"When Western tourists talk about Africa somehow it seems to me that what they really mean is East and Southern Africa, places like Namibia and Kenya and Botswana and parts of Uganda where you will find safaris and zebras and elephants and lakes in abundance.[...] Nigeria is one country where foreigners come to make money, not fritter it away on guided tours and lakeside resorts. In the Congo they will be aid workers and diamond-seeking businessmen and gorilla savers; ditto the Sudan (minus the gorilla-savers and businessmen). In Liberia and Sierra Leone they will be IMF and World Bank officials. In Guinea Bissau they will mostly be cocaine merchants and US drug enforcement agents."
Dabei geht es aber nicht nur um die Lieblingsziele der Touristen, sondern auch um Rollenzuschreibungen, darum, wie die Vergangenheit die Zukunft beeinflusst und wie es der Welt ohne Afrika ergehen würde:
Den ganzen Artikel gibt's hier. Mehr zum Autor Tolu Ongunlesi auf seinem Blog."If Africa didn’t exist, the world – the West, actually – would have had to invent it. If they failed, then China would have succeeded. Indeed the anthropologist and Africa specialist John Ryle wrote, in his review of Richard Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, in the London Guardian: “In an important sense, “Africa” is a western invention. Despite attempts by visionaries to promote unity among the states that inherited dominion from Europe's retreating empires, African politicians have never paid anything more than lip-service to the pan-African ideal.”But we could even take that concept of invention to the extreme; beyond the invention of African "unity" to the invention of Africa itself."
