Comments on: ‘Should I go on holiday in Sudan?’

By: Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:45:00 +0000

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

By: Sean Jacobs

Sean Jacobs — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:14:00 +0000

Oh Reggie: thanks for the compliment.

By: Sean Jacobs

Sean Jacobs — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:13:00 +0000

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.

By: Reggie

Reggie — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:39:00 +0000

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 !