The phrase “Africa Lite” drives me crazy
2019
I just arrived in Mozambique. It’s the first time I’ve been here but it’s been on my wish list of places to visit for years. A bit of background (based solely on academic readings, random facts one can look up on Wikipedia and stories I heard while living in South Africa). Mozambique has a diverse history. Located on the east coast of Africa along the Indian Ocean it has been influenced by traders since the 7th century. For centuries, the Swahili and later people from as far as India have traded and set up settlements here. In 1498, the Portuguese arrived and ruled it until its independence in 1975. Two years after independence it plunged into civil war which lasted until 1992. In that time, over one million were killed and one and a half million displaced. It has been relatively stable since then but still has problems with chronic poverty and propensity for natural disasters (the most recent being Cyclone Idai which devastated the northern part of the country). The GDP per capita is about 415 dollars per year.
This all said, I have seen very little of the country other than a three-hour tour around Maputo today. From what I saw it looks similar to many other cities I have been to, roads lined with shops and vendors, houses off the main road, small parks and monuments to past leaders and fallen citizens. It has a feel of a former Portuguese colony, with old Portuguese buildings in the center of town. It looks like a city, in Southern Africa, complete with the complex landscape geography one would expect from a place with shifting powers in charge over the centuries.
On the plane I sat next to an American family who were here on their first foreign service post. They had been here almost two years. As is common, the husband was working at the embassy and the wife had given up her career to be a trailing spouse, caring for their three children. The wife explained to me that this post was “Africa lite,’ a phrase I have heard a hundred times. Often it is used to explain South Africa, a place with a higher GDP and plenty of luxury, interspersed with the extreme poverty. I have also heard it to explain Namibia, Botswana, and eSwatini, all countries with clear middle-class areas and good overall infrastructure. When I tell people I was in Peace Corps South Africa, ate at a great restaurant in Kenya or stayed in a fantastic beach hotel in Namibia, “Africa lite’ is a common refrain. This phrase always bugged me, but for personal reasons. Peace Corps South Africa didn’t feel ‘lite’ at all. Whenever someone said ‘Africa lite’ to me it was like they were saying I had it easy in South Africa and it could have been so much harder. I am not going to go into here all the challenges of Peace Corps South Africa in the late 1990s, but confronting racism, violence, sexual harassment and extreme poverty were daily occurrences. Struggles ranged from the annoying to life threatening. At the same time, often at the same moment, the ‘Africaness’ was what got me through. It was a thing of beauty and never felt watered down just because if I wanted to I could get to Pretoria (about five to seven hours away by public transport) and be at the mall or at a movie theatre that weekend. The complexity of the place is what made it what it was. A land with deep traditions that had been either erased, hidden or changed due to colonialism.
So today when this woman said to me that this post was ‘Africa Lite’ it hit a nerve but then I realized that what bugs me isn’t that my experience is often called that, but the idea that places in Africa that are ‘nice’ or ‘easy’ are somehow considered less African; that Africa needs to be ‘dirty,’ ‘chaotic,’ or ‘poor,’ to be real. It is racist at its core. The fanciest hotel I ever stayed at was in Uganda. The best meal I ever had (well, that was in Paris) but the second-best meal I ever had was in South Africa. The nicest malls I have gone to have been in Kenya and South Africa. The best fish and chips was in Namibia. Are these ‘less African’ because they are nice? No. I can’t imagine someone saying some place is “America lite” (what would that even mean? Fewer guns and cheaper health care?). I’ve been in some pretty crappy places in America and some pretty crappy places in Africa. I’ve been in some really amazing parts of America and some really amazing parts of Africa. “Africa lite’ says you expect crap and are surprised when it is less crappy. There is no Africa lite- there is just Africa in all its diverse glory. Mozambique has had a challenging history and has a challenging present yet I fully expect to see rich and poor, good and bad, great infrastructure and poor infrastructure, safe and not safe- you know, Africa.
