What do you do as a South African tourist industry when the promised surge in visitors after the World Cup fails to materialize? You move your aim, target the local ‘upcoming individuals, independent couples and families’, draw up an ‘energetic, vibey and pacey’ campaign, get some of those upcoming individuals on board — and you turn the local into a daft trope.
The BLK JKS, for example, take a left turn where the hitch-hiker’s carton says ‘local’, meeting up with ‘the original men: the San’, shaking hands ‘with their ancient selves’. South Africans are urged to get out of their ‘comfort zone’, ‘get off the map, get out of the suburbs, keep moving’, because ‘sometimes you’ve got to loose your way, to find yourself again’:
Artist Mary Sibande undertakes a ‘spiritual journey to Limpopo and Mpumalanga’, pulling over at ‘the cultural landscape’ of Mapungubwe, the cycad forest of ‘the other-worldly’ Ga-Modjadji and meets up with Esther Mahlangu, ‘the icon in African traditional art’:
And DJ Black Coffee flies low over KwaZulu-Natal’s Drakensberg Mountains:
You no longer need to be white to feel like a tourist in the country.
…and the van has the stereotypical american indian chief a la spur…perfect.
still love the music, though.
The ‘shaking hands with their ancient selves bit instantly reminded me of this remark of Achebe. Sometimes I am amazed at the extent some South African have internalized the racist gibberish. These guys are sincerely unaware
“Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully “at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks.” But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.”
Really, they all should read Njabulo Ndebele’s beautifully rendered essay on the DIS-comfort of being a black traveller in his own country, circa 1998. Still applies.