I met Alex Halperin in Kampala in 2008. He already was talking about writing a piece like The Mzungu Thing even back then, and I’m so glad to see it published. The essay takes a long hard look at expats in Africa – the good they do, and the not so good. Alex says a lot of things that need to be said, but that most people don’t want to hear, and certainly no one wants to write.
With amazing dry humor and a nod to How to Write About Africa, Alex recons with everything from the devaluation of African lives to “good news” to drug trafficking. Here’s a brief excerpt, though I highly, highly recommend that you read the whole essay:
The safer parts of Africa have become a workshop for high-concept philanthropy, wrapping adventurism in a veneer of charity. Young Americans bring yarn to a small Ugandan town, where they teach women to crochet hats to sell back in the States. Two British girls on a gap-year teach kids photography in Nairobi slums. They plan on selling the kids’ work from a London gallery and, if the plan works out, somehow reinvesting the profit in the kids. A fitness-oriented charity attempted to organize “an endurance running challenge: 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 weeks in 2010. This Guinness World Record-breaking endeavor will push our team members to their personal limits with the goal of bringing fundraising and awareness to the AIDS orphans of East Africa.” Running the Antarctica Marathon for the sheer idiocy of it no longer registers on the self-satisfaction meter.
I can sympathize. It wasn’t enough to go to Africa; I had to feel important doing it. So I found a generous organization that would sponsor me to go find Africa’s untold good news, although I’d never been there. I wanted to write about social entrepreneurship, fair trade, and microfinance—this last the biggest thing in poverty reduction since Live Aid. Since I wanted to sell my stories to the mainstream American media, it would help if my central characters were white.
The point of this series is to highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context. I also hope create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of projects committed to telling a different kind of story.
See previous Context Africa posts:
How did you decide you wanted to write about this and how did the essay come about in this form?
I began writing what eventually became The Mzungu Thing during Kenya’s electoral crisis. The country was falling apart: thousands of Kenyans had been killed or injured during the violence, many times more had lost their homes and I was going home every night to a comfortable furnished apartment in Nairobi. For me it underscored the reality of Americans visiting Africa which is that they are, in almost all cases, infinitely more privileged than almost everyone they encounter. That’s not always said but still pretty obvious, so in the essay I focused on why people like me want to go to Africa and what we do once we’re there.
There are many foreigners who are doing important work in Africa. I focused on those who aren’t because their foibles are more entertaining. But I also hope the piece conveys that do-gooding isn’t something just anyone can do. Many Americans, I think, go to Africa under the illusion that somehow their mere presence will make a difference. And that isn’t any more true than it would be for someone who barged into an operating room and demanded the scalpel.
What are your concerns in publishing something like this? Do you think it might be misinterpreted?
Anything can be misinterpreted, and I do worry about that kind of thing. In a lot of reporting from Africa, undoubtedly including my own, most Africans appear as martyrs and victims in atmospheric detail and then the journalist goes off and interviews an official—often a foreigner—whom they rely on to find out what’s going on. In this piece I tried to describe encounters with a few people who probably wouldn’t appear in the media, and because these portrayals aren’t entirely sympathetic I am a bit nervous about how readers will react.
Ultimately, this essay is very much about the value of African lives to the outside world. What kind of thoughts did you have about this before you went to Africa and at the end of your stay? And after writing this piece?
Before I left for Africa I didn’t think there was any earthly calculus in which Africans have an influence proportional to their numbers. Traveling around didn’t change my mind. How could it?
To me, this essay is kind of like a version of “Stuff White People Like” that’s about Africa. What do you think of that?
I like that blog and can cringingly identify with it as much as the next white person. Sure, elements of my essay might read like what happens when ‘White People’ go to Africa. I didn’t mention it in the essay, because I couldn’t figure out a way to say it without sounding even more tendentious, but elements of white culture—which of course the blog highlights—are highly sought after by Americans in Africa. Good coffee, The New Yorker, and certain foods are all the more fetishized for being hard to come by. Pirated DVDs, iPods and 21st century pharmacology make life in Africa much more comfortable than it used to be. On the other hand the contrast between American middle-class luxuries and the reality of life in, say, northern Uganda, can be unsettling. Like any White Person, I squirmed a bit at the juxtaposition.
Do you feel guilty about being one of those mzungus? why or why not and what do you do with that feeling?
Not really. I’m a journalist and so it’s pretty easy to say I was in Africa to write about things, not to help anyone. And like most people I’m not particularly inclined to apologize for my circumstances and good luck.
Why do you think Africa in particular is subject to this sort of thing: “The typical American in Africa is less likely to know five people willing to donate $100 than a quintet eager to fly over and give an awareness-raising rockapella concert.”? Why don’t other poor regions see the same phenomenon?
It’s not exclusive to Africa. In Calcutta, for example, there’s a huge community of wazungu—for lack of a better term—who are anointing lepers and such because they feel guilty about some aspect of their lives. Part of this owes to Mother Teresa’s legacy but the broader point is that many people try to absolve themselves, for whatever reason, by working with the poor and it’s much more stylish these days to work with the far away poor than the nearby poor. But yes certain parts of Africa do attract more than their share of people looking to do charity on their vacation. This is probably because Africa is the poorest continent and Westerners who haven’t been there often see it as one miserable monolith, the place where they’re most needed.
Alex Halperin is a freelance reporter who lives in Brooklyn. You can reach him at alexhalperin at gmail dot com.
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