The UK Guardian (of all people) gives some advice to its readers:
‘Sudan suffers from rather bad press, tourism-wise. All we hear is civil war; all we see is thornbushes and desert… just because some bits of the largest country in Africa are scary doesn’t mean that all of it is… Just be careful where, and try not to offend local sensibilities – standard holiday advice, really.’
No comment.
The newspaper’s reporter may just as well suggest to readers: just act like you don’t see the dead bodies.
Full story here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Staying in Joberg, you often get the same concerns from tourists. The difficult question is how we deal with the tension between the domestic realities on the one hand and the crude stereotypes of (South) Africa on the other hand. The key is to keep this delicate balance or to cut it deeper in terms of the deepere underlying ideology behind these type is newspaper articles.
Excellent blog !
Ja, but we’re talking about 2 different contexts here. Perhaps a more approrpiate comparison is apartheid South Africa, i.e. the government is wilfully oppressing (the levels of violence differ of course) a part of its citizenry (and in the case of apartheid SA, black people were not full citizens). My overwhelming sense when I read the original piece in the Guardian was that I bet if you go back you’d find similar kinds of relativising pieces in the Brit press of that time. I.e. it okay down there. so visitors then would have been told: check out Su City (!) its in an “independent state” inside SA, go to Cape Town’s clean (emptied of course of the bulk of the population who can’t go there by law) etc.
Oh Reggie: thanks for the compliment.
Speaking of travel (and, as Ibn Battuta, travel is what I speak of), there’s this:
“It was our response to demand as there is such a great interest in Africa right now.”
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/travel/09family.html