I switched on my television today for the first time in weeks. Who knew that working in Gordon Ramsay’s celebrity kitchen would be harder than flailing in a vat of worms or showing your pecs on the beach while making fire with a Zulu calabash? Next week someone is bound to cut off part of their finger and serve it to a leading critic by mistake.
The other food-related reality show was by made by Sorious Samora a few years ago. The Sierra Leonean celebrity journalist went to Ethiopia to starve and show us How to Live like a Starving Ethiopian. The idea he had, of doing a really, really real reality show really, really made me want to punch him.
Sigh — there is always the temptation to up the ante — I did that in my last column on Robert Mugabe, afflicted by the same sense of impotence that might have overcome Samora in that CNN debacle.
In the romance novel business in America the new thing is beasts. There are these men and women who carry a beast in them: a tiger, a shape-shifter, a wild boar (werewolves and vampires are out, too soft), and they can ravage, snarl, snarl and slurp you like you are a horny truffle in Ramsay’s dining area.
Sorious has produced some interesting stuff, most notably Cry Freetown. But he (and we) are in danger of becoming circus performers for a bored and numb Western viewership looking for edge for edginess sake. So, to ”bring corruption to the attention of the world,” he ends up contorting himself into one gymnastic drama after another — it all becomes plastic after a while because it is no longer about the subject matter, but about like, wow, how will he top that?
In South Africa DStv and big budgets of television stations, magazines and newspapers have made us start eating our own jig-dancing entrails.
Our best artists are deeply devalued and they seek to make a living elsewhere, where they often have to perform their ”authenticity” for a living.
I got an enlightening email today, from Ntone Edjabe, who edits Chimurenga (www.chimurenga.co.za). A group of African writers and editors met last year to talk about starting an African writer’s fund and Ntone threw in his comments.
One of the things he said in his email was: ”—The problems of mobility on this continent are more evident on the page than in any song or film.”
In the past few years, over and over and over again, you feel the sense of frustration from so many African writers that they are not able to travel within their own continent. So, this is why we see so many novels by Africans set in London or Paris or Brooklyn or our home towns.
We refuse to spend money to share our common humanity.
You can’t build a continent you don’t know. You can’t read in my country anything about the ordinary lives of people who share your hopes, dreams, adversity and opportunity. So our ambitions become designed by Hell’s Kitchen or Survivor and we become fools about our own land, paying royalties to the people who bestialise us.
Our brains need to share the small space of other human beings to humanise them, for them to come to matter, and for us to begin to use a more valuable intelligence to make decisions and choices. It is in the kitchen small-talk of the woman in Eastern Congo that brings her into a shared space with us — and we have evolved to be moral people by using this intelligence and empathy.
To not have that, we become psychotic, as unfeeling as serial killers, and we make equals of dead bodies in Burma, Reverend Wright, Beirut, Iraq, Pop Idol eliminations and Oxfam-type pity-babies.
Over the past few years, Darfur has become a spectacle — a sort of bloody cyclone with cliché victims and cliché perpetrators.
A few months ago, John Ryle, a man with many connections in Sudan, sent me the work of a writer called John Oryem. He is a priest and writer based in Sudan. Google him, his work is on the internet.
No gimmicks, just genuinely realised characters who leapt off the page and came alive inside me.
I think every humanitarian organisation on the continent should travel with an African writer. To correct their inherent ”awareness-raising” distortions which destroy as much as they ”save”.
Every statistic I read about Darfur now matters, because Oryem has opened my mind and senses to the human people of Sudan doing what human people do first: live, eat, love, work, chat and think. In good and in insane times.
Kenya and Sudan share a border: I have finally paid a proper visit to the people who live next door to me.
I am 37.