The #BullshitFiles: KLM offers flights to ‘the Dark Continent’
We’re not making this up. It turns out Royal Dutch flagship carrier’s KLM decision to hire the Dutch East India Company as its PR firm was a bad plan. According to their website, KLM will fly you to ‘the Dark Continent’ (their original inverted commas) to visit Lusaka, Zambia, a city of two million that they’re still selling as the “undiscovered, unspoiled Africa”, or Nairobi, Kenya to get “a real sense of Africa” (using a detail of the stock photo above), etc:
Dodgy advertisement agency? Most definitely.
Asked about it via Twitter…
RT @SRoosblad @KLM suffers from #colonialmentality by calling #Africa 'The Dark Continent' http://t.co/wPgx0IyYaH
— AFRICA IS A COUNTRY (@AfricasaCountry) October 18, 2013
…KLM responded:
…and then changed it to this:
Yeh, “unspoiled” Zambia: after colonialism, independence, one-party rule, and an economy crippled by Structural Adjustment.
We’re glad KLM have changed their description of Africa as “the dark continent”. They told us they didn’t want people to misinterpret it. Apparently we misinterpreted it as racist Bullshit.
