Turning on the evening news as I sat down to dinner five weeks ago, I was met by the shocking images of a mass shooting at Virginia Tech university.
After registering what I was seeing, I was hit by a double shock — first, the obvious magnitude and horror of the tragedy. And second, the fact that here in South Africa I was six time zones and an ocean away from my home in Boston, yet an American shooting was headlining the 30-minute nightly news.
Chalk it up to naivety, perhaps, but when I left my university bubble at Boston College in the United States to spend a semester studying here at the University of Cape Town, I was expecting a break from Oprah, apple pie and Wal-Mart. As American study-abroad clichés go, it was my time to discover the rest of the world.
But now that I’m here, all I see, hear and eat is tinged with red, white and blue.
I live closer to a KFC in South Africa than I do at home, and walk by a Ford car dealership on my way to campus every day. My lunch today included a smear of Skippy peanut butter and a handful of Pringles, washed down with an ice-cold Coke. A recent study found that it is 16 times cheaper to syndicate an American television show on South African television than to produce a homegrown programme, which explains why CSI and The Amazing Race occupy the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s prime-time schedule.
Having now spent more than three months abroad, I still find the extent of the American footprint in South Africa — and elsewhere, for that matter — to be astonishing. American military and political actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere get the most headlines, but in South Africa, bombs and policy pale to the influence exerted by the well-oiled American cultural and commercial machines.
A recent conversation with a South African highlights the issue well. He was interested in the possibility of a black president — an American black president, that is — and wanted my thoughts on Barack Obama’s chances in the 2008 US presidential campaign. Curious, I asked who he thought might replace President Thabo Mbeki in South Africa’s own presidential election.
He couldn’t even name a contender.
Perhaps that can be chalked up to the obscenely early start to the US presidential race — the weekly 12-page New York Times insert in the Sunday Times keeps me up to date on all things American, of course. But it also seems to hint at the immense sphere of American cultural influence that this American vastly underestimated. That same South African was, for instance, eager to engage in that most heated of South African debates: the quality of American Leonardo DiCaprio’s South African accent in the Hollywood flick Blood Diamond.
Leftists may deride this as cultural hegemony; conservative Americans might laud it as a means of maintaining the US’s global influence. But most Americans are probably just comforted to hear Beyoncé and the Beach Boys in every store or taxi we enter.
Is there a problem here? Should Americans be concerned that our culture often seems to suffocate others? But what if most, though certainly not all, South Africans seem to enjoy what our culture has to offer?
I cannot answer for South Africans, but I find these circumstances simultaneously soothing and disconcerting: soothing because I do find a certain familiar comfort that comes with driving by the golden arches of McDonald’s, and disconcerting because I see the US on the favourable end of a potentially dangerous, international imbalance.
Indeed, I find myself morbidly wondering: If 33 South Africans were killed at the University of Cape Town — God forbid — would it lead the news back home on CNN? If the US is serious about being a member of the global, human community, I would hope so. But my gut tells me it would not top the broadcast.
I came abroad to experience something new — a new place, a new culture, a new world. And though South Africa has given me so many incredible experiences, it is often all too easy to fall back into enjoying all things American.
Which is why tonight, I’ll be at the cinema enjoying Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage or Spider-Man. For better or for worse.