It was a cute skirt, pleated, with black and white stripes. I saw it at Woolworths when I moved to Pretoria in 2001. I toyed with the idea of buying it but didn’t. Late last year I saw it advertised as the latest fashion at Woolworths in Lusaka.
My Zambian friends often gripe about ketchup and near-expiration film dumped on them by South African retailers.
Among the other expired products that South Africa proudly dumps beyond its borders are its older white executives, past their shelf life owing to black empowerment at home. On flights to East and Central Africa I sit next to these ageing road warriors sent on a civilising mission: bring fast food and panties hygienically sold in plastic bags to the rest of Africa.
And as the route to market for the fast food and hygienically sealed panties, South Africa’s best known cultural product — the shopping mall — is popping up from Luanda to Kampala.
There are some wonderful things about this export. Returning to Lusaka from the dusty copper belt, or after a few days living with Swahili plumbing, the familiar, clean potpourri smell in the malls’ washrooms feels like Angel parfum.
By far the most lekker local way to go continental is South African Airways: easy booking, fast check-in, decent maintenance and always that nice smell in the toilet. I’ve had my share of trips with the Airlines from Hell, such as TAAG, Air Cameroon, Air Burkina and Madagascar Airlines, rightly known as Mad Air.
But South Africa’s exported mall culture has a downside. Besides their homogenising effect, the mega-chains often put the mom-and-pop shops and takeaways out of business because they can’t compete with the giants. Rentals near the new malls skyrocket.
In central Luanda the old Kinaxixe market has been boarded up to make way for a shopping mall. Gone are the fresh produce stalls and the food vendors, those resilient Angolan women full of amazing stories of war, displacement and survival. ”Everybody who was poor was evicted except a handful of shops that can take the new owners to court,” says my friend Filomena. A more creative solution would be to integrate the old market into the new complex.
Why can’t malls have a local flavour? Architects could give a style nod to the graceful design of Swahili public space in East Africa or the stunning Sahelian mud architecture of West Africa. Must all pubs have a vaguely Irish-cum-Boksburg air about them?
My concern is for cultural diversity, about the personality of cities and the fabric of daily life, about the loss of uniqueness and not about preserving places as colourful, unchanged tourist destinations.
Africa’s varied urban life will be less rich if global franchises plaster over national character, if a street in Blantyre looks like a street in Bloemfontein.
Soon we will have identical shopping malls everywhere in Africa — it will be a continental mush, from Cape to Cairo.
Every time I land somewhere in East Africa I have to remind myself to switch on my human detectors. Here shopping involves human contact beyond the perfunctory ”good morning” at the Pick ‘n Pay tills. It will be an exchange of more than money for bottled water. You look each other in the eyes, you chat and you take your time.
Nothing could be more different than the drive to Johannesburg or Entebbe airports. The first rushes past a sterile landscape of high walls that hide homes and factories. The other weaves its way through villages where every aspect of family life and work is on exhibit: the welders, bakers, upholsterers, tailors, car mechanics and hairdressers, the kids, the goats and the boda-boda motorcycle taxis, each scene tells so many stories.
On the other hand, look at the advantages of continental mush: if you regret not buying a skirt in Pretoria you will find it five years later as the latest fashion in Bunia. Fly South African Airways, though, and not Air Bunia.