Imagining Africa…
by Jenny Doubt
after about sixteen months, six countries, dozens of bent ears, a few hundred coffees and about a thousand pieces of paper, napkins (you gotta take whatever you can get when inspiration strikes), backs-of-paper-menus and scratches of notebooks detailing just as many concepts, conversations, ideas and executions between us, we finally sent out our first call for submissions to the inaugural edition of on:africa. and felt pretty proud.
and then we waited for our first response…
it was less than an hour later that an old friend of mine, now a writer living in new york, relieved the anticipation. ‘jenny!’, she announced, ‘are you crazy?! I don’t know anything about Africa!’ (I paraphrase, but trust that twenty years of knowing somebody allows me to do so with pretty spot-on accuracy.) a jewish dancer-come-writer who grew up in montreal and now lives in harlem: is she allowed to know any thing about africa?
I visited Africa (specifically South Africa, a long-standing literary, life and then research area for me, along with Kenya, which dug its heels into me early in life, in the form of a beloved neighbor) for many years in my imagination before I watched the sun bleed over the sky leaving Dubai and the earth turn red over Zimbabwe; before I actually set foot in Cape Town, in Dar, in Arusha or Nairobi; walked with a land snail the size of my two hands as morning broke over a broken bus in Haubi, stared out of airy, long, sun-stretched bus journies looking for giraffes over the bumpy road to Lamu, stood in the judgemental and tourist-heavy heat to board the boat to Zanzibar, inched over, body-by-body, in a dala-dala, or circled above KwaZulu-Natal’s green terraced mountains before landing on a wing, a prayer and a very nauseous stomach in Pietermaritzburg.
Given a long history of colonialism and orientalism, of domination, exploitation, subjugation and the commandeering of history, along with the postcolonial discourses, rhetorical polemics, political activisms and debates that have accompanied them, it is hard to say anything about Africa without keeping all those who have spoken for Africa (in and out of turn) in mind. and that’s a lot of people. but when I sat down to reply to our very first response to on:africa, my impulse was to encourage. because in a way, there is not enough written, snapped or recorded about Africa that challenges and contests as well as innovates and celebrates from the ground: whether that ground be a road with tarmac in New York, the shaky ground of a camera in Harare, the new birth of a consultancy in Nairobi, the first page of a new Caine-prize story, third chapter of a thesis or inroad to a memory.
and that’s where you all come in.
