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African stereotypes we’re tired of hearing

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On a recent Friday night, I was watching He’s Just Not That Into You. It’s a sweet love story of a girl chasing love and taking advice from a boy she was falling for, while, unknown to them both, he felt the same about her. Of course they end up together at the end, Hollywood-style.

In one of the early scenes, groups of friends from different parts of the world take turns comforting each other as they share their relationship troubles. When an African girl complained about her boyfriend not being in touch, her friend’s response was: “Maybe he forgot your hut number.” Another quickly added: “Or he got eaten by a lion.”

I found it very offensive that in 2009, Africa was still being portrayed in such a manner. How many times are these ‘jokes’ at our expense going to be told? But here we are in 2014, and Africa is still being portrayed in that manner. It led me to thinking about the stereotypes that follow us around in our daily lives, not just on-screen. I asked my friends – from Cape Verde to Somalia, from Cape Town to Tunis and Nigeria – about the stereotypes they most often encountered,  whether it was about religion, culture, tribe or country. Unsurprisingly, many of the responses were similar.

  • Nigerians will juju you.
  • Tunisians are terrorists.
  • Arabs are not Africans.
  • Igbo people love money.
  • A Senegalese person’s complexion is several shades darker than the complexion of an average sub-Saharan African.
  • All Kenyans are fast runners.
  • Hausa people don’t speak good English
  • Africans are poor.
  • Nigerians are scammers and must not be trusted.
  • Muslims are terrorists.
  • All Africans are black.
  • All South Africans have Aids.
  • Yoruba girls are ugly.
  • Nigerians are all thieves.
  • Nigerians are all drug dealers.
  • Nigerians are obnoxious.
  • “Do you speak African?”
  • “Do you people live with lions?”
  • “Do you know Mugabe?”
  • All Hausa people are stinking rich or terribly poor.
  • Africa, in general, is a dangerous place.
  • “Do you live on trees?”
  • “Do you own cars?”
  • All Africans are violent and/or terrorists.
  • Light-skinned and attractive Africans are more successful.
  • “Do you have internet in Africa?”
  • Africa is a homogenous country.
  • Africans are less intellectually gifted than other people.
  • You get more opportunities because you are African, especially with college applications.
  • Egyptians go to school on camels.
  • Rwandans kill themselves (the genocide of 1994).
  • East Africans have large foreheads.
  • Zulu people are hot-tempered.
  • The South Sudanese all have a delinquent and miscreant mindset.
  • All Egyptians are Muslims.
  • “Do you live in a pyramid?”
  • Sub-Saharan Africans cannot have long hair – it just doesn’t grow.
  • Nigerians are kidnappers.
  • Nigerians will ‘hook’ you to drugs.
  • Xhosa women are all gold-diggers.
  • People from the Maasai tribe eat blood.
  • Africans speak “Lion-King” language.
  • Africans hate white people.
  • Africans do not wear clothes.
  • All African countries are corrupt.

I’m sure there are countless others we can add to the list. If, during colonialism, Europeans thought Africans did not wear clothes and spoke “Lion-King” language, I could perhaps forgive that. But I cannot accept the ignorance of people of my generation. Instead of laughing it off – as we are expected to – we should call them out on it.

Khadija Sanusi is a first-year student at the African Leadership Academy.

Sex in African literature: More, please

jalada

Every once in a while, stories come along that surprise critics and readers who claim to know African literature. Jalada’s recent compilation about sex strikes me as that kind of work.

Jalada Africa is a literary collective committed to reshaping the way writing is published and circulated within the continent.

Their recent collection titled Sext Me Poems and Stories proves their open and risk-taking approach to literary projects. I spent the last few days browsing through the collection, floored by how delightfully raw and honest most of the pieces are.

The project is also a small but bold step towards filling a gaping hole in African literary culture. To the annoyance of readers like myself, African authors are not always keen on what their characters do in the bedroom. Under pressure to write about things of world historical importance like colonialism and poverty, African writers have always made short shrift of sex. Sex is perceived as indulgent.

But a projects such as Jalada’s Sext Me Poems and Stories tells us why sex is not superfluous in narrative.

Sex is the true story of the body told from a place of pleasure, pain, and radical uncertainty. Sex is about putting the body in a place where traditional ideas about gender, shame, violence, and loss are interrogated.

Besides, this collection is not just about sex. It’s about how Africans do sex.

Scrolling through the collection is like walking through a sex-toy shop, dazed by the sheer inventiveness put into assembling a world built on pushing the limits of sexual pleasure.

Akati Khasiani’s Coming Down and Aisha Ali’s The First Time are vignettes sketching out a scene of female masturbation. Both stories put the female body up on display, but as something capable of generating the most profound experience of pleasure, entirely on its own.

The language in both pieces is as raw as it is lyrical. Sex in these two stories is not about conquest or consuming bodies but about exploration and discovery. Ali’s character speaks of the vagina as “that small wet place” that the “fingers” go “searching, exploring, looking for answers.” Pretty intense and exciting stuff.

The first of two parts closes off with Orem Ochiel’s Miss Fucking You. Odd, but the title does not prepare you for the obscene goodness of the story. It’s framed as a man asking a woman, pleading more like, to have another go with him. To make his case, he recounts all the impassioned and kinky sexual encounters they’ve had without sparing the dirty details. Every other word in the story is “fuck” or “fucking.” Don’t click on the story while you’re in church!

The Oink in Doinker by Tuelo Gabonewe is a comical tale about a “half-widow,” Haroldette, who encounters a penis cut off from its owner.  She takes it in, bathes its, feeds it, and names it Phineas McPhallus. Unlike many of the other stories in the collection, this one is not strictly an erotica. It is something you’d imagine Gogol or Kafka would write. In fact, I couldn’t help noting the striking resemblance between Gabonewe’s story and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Runaway Fingers.

Sext Me by Aleya and Dorothy Kigen’s Inbox (1) are fun at the level of form. Aleya’s piece is entirely a dialogue that takes place via text messaging. A man and a woman set the stage for their sexual encounter by expressing what they imagine the encounter would be like – a textual foreplay as it were. People complain that it’s hard to convey complex emotional states via emails. Not so for Kigen’s character who details her illicit sexual experiences in an email message.

Sext Me Poems and Stories is titillating storytelling. Read the collection here.

Brittle Paper is an African literary blog featuring book reviews, news, interviews, original work and in-depth coverage of the African literary scene. It is curated by Ainehi Edoro and was recently named a ‘go-to book blog’ by Publisher’s Weekly. 

Poor families move in with the dead in Kinshasa cemetery

In a Congolese cemetery overrun with weeds and rubbish strewn among the graves and banana trees, the living have moved in with the dead – some of them years ago.

For want of money and space, families have built houses out of earth, brick or sheet metal alongside tombs – some of prominent figures like the father of the current first lady – in the Kinsuka cemetery in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital.

As they attempt to lead normal lives in this unlikely setting, the cemetery dwellers, who number at least several hundred, are not only living on the land illegally but also face dangerous sanitary conditions.

“You’re afraid you’re going to dig up a bone,” said 19-year-old Emile as he worked on the foundation for his older brother’s new house just steps away from a well-tended grave.

Should he, or the others, degrade a tombstone they face up to six months in prison, while living without a proper land title could mean a year in jail under the country’s penal code.

A woman and a child stand next to a pit at the Kinsuka cemetery on June 10 2014. (Pic: AFP)
A woman and a child stand next to a pit at the Kinsuka cemetery on June 10 2014. (Pic: AFP)

Neighbour Bibiche (23) has lived in the cemetery for two years but says it is still an unsettling experience.

“You feel afraid sleeping amidst the graves, but we had no home,” she said. “The cemetery isn’t good, we have no electricity.”

Yet other cemetery residents say they not only have electricity but pay a “bill” to the national power company, SNEL.

Poverty
Despite its vast mineral wealth, two-thirds of the DR Congo’s 68 million people are mired in poverty, exacerbated by back-to-back wars that ravaged the country from 1996 to 2003 and left a complex web of rebel groups still terrorising the eastern provinces.

Finding housing is a constant struggle for many, and large numbers of civilians – and even police and soldiers – have taken to the country’s cemeteries to find a place to call home.

But life among the gravestones is no free ride, explained Therese, a five-year resident of Kinsuka cemetery. The 57-year-old widow paid a local chief to buy four plots of land with her children’s help.

“They cost between $2 500 to $4 000 each,” said Therese, who like all the cemetery residents only gave her first name for fear of reprisal.

Inside her two-room house, the bedroom has a mosquito net but no bed.

“In November, the police came to destroy the houses. They took my things,” she said.

“I had to rebuild my house, but I don’t have the courage to rebuild on my other plots that I wanted to rent out.”

Yet scenes typical of village life can still be found in Kinsuka. The dirt paths are lined with wooden stalls selling food and basic supplies, and children in traditional blue and white kits play football at a Protestant school built inside the graveyard three years ago.

“Today it has about 150 students. Parents pay 78 000 Congolese francs per year, against $300 to $400 dollars elsewhere,” said the school’s director.

In some parts of cemetery the construction of homes has made it harder to locate remaining burial plots. The graveyard was founded in 1978 and is the final resting place of several well-known figures, such as engineer Sita Barnabe Kinsumbu, the father of the DRC’s first lady Olive Lembe Kabila, according to a local burial tax collector.

Public health hazard
Government officials say the homes in Kinsuka and other cemeteries across the country constitute a public health hazard, noting that it takes as long as 50 years after a site’s last burial to ensure the ground is fully decontaminated.

“Sometimes people find a source of water but when you sniff it, it smells like a corpse,” said Dr Benjamin Mavard Kwengani, director of hygiene at Kinshasa’s health ministry.

“We haven’t done a study, but there have been abnormal cases in the (cemetery) communities – diarrhoea and abnormalities that we can’t explain,” he said.

According to Pius Ngoie, an advisor to the urban planning ministry, cemetery villages only continue to exist due to negligence and corruption within the civil service.

“Some of the state’s civil servants … are completely irresponsible” and “fraudulently” sell tracts of land in the cemetery, he said.

The cemetery dwellers are under no illusions that their homes could be razed at any moment.

“One day, a [state] tractor is going to come and knock down the houses and they will lose everything,” said Peter, whose father and grandfather are buried in Kinsuka.

His words turned out to be prophetic. Just a few days later, soldiers arrived to destroy some of the homes built on the remains of this final resting place.

Habibou Bangré for AFP

Fifa probes blackface fan photos at World Cup

Fifa is investigating a possible racial discrimination case after photographs circulated of fans with blackface makeup at Germany’s match against Ghana.

Images posted on social media networks showed two men, appearing to be Germany fans, with blackened faces in the Fortaleza stadium on Saturday.

A spectator at the Germany-Ghana World Cup match on June 21. (Pic: AFP)
A spectator at the Germany-Ghana World Cup match on June 21. (Pic: Reuters)

Fifa said on Sunday that its disciplinary committee is considering opening a case. It will also consider a report by the Fifa match commissioner, Eggert Magnusson of Iceland.

“We do not respect any discriminatory messages,” spokesperson Delia Fischer said.

Fifa holds national football federations responsible for their fans’ behavior inside stadiums.

In a second incident, a man ran onto the pitch in the second half of the 2-2 draw.

The shirtless fan had an email address and telephone number written on his back. He was ushered away by Ghana midfielder Sulley Muntari before being detained by stewards.

Brazil’s organising committee spokesperson Saint-Clair Milesi said the man was reportedly from Poland.

“He came running, charged and jumped over the stewards,” Milesi said. “Such behavior is totally unacceptable. He was taken to the local authorities for the proper measures.” – Sapa-AP

Beauty and the weave

(Pic: Flickr / Viqi French)
(Pic: Flickr / Viqi French)

It is Wednesday afternoon in Gaborone and I am having a bad hair day. I head into town to see my hairdresser for my monthly haircut. I have deliberately set my appointment for midweek to avoid the mayhem that happens on weekends in the hair salon. As I stride in, behold, four beautiful ladies ALL getting their weaves on. There was a rather colourful assortment of hair pieces ranging from black Brazilians to blond fringes. It suddenly dawns on me that the legend of the weave ladies might be true after all: they prefer visiting the salon smack in the middle of the week when everyone else is at work. Reason? Their obsession with the weave has cost them their hairlines and so they do not want anyone but their hairdressers to witness the calamity that has hit their pretty heads.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery.  We live in the “hair piece” era and in Botswana many young women do not grow their hair naturally anymore, but instead go out of their way to wear hair that belongs to Brazilians, Peruvians, Malaysians, Mongolians and many other nationalities on their heads. What happened to good old dreadlocks, the afro or even plain straightened hair which can be braided every now and then? Why do we want to imitate members of other races when the African race is so beautiful? Are we losing our identities to the weave craze? Have we been corrupted into conforming to mainstream standards of beauty and femininity, believing that we can’t be beautiful if we wear natural hair? Fake it til’ you make it is the motto.

Being a member of #TeamNatural, chances of me donning a weave are slim to none. I will admit that I did try it out once, out of curiosity. And it is suffice to say my affair with the hair piece ended a week later. I just couldn’t stand the itching and the constant head-patting. It felt like dozens of mosquitoes had purchased real estate on my scalp! And the inability to scratch made it even worse. So I decided to leave it to other ladies, concluding that experience has taught them to handle the discomfort better.

I have no problem with the weave; I just have a problem with natural hair being vilified. Are we going to pass down negative perceptions of black hair to generations after us so they become ingrained in our children’s mentality to the point where they will be accepted as simple truths?

For many black women, the weave is probably the next best thing after high heels. In many parts of Botswana, especially the urban areas, the weave is not just a trend, it’s a lifestyle. It looks really good and boosts a girl’s confidence if sewn on right, making her look and feel like an African queen. The problem is the hair looks so fake it could melt under the merciless Botswana sun.

From itchy scalps and patchy hair loss, these inventions not only cause premature balding but they cost big bucks. The men say they hate it – for two reasons: 1) they want to be able to run their fingers through a woman’s hair without their hand being smacked and 2) 80% of the time they have to pay for it.

I asked one of my friends who has embraced the weave craze about her choice. She said the appeal of it lies in how it makes her feel – sexy, stylish, expensive. “You don’t look basic. And going to the salon often to get it done is one of the few ways of pampering myself, just like getting my nails done or having a massage,” she explained.

Most races – Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanics etc. –  have no problem wearing their hair as is, but in black culture it’s looked upon as subversive. That’s not to say that other races don’t change or play around with their hair (white women wear weaves and call them extensions). However, it becomes concerning when we measure self-worth by what kind of hair we wear – or don’t wear.

Maybe one day, we African women will evolve to a level where we are proud of dark skin and nappy hair; to a level where society deems wearing natural hair as a progressive statement for everyone – not just for poets or the “artsy” or “afrocentric” types. Maybe one day our hair in its natural state will be a symbol of African pride.

Rorisang Mogojwe is a features writer in Botswana.