Of Elands and Giraffes and Helicopters and Teacups
Humor me for a moment and try to imagine Elon, Zuck, and Bezos at the beach as kids. For the sake of this uncanny vignette, imagine they’re all around the same age, not older than eleven or twelve—gawky, pale, entirely unremarkable. It’s a Saturday, busy even for a summer weekend, and the boys are congregated by the water’s edge, sandy swimsuits, sitting in the loose unguarded way of children. Zoom in. The boys are single-minded in their work, dripping wet sand into the shape of a small colosseum. Drip, drip, drip—the walls build up, mesmerizing in their ugliness and ease. The boys aren’t talking, but their dance maintains the telltale coordination of consensus. Drip, drip; three sets of eagle eyes find the places where the wall is weakest; buttressing, plugging gaps, dribbling ever higher. Then the camera pans down, and we feel like God for a moment, supervising divine construction. Zoom in again. We see there’s a small hermit crab tucked in her shell, dead center of the mounting hippodrome. It’s distressing to witness; her aloneness, her stuckness, entirely at the mercy of boys who haven’t yet figured out what to do with her. Then again, she’s not trying to escape, really. Her nescience becomes the scene’s most troubling detail. Her ambivalence is appalling. Then again, why should she ruminate on the enclosure that’s vaulting up around her? Life is comfortable. The walls are just sand, after all.
By one telling of the story, we might liken ourselves to the hermit crab caught in the tech oligarchs’ drip castle. Alternatively, we could assign ourselves a bit more agency and admit to opting in to some version of a digitally engineered Skinner box. Skinner’s seminal experiments involving rats and pigeons—marginally brighter specimens than our humble hermit crab—are widely regarded as among the most influential studies of habit formation. Confined in operant conditioning chambers, test subjects learned to press levers and peck keys in exchange for food pellets. Skinner’s specimens typically learned the conditioned behavior within three to four hour-long sessions; some particularly bright rodents were trained in sixty minutes.
The human brain weighs about 700 times more than a rat’s—hardly a linear proxy for cognitive ability—but it does make you wonder how quickly we might habituate to our own algorithm-optimized Skinner boxes.
A Break for Lunch
Last weekend in Ghanzi town, a brash and meaty Afrikaner explained to me that his infant daughter was somewhat of a savant, having learned to navigate TikTok’s explore page at the tender age of zero. You would have thought she was cogitating on quantum physics.
“But those Bushman kids—hah!—another story. You give them a phone, they think it’s a stone! Good luck getting education into a Bushman brain!”
I sat there stunned, unsure whether to respond to the flagrant racism or to the complete delusion this man seemed to harbor about his infant’s technological aptitude. Glancing over at Baby—deadpan eyes, marble brain, perfect little bowed mouth popped ajar—swipe…swipe…swipe…you’d think refresh was some primitive reflex. Sensing I wasn’t going to move the conversation forward, my unsolicited lunch date raised a toast of dark liquor.
To opening the Bushman brain, and softening the Bushman heart!
Glass drained, he surrendered to a fit of hysterical laughter while Baby slow-poached her precocious little mind, slamming the Skinner lever again and again and again.
What it Really Looks Like Downstream
I’ll admit that my time in the Skinner box—or the sand-dribbled doom amphitheater, whatever you prefer—has had its effect on me. I’m more trigger-happy in drawing causal links and hastier in claiming understanding. Contrarianism tastes sweeter to a palate refined for dopamine. Novelty is harder to come by, so a highly distilled version of reality is required to cut through attentional fog. Nuance looks like cowardly indecision, while polemic, rage and conspiracy sound ever more appetizing. Over time, I fear the kind of intensity we’re learning to expect will sand down our tolerance for complexity.
In the throes of an attentional economy, one viral commodity has appreciated precipitously. It is the promise of hidden truth—better, elaborate conspiracy—the inglorious exposition of a rotten underbelly. If there’s anything the internet excels at, it’s manufacturing and disseminating rage.
Viral clickbait of this sinister flavor is often teed up as follows:
1) The Real Story of… [insert subject of investigation, nothing is too banal]
2) The Secret Truth Behind… [pairs well with canonical historical events, suspiciously ageless celebrities, ingredients, and seemingly innocuous household items]
This rhetorical strategy delivers because it preys upon our innate desires to A) be part of an exclusive in-group, and B) find a satisfying binary “truth” in everything so that the world becomes less complicated and consequently less terrifying.
Very rarely do we scour the bona fides of our algorithm-born whistleblowers, for an argument’s virality creates the impression of truth by consensus. Consensus feels democratic. Science, on the other hand, rests on research, and research rides on big money; therefore, conspiracy. Non-sequitur, but no matter. Self-doubt, often coupled with laziness, primes us to outsource truth-seeking to the self-righteous. Everything You Think You Know About the Moon Is Wrong. All The Lies You’ve Been Fed About Mary Todd Lincoln. It takes some gall—confidence if we’re being sympathetic and narcissism if we’re honest—to claim truth so combatively. The Long Game Behind Office Chairs. The Color Blue Is a Government Psyop. There lies powerful leverage in being the one who sees through conspiracy.
Real Africa, According to Someone Familiar with the Matter
Last month in Cape Town, at the highfalutin Conscious Matcha café, I was informed that my milk options were: soy, almond, hazelnut, coconut, and cashew.
“Do you have cow?”
“No, we have soy, almond, hazelnut, coconut, and cashew.”
Shameless grandstanding—but for who exactly? Waiting for my soy latte, I scrolled social media absentmindedly. And there it was, deliciously combative: The West Doesn’t Want You to See Real Africa. Impossible to resist an opening frame like that.
Real Africa. It takes about two minutes to explain. A well-dressed white guy with a fashionable haircut announces that we, the Western public, have been duped by anti-African propaganda that has led us—complacent sheep who haven’t done our own research—to believe that Africa is uniformly poor, hungry, dry, and violent; eternally sliding between various states of civil war and decrepitude. Real Africa, our influencer sage promises—scenes of Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi’s skylines flash across the screen as he voices over—is a place of abundance, hypermodern luxury, and technological innovation. Ideas you cling to of disease, catastrophic drought, emaciated children with kwashiorkor bellies and bare feet—those are the product of a coordinated Western effort of anti-African propaganda. The truth, according to this uncredentialed Africanist, is that Western governments don’t want their citizenry—working grueling hours, eating poison food, getting fat, pale, and stupid—to understand that life could be much better, freer, and more prosperous on the Dark Continent. I watched the video several times, because it was such a ripe example of what happens when attention spans contract, contrarianism becomes lucrative, and nuance is unceremoniously strangled out.
First Principles of Real Africa
The case for Real Africa, as argued by our Instagram iconoclast, necessarily assumes an audience lacking any firsthand experience of Africa. Probabilistically, he’s made a strong bet—less than 1% of outbound international flights from the United States are destined for the continent. Despite a surge in immigration from sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade, African immigrants account for just 0.7% of the U.S. population. Given the premise of relative consumer ignorance, we’re left with a self-licking ice cream cone of an argument: absent firsthand evidence contradicting Real Africa’s sweeping claims, any attempted rebuttal risks corroborating the narrative.
See, the white woman says Africa is a land of penury and darkness! Look how the rapacious Westerner wishes to keep Africa on its back foot—exploited and dependent! What a pity to live as sheep, benighted cogs of the propaganda machine.
Well played.
The creator’s second assumption, that I have been inundated with advertising and news media featuring starving Africans, is equally well-reasoned. Over 50% of international charity ad imagery focuses on Africa. Many of those images are disturbing, graphic, and shamelessly opportunistic. Critics bitingly call the stuff “poverty porn”. Scraggy despairing children, disfigured bodies, blisters—if there’s no vultures explicitly painted into the frame, there might as well be.
Watching suffering pressed into marketing material at such scale, one can’t help but hope that Real Africa is more merciful. There’s no way a whole continent could be so uniformly unyielding in its deprivation. True. That is absolutely true.
But because complexity is bitter, conspiracy sweet, and there exists collective longing for a less cruel reality, our influencer’s reductive Real Africa thesis gets its foot in the door.
Of Elands and Giraffes and Helicopters and Teacups
So here we begin a story without a thesis. Here we begin an exploration in nuance and contradiction that isn’t meant to finish with tied-up ends or crisp hospital corners. A story of 1.5 billion people spread across almost 12 million square miles—of elands and giraffes and helicopters and teacups.
Africa of Bubbles
Down the street from Conscious Matcha, there’s a pet spa called The Poochie Coo Pup Retreat. There are 34 medical spas and 110 listings for yoga studios in Cape Town’s city directory. In our tiny settlement of D’kar, a fourth grade teacher, Mr. Gaolebale, wears acrylic nails with tiny bows lacquered onto the thumbs and calls me “queen”. Thirty minutes’ drive away, I can buy parmesan cheese.
During a semester-long internship in Dar es Salaam, I worked sixty-hour weeks on the 20th floor of Golden Jubilee Tower, just one floor down from Akemi, “The First and Only Revolving Restaurant In Tanzania”, according to its website. Literally revolving—the restaurant completes a 360° rotation in around seventy minutes. This iteration of Real Africa had a dress code and biometric access controls to enter the board room and leather wheely chairs with excellent low back support.
As part of a work assignment, I spent a weekend watching dozens of cataract surgeries at a rural eye clinic. The surgeon drank a sugar-free Red Bull and told terrible jokes as he expertly sliced and diced at corneas for eight hours straight. I joined a gym. My favorite lunch place pressed its own tofu and served local kombucha on tap. At a colleague’s dinner party, a flamboyant Malawian fashion model invited me to a three-day “queer bubble rave”. If only the international press had paused the Ebola broadcast for a day to elucidate this African phenomenon, I might have known what to wear. Bubbles—sprung from a doggie spa or a multiday queer rave—do not fit neatly into an Africa defined by privation and plunder.
Madonna’s Africa
Glaring inequality remains a disquieting undercurrent in all these scenes. It’s not a uniquely African condition, of course, rather an inevitability of capitalist development. Nothing is clear—the chain of attribution, the heroes, the villains, the victims. Everything is political. Everywhere is improvidence and incongruity. Take, for example, the dark comedy of the Audi parked outside its owner’s thatch-roofed mud hut. No piped water, no electricity, but an uninsured sports car on lease, sitting pretty in the front yard.
Fifteen minutes inland from Cape Town’s tony seaside promenade lies a haphazard sprawl of forgotten townships. Not forgotten by those who live there, of course; the ones who drive the Ubers and paint the toenails and tend the gardens of those who have paid to forget. Satellite dishes perch precariously on tin roofs balanced on corrugated walls. Rubbish is disposed of expeditiously—what happens when that mounting pile can’t take another dirty diaper? Why wring your hands over hypotheticals. Poverty invites a distinct myopia. Saving, investing, building things to last—privileges of the haves. Consequently, architecture of the slum is remarkably consistent.
Two years ago, I spent three weeks in Kibera, Africa’s largest urban slum, draped along the outskirts of Nairobi. In brochures and safari marketing, Nairobi is sometimes referred to as the “Green City in the Sun” for its verdant hills and dazzling equatorial sunshine; it is the only capital city in the world to host a national park—and its own stock exchange. McKinsey & Co. runs its East African operation out of the upscale Lavington neighborhood; Boston Consulting Group, Google, Deloitte, PwC, JP Morgan, and Mastercard also keep offices in the city.
But drive twenty minutes southwest down Ngong Road to Kibera, and your life expectancy at birth more than halves to just thirty years old. Admittedly, this figure is skewed by an equally disturbing statistic: 19% of children born in Kibera die before their fifth birthday. Clean water is unreliable, government schools are overcrowded, and sexual violence remains a persistent issue, leaving NGOs and community organizations to support the education and childcare needs of a mushrooming population of preteen mothers. Each afternoon, as I wandered home through mazes of colorfully wrapped women touting matches and candy, moats of untreated waste, and the skeletons of long-forgotten infrastructure projects, Kibera’s residents lit up colossal piles of paper and plastic waste. The smoke from that kind of burn is dark and close—like a house fire more than a campfire—vaporized couches, plastic bags, scrapped refrigerators. One evening, I traced a putrid trickle of stream through the settlement’s corrugated walls to reach a short knoll overlooking a sea of tin roofs.
“You know Madonna was here in January?” a voice behind me announced.
I turned around to face an older man dressed in yellow flip flops and a Gonzaga Baseball sweatshirt.
“The singer?”
“Yes, the singer. She build a mural here. She love Kibera so much.”
Africa the Ordinary
Even less memetic than Africa’s polarity of fortune is its mundanity. Imagine what a headline that would make: Africa the Ordinary. What virality can be mined from the woman buying groceries, or the bored public servant at the customs office, or the surgeon doing his job? How to reconcile Africa the Exotic, Africa the Erotic, Africa the Exploited, Africa the Abundant—verdant and wild—with Africa at 9:00am on a Tuesday? Kids going to school, new shoes. In the villages, Herero women in kaleidoscopic dresses, cattle horns mounted to their headscarves, will sit under the broad shade of an umbrella thorn tree. In town, a man will reach into his briefcase for a brush to buff his leather loafers before stepping into the office. People will buy umbrellas and toothbrushes and baking powder and condoms. Teenagers will fall in love and find ways to be together. Others will get sick, some will die. Rain will come, and the men digging ditches will run to find cover. Old men and young men will play cards and complain; on a good day there is money for beer. There will be lots of waiting. You see, this is Africa in its patient familiarity, its benign cadence and minutiae.
For those eager to understand this version of Africa, D’kar makes an exceptional field site. Stay for a while, cut your teeth in waiting and watching. For how mercilessly this land and its people have been chewed up and forgotten by bureaucrats, prospectors, and agents of virtue across all stripes, it’s amazing how sturdy life’s rhythm remains. There is no money—so familiar it’s almost a greeting—but D’karians have learned to ride the ebbs and flows of grant money injections, welfare schemes, and capricious international attention. The Bushman has no dreams. Pithy aphorism offered by D’kar’s head nurse when I asked about community health risks. Hunger and racism coexist like a persistent low-grade headache, unpleasant but bearable. Howling and tearful begging don’t get you far; to emote at that level is exhausting and calorically exacting. Better to sit under a shade tree and get on with surviving. That stubborn resilience is something charitable giving campaigns always manage to forget.
Real Africa, Today
Today, D’kar is my Real Africa. Most D’karians—save Yohanes, who begins each conversation with, So…what is happening in Ukraine?—are primarily concerned with the business of subsistence. Often, that involves a 22 oz. Black Label, but who am I to judge? Neither tragic nor romantic, surviving does not necessarily imply suffering. It resists moralization. More often than not, it’s rather prosaic—waiting, washing, fixing, resting.
My weeks are punctuated by episodes of confusion, sadness, frustration, and doubt; but those beats show up as deviations from a baseline of pleasant mundanity. Washing, teaching, sweating, cooking, always walking somewhere, always grubby kid hands touching my face, braiding my hair. More heat, more sweating. Life’s soundtrack is the vowel sounds—A says “ah”, E says “eh”, I says “ee” like peeg, beeg, deeg—classroom jingles about question words and days of the week, shrieking, laughter, teacha loooook.
Sometimes, there is magic here. In the ethereal gloam of twilight, when the heat is bearable and the moon still hangs on, time feels patient and so gentle. It is a beautiful, as my kids like to say. Sunrises are still, quiet of human chatter. The sky’s enormity can be overwhelming. In the evenings, when everyone emerges from their private shade to walk, little girls pad alongside us. We stroll, slow and meandering, stopping to harvest yellow cgóm and xananam pods. It is sweet, teacha, taste. Palms open with the plumpest ripest crop. These are Basarwa—Bushman—snacks, they announce with pride. The Bushman has no dreams. Anger is corrosive. To softening the Bushman heart! Children have a way of neutralizing the most caustic poison. Venom is quick to dilute in the desert’s quietude.
In December, outrunning afternoon thunder, our band foraged wild honeysuckle. Little teachers guiding our fingers, we learned to split the bloom’s tiny calyx to find a single drop of sipping nectar. It is sweet, teacha, taste. Anger cannot breathe in that sweetness. Nothing is confusing here. In the humming dusk, we flit about the honeysuckle, supping nectar like butterflies. A murmuration of fairies, drinking in our good fortune. This is Real Africa, in its ease and softness. Sometimes, there is magic.
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Image: Ejakob Pixabay