Comments on: Africa on my mind

By: The Memory Bank » Blog Archive » The informal economy: a story of ethnography untold

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:46:49 +0000

[...] planning this book three years ago, I wrote an unbuttoned personal account of that fieldwork called Africa on my mind. Maybe something like it will find a place in the present version. Maybe not. But the point of this [...]

By: keith

keith — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 13:05:22 +0000

Thanks for the inspiring comment, Katja. Why inspiring? I can only answer with a story. I have a friend called Ruth who at the age of 80 still writes to authors of novels, biographies and poetry that she likes to read. She is always astonished to get back 4-page hand written letters, invitations to dinner etc. I tell her, “But Ruth you are the only one!” Writers (and teachers) get very little feedback on their efforts. It is lonely to write and even lonelier to wonder what readers make of it. So that is one reason. Look how long this piece has been up and how much feedback I have had.

But it is also insipring in its content. Both of us have experienced the idea of Africa as an awkward constraint in mobile and complex lives. I still think that there is a postive political value to be found in the idea, one that might help Africans (who will be a quarter of humanity in 2050) to make their collective voice heard. But only in a world that has moved beyond the racist stereotypes that made the last version.

I have discovered Finland only recently, being exposed much more to Sweden, Norway and Denmark. I am intrigued by a national culture combining Swedish, German, Russian and Lapp elements with Finno-Ugric memories of Central Asia. The power of Finnish design has a specific historical source. Yet the others talk about the Finns in terms similar to Polish jokes in the US or Irish jokes in Britain. I even made up a joke against the Finns, a bad one I admit: Did you hear that last year the Finns admitted two Africans into the coutnry and then lost them in the snow? Well, I told you it was a bad one. I have quite an acute sense of what you went through.

Cape Town is my least favourite of the three main South African cities. The inscription of race in the landscape is more pronounced there: the historical injury the British inflicted on the Afrikaners, the origin of the Coloured population in slavery and piracy, the White downtown and beachfront areas contrasted with the African slums. I find it a sterile city and UCT still hasn’t figured out how it can be a sort of Oxbridge in that place. You will definitely find South London more congenial than Lappland or Cape Town, but unfortunately I will not be there, since I retired two years ago. But let’s stay in touch through the OAC.

By: Katja

Katja — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 21:13:50 +0000

This was a very interesting read. Having just completed four years of studies in anthropology at the University of Cape Town, I find it enlightening to read about fieldwork accounts based in so-called “Black Africa”. A distinguished professor such as yourself, writing so honestly and opening about your experiences,is certainly refreshing. Many students in my Honours class of 2009 seemed to come from mostly middle-class, white South African backgrounds. We had two black SADC students and a couple of (white) American exchange students. In addition, we had two “Coloured” students and myself. The first time I was exposed to the concept/idea of “Africa” as a homogenous, wretched whole was when my family moved to Lapland, FINLAND in 1998. Before that, my childhood was spent in an Africa, or should I say, a Zimbabwe of multiple colours and contrasts (all the more ironic considering that the black-white dichotomy is so highly publicised in the media nowadays with reference to the ‘Zimbabwe crisis’)…being a child of mixed heritage (my mother is a multiracial Zimbabwean of Chinese, Indian and African origin- my father was a Finn), I found it upsetting/confusing in Finland when people asked me to speak “African” or demonstrate an “African dance”, for example…or worse, when they asked me why I was not “Black”. The idea of Africa as the dark continent, both literally and figuratively, is still all-pervasive, despite globalisation. The level of ignorance displayed by some exchange students at UCT is shocking and the students who do not fit into the neat catgories defined by mainstream, eurocentric academy/society are often left on the margins. In such a multicultural/multiracial city like Cape Town, there was very little discussion around racial hybridity and cultural fluidity. The two Coloured students and myself (I identified myself as Coloured by default)often felt under-represented and MIS-represented as “another kind of African people”.

Anyway, I hope to continue graduate studies at Goldsmiths next year!

By: Archive Fever | Blog | keith@oac

Archive Fever | Blog | keith@oac — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:24:26 +0000

[...] I went to live in a slum, a 22 year-old boy who had never been anywhere before. (I have posted a memoir of this period). I found there that I was rich, white, educated and bureaucratically adept. I [...]