appropriations, 44, 83 embodied experiences, 6, 83 embodiments of landscape, 163 empire, 8, 131 American, 182 British, 181 frontiers of, 12, 43 environmental conservation, 56, 165 ethnic identities, 106, 112, 114, 139 new ethnicities, 133 ethnicizing eye, 151 ethnographic present, 22, 56 ethnography of global connections, 40 as tourism, 15, 17 of tourists, 12–14 of the United States, 2, 19 ethnos, 11 exiles, 13, 149 Fabian, Johannes, 189 fame, 157 Fassin, Didier, 194



Index

Index

game parks, 23, 80, 84 see also Disney World’s Animal Kingdom; safaris Gates, Henry Louis, 190 gaze, the, see colonial gaze; reverse gaze; tourist gaze Geldof, Bob, 177 gender differences, 48–9, 139 gender roles, 105, 110–111, 171–2 genetic ancestry, 8, 189–90 see also homecoming tourism Ghana, 160 see also homecoming tourism Ghughulethu, see township tours global connections, 3, 18, 40, 49, 150, 194 global ecumene, 14, 142 Global Exchange, 25–9, 54, 70, 92, 95–7, 172 globalization, 55, 94, 133, 148, 173 global responsibility, 7, 59, 170, 178 see also humanitarianism; citizens; citizenship Global Routes, 32, 168 Graburn, Nelson, 13, 92–3, 105 guidebooks, 163 Gunning, Sandra, 131

Harrison, Julia, 15, 105, 122, 134, 150–1, 166 heritage tourism, see homecoming tourism hexis, 141 see also embodied experiences Hilton, Paris, 19 HIV/AIDS activism, 28, 53, 174, 188 challenges to Africa, 4, 55, 73, 91, 124, 155, 161 treatment, 21, 109 Hollywood, 48, 155 Holsey, Bayo, 45–6, 57, 132, 183 home changing ideas of, 138–9, 142, 144, 150–1, 165–7, 172–3 feeling different at, 121–2, 129–30, 134 the meaning of, 19, 22–3, 131 as normative, 152 in relation to the ethnographer, 16–17 in relation to the field, 3–4, 14 in relation to travel, 12–13, 95, 114 searching for, 43, 101, 106, 132–3, 158–9 homecoming tourism, 5, 46–7, 132 homeland tours, 5, 47, 51, 77, 175 homestays, 110–111 Hubbard, Laura, 21–2, 73, 83, 172 Hughes, David, 64–5 humanitarianism, 182, 194 celebrity, 21–2, 156 see also aid hybridity, 12 hyphenated identity, 117–18, 129, 132, 186

hair, 111, 128–31 halfie anthropologist, 4, 17 Hannerz, Ulf, 14, 142, 151 Haraway, Donna, 66, 69, 84

ideas of Africa, 64, 66, 72, 163, 193 identities, 92, 123, 131 African, 16, 55 African-American, 1, 128–9, 131

feminism, 109–11 Ferguson, James, 2–3, 18, 44, 172, 178, 194 field, the, 2–4, 14 fieldwork, 3–4, 12–13, 50 see also halfie anthropologist; native anthropologist; white South Africans folk culture, 57, 151 Frey, Nancy, 140 frontiers, 12, 49 see also empire



218

Index

Jacobs-Huey, Lanita, 130 Johannesburg, 65, 77, 90, 121, 163 Jolie, Angelina, 156, 176–7 see also celebrity; celebrity adoption; fame Kaplan, Amy, 134–5 Keep a Child AliveTM , 21, 186 see also celebrity; Keys, Alicia Keim, Curtis, 47–8, 58–9 Kenya friends from, 108 game parks, 62 as ideal Africa, 30, 76, 80 poverty, 159–60, 168 President Arap Moi, 54–5 traveler expectations, 74, 114 see also Obama, Barack Hussein (United States President 2009–); Out of Africa; safaris; reality television Keys, Alicia, 161–2 see also aid; celebrity; humanitarianism; Keep a Child AliveTM Kincaid, Jamaica, 76

Kingsolver, Barbara, see Oprah Winfrey Show, The Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936), see white man’s burden Kurin, Richard, 57 landscapes authentic African, 66, 75–6, 163–5 empty, 42–3, 64–5, 156 Larkin, Brian, 20, 22 liminality, 14, 92, 105, 139 Linde-Laursen, Anders, 151 Lion King, The, 64 Live Aid, 156 see also aid; celebrity; humanitarianism Livingstone, David (1813–1873), 47 Livingstone, Zambia, 44–5, 87 Louie, Andrea, 132–3 see also Chineseness Lumumba, Patrice (1925–1961), 52 MacCannell, Dean, 13, 89, 97, 140 Madonna, 21, 156, 176 see also celebrity; celebrity adoption; humanitarianism Magubane, Zine, 22, 176–8, 188–9, 192 Malay Quarter, see Bo-Kaap Mandela, Nelson images of South Africa, 37–8 as Oprah Winfrey’s inspiration, 188, 192 as tourist attraction, 67, 83, 99–100 Mauss, Marcel, 141 Mayer, Ruth, 47–9 Mazzarella, William, 20, 22 Mbembe, Achille, 4–5, 194 McDonalds, 35, 148 homecoming tour, 46 see also homecoming tourism McIntosh, Peggy, 152



American, 4, 8–9, 118, 134, 142–3, 147, 152, 186 changing, 118–19, 124–5, 128–31, 153–4 Mexican-American, 124, 126 national, 18–19, 57–8, 133–5, 141–2, 150–1 see also Americanness; Chineseness identity politics, 19, 126, 133 Ignatieff, Michael, 182 Illouz, Eva, 187, 192 images of Africa, 40, 41–2, 47–8, 56, 69, 162–3, 184 images of poverty, 75, 158 images of suffering, 178 imagined Africa, 5–6, 49, 65, 89

219

Index

media representations of Africa, 2, 14, 42, 53, 65, 89, 94, 160 representations of America, 144–5 representations of humanitarianism, 4, 156–7, 186–8 as site, 19–22, 50 mediation, 3, 22, 63 Mercer, Kobena, 130 mestiza consciousness, 126 Mexican American identity, see identities migrants, 13, 149 millennium generation, 11, 184–5 Miller, Perry, 134–5 mobility economic, 45 global, 2, 145, 185 Morrison, Tony, 130–1 MTV, see reality television museums, see diaspora; national narratives national belonging, 7, 138–9, 151, 186 see also identities national characteristics, 141–2, 153 see also identities National Geographic Channel, 2, 80, 170 see also Worlds Apart National Geographic Magazine, 47 national histories, 5–6, 18 nationalism, 131, 172 national narratives, 150–1 National Summit on Africa, 42, 54–5 native anthropologist, 4, 17 Nixon, Rob, 41 nostalgia, 167 Ntarangwi, Mwenda, 15, 74, 80 Obama, Barack Hussein, (United States President 2009–), 1, 8–9 Observatory, 68–9

Oprah Winfrey Show, The, 52, 161, 192 see also Winfrey, Oprah orientalism, 47–8 Ortner, Sherry, 17, 157 othering, 17, 92 Out of Africa breakfast, 73 film, 49 safari, 63–4, 144 PAGAD (People against Gansterism and Drugs), 109, 128 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 21, 156 see also celebrity; fame; humanitarianism Park, Mungo (1771–1806), 43, 47 passports, 138, 152–3 patriotism, 168 Peace Corps, 78–9, 149–50, 169–70 PEPFAR (U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), 1 photography of children, 75 code of ethics, 70–2 as memories, 6, 69–70, 72–3 representing Cape Town, 74 as tourist gaze, 46, 74 see also safaris pilgrimage, 93–4, 140 Poisonwood Bible, The, see Oprah Winfrey Show, The political tourist, 11, 14, 25–29 pop culture, 132, 143 popular culture, 4–5, 12, 14, 20, 22, 89, 156–7, 177 Population Registration Act, 101–2 poverty as absence, 175 authentic, 173, 176 culture of, 66 impact of, 157–62, 168, 171 meaning of, 78, 109, 149 relative, 144–5



220

Index

race, 8 perceptions of, 101–3, 106, 111–14 see also identities; whiteness racism in America, 131, 166 experiences of, 107–8 in South Africa, 112 reality television MTV, 19–20 Road Rules, 64, 70 Survivor Africa, 73, 172, 174 see also Worlds Apart Reality Tours, 26–7, 96–7 see also Global Exchange reciprocal vision, 43 see also reverse gaze Redmond, Sean, 20, 156–7 refugees as mobile subjects, 13 representation, 2, 4, 19–21, 40, 48–50, 57, 175 see also images of Africa; imagined Africa; safaris reverse culture shock, 165–7 reverse gaze, 7, 15, 75, 138, 142, 150, 178, 185–6 Road Rules, see reality television Robben Island, 67, 75, 99–101 see also apartheid, tourism; Mandela, Nelson Rock, Chris, 159, 188 romance tourism, 44–5 see also sex tourism

Roots, see McDonalds Rosaldo, Renato, 12, 117–18, 126, 132, 139, 152, 163 Roy, Ishita, 171–2 Sachs, Jeffrey, 175 safaris, 48–50, 76, 80–2 photographic, 69–70, 73, 80 see also Disney World’s Animal Kingdom; photography; Out of Africa; township tours San Francisco, see Bay Area Save Darfur, 21, 42, 50, 186 saving Africa, 156, 175, 184 see also aid; celebrity; humanitarianism self changing, 117–18, 122–3, 132–4, 151–4, 164 constructing, 15 discovering, 189, 192 ethnographic, 17–18 tourist, 92–3 see also Americanness; identities September 11, 2001, see 9/11 sex tourism, 44–5 SHAWCO (Student health and welfare organization), 32 slavery, 6, 56 see also diaspora; homecoming tourism Smithsonian Festival on the Mall, 42, 57–8 South Africa cultural tourism, 95–6 diversity, 101–4 images of, 23, 41, 51–3 relationship with America, 5–6 tourist brand, 66–7 travel statistics, 24, 31–2 see also Cape Town; Observatory; Smithsonian Festival on the Mall; township tours souvenirs, 29, 100, 115



relief, 21 tourism to, 75, 84, 91, 96 Powdermaker, Hortense, 3, 39–40 Pratt, Mary Louise, 12, 42–4, 47, 49, 183 primitive Africa as, 47, 76, 171–3, 175 primordial, 164 (Product) REDTM , 21, 159, 161, 188

221

Soweto, see township tours Stewart, Jon, see Daily Show, The study abroad expectations of, 92–4 see also homestays; transformational travel study abroad programs, 31–4, 38 study abroad students, 35–9 Sudan, see Save Darfur suffering experience of, 194 impact of, 161–2 as self, 187, 189, 192–3 stories of, 140, 156, 183–4 see also Winfrey, Oprah Survivor Africa, see reality television Tarzan, 47 taste, 125–7 see also embodied experiences; clothes techniques of the body, 141 see also embodied experiences; hexis television, 20, 21, 42, 64, 143, 144–5, 156, 162 see also Oprah Winfrey Show, The; reality television Theroux, Paul, 194 tourism branding, 66, 163 see also branding tourism, see adventure tourism; apartheid; contact zone; romance tourism; sex tourism; tourist tourist literature, 12–13, 92–4 statistics, 23–4 see also tourist gaze, sex tourism tourist gaze, 6, 43–4, 46, 69, 83, 114 township tours, 75, 83–7, 90–1 see also photography, safaris transformational travel, 6, 46, 95, 105, 189

Index transnationalism, 3, 133 travel disjunctures, 101–4, 109–10, 112–14, 160–2, 164 encounters, 90, 98–101, 142–7 ethnographic, 14–15 expectations, 58–9, 74, 79, 91–4, 96, 162–3, 165 home, 3, 16–17, 19, 165–7 identities, 40 impact of, 44, 46–7, 75, 83, 105, 109, 114–15, 147–50, 169–70 inner journeys, 92–3, 120, 174, 192 literature, 12–13, 18, 43–4, 75, 92–4, 139 as negation, 178–9, 193–4 preparation for, 26–7 in press, 23, 52 stories, 71–2, 155 see also adventure tourism; colonial travel; borders; homeland tours; homestays; reality television; reverse gaze; safaris; tourist; transformational travel travelers Amilca, 38, 106–7 Amyra, 163, 175–6 Bahar, 39, 113, 144 Betsy, 105–6, 148, 158, 170 Bonnie, 28–9, 65, 70–2, 78, 90–1, 95, 97–101, 164 Calvin, 28, 102–3, 172–3 Casey, 30, 168 Corey, 35, 110, 117–18, 124–5, 127–35, 153, 166–7 Dahlia, 39, 107–8, 144, 169 Duke, 35, 80, 108–9 Elizabeth, 112, 161 Erika, 35, 110 Gerardo, 35–6, 75 Jai, 113–14, 158–9, 174–5 Johanna, 148–9, 166



222

Kamika, 107, 145, 159 Katie, 36, 72, 80, 147–9, 167 Kurtz, Linda, 78, 103, 161–2 Leah, 16, 36, 105, 153 Liz, 39, 105, 112, 141, 145–6 Maria, 36, 80, 117–18, 124–7, 131–5, 153 Megan, 36, 105, 109–10, 117–24, 131–5, 153, 166–7 Peter, 158, 160, 173 Phyllis, 39, 73, 108, 111, 139, 146–7, 169 Regan, 36–7, 74–5, 110, 122, 153, 166–7 Rya, 37, 147, 167 Teresa, 167 Val, 15, 24–5, 144–6, 169 see also celebrity; Clinton, William Jefferson (United States President, 1992–2000); colonial explorers; Peace Corps; reality television; Winfrey, Oprah travel writing, see colonial travel writing Tsing, Anna, 3, 40 Turner, Victor, 92 United States Presidential Campaign, 2008, 1, 9, 184–5 University of California research site, 38–9 students in South Africa, 169–70 see also Bay Area; study abroad programs University of Cape Town (UCT) alma mater, 16 international students’ program, 93 research site, 34 response to Americans, 94, 111 travel destination, 67–8 USA for Africa, 156

223

values American, 1, 4, 8–9, 11, 93, 148, 168, 174, 186 disturbed by travel, 121–2 recognized in Africa, 21–2, 171–2 Victoria Falls, 44, 64, 81–2, 87–8 see also adventure tourism visas, 139, 152–3 volunteering, 30, 32–3, 76, 168 see also Peace Corps Wainaina, Binyavanga, 48 white man’s burden, 181–2, 187 whiteness, 123–4, 130–1, 152–3 white South Africans American encounters with, 35, 79, 98, 102–3, 108, 111–12, 119 ethnographer, 4, 16–17, 86 Wilson, Sheryll, 187 Winfrey, Oprah, 21, 187–94 see also aid; celebrity; humanitarianism; Oprah Winfrey Show, The Wonders of the African World, 53 see also Gates, Henry Louis World Affairs Council, 51, 53–4 Worlds Apart, 170–2, 174–5 World Vision, 162, 176 Yurchak, Alexei, 21 Zanzibar, 44, 45, 73–4 Zimbabwe friends, 38, 108, 112 Lake Kariba, 64–5 press, 50 protests, 83, 147, 148 study abroad programs, 31–2 travel to, 25, 30, 39, 81, 111, 124, 128, 139, 144–7



Index

Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa

South Africa (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

The African-American Travel Guide (African American Travel Guide)

Becoming

Becoming

Becoming

Becoming

The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation: Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era (American Popular History and Culture (Routledge (Firm)).)

Becoming

becoming

Becoming

In Africa

Becoming

Becoming

Becoming

Africa and the New World Era: From Humanitarianism to a Strategic View

Scientific American Special Edition - Becoming Human

Architecture and Power in Africa

Democracy and elections in Africa

Peace and Conflict in Africa

Custom and Conflict in Africa

Government and Politics in Africa

Democracy and Development in Africa

Democracy and Development in Africa

Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke (Southern Literary Studies)

Deleuze, Education and Becoming

Time and Becoming in Nietzsche's Thought

The Best American Travel Writing 2011

Colonial American Travel Narratives (Penguin Classics)

African American Settlements in West Africa: John Brown Russwurm and the American Civilizing Efforts

Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa

South Africa (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

The African-American Travel Guide (African American Travel Guide)

Becoming

Becoming

Becoming

Becoming

The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation: Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era (American Popular History and Culture (Routledge (Firm)).)

Becoming

becoming

Becoming

In Africa

Becoming

Becoming

Becoming

Africa and the New World Era: From Humanitarianism to a Strategic View

Scientific American Special Edition - Becoming Human

Architecture and Power in Africa

Democracy and elections in Africa

Peace and Conflict in Africa

Custom and Conflict in Africa

Government and Politics in Africa

Democracy and Development in Africa

Democracy and Development in Africa

Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke (Southern Literary Studies)

Deleuze, Education and Becoming

Time and Becoming in Nietzsche's Thought

The Best American Travel Writing 2011

Colonial American Travel Narratives (Penguin Classics)

African American Settlements in West Africa: John Brown Russwurm and the American Civilizing Efforts

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