London Charm and the Colonial Legacy

I landed in London, over a week ago now, and felt an irrepressible grin take hold of my face. The reality of my latest journey having truly begun, after months of planning (nearly a full year since I began my application for this program), finally sank in as I walked through Heathrow. But that was only part of my excitement: I was in London.

I would never have expected to be so excited about visiting this city, but I guess over the last several years of reading the BBC, watching British tv shows, becoming increasingly familiar with the culture, and meeting many wonderful people who had claimed the city as home at one point or another, I’d worked up a subconscious curiosity about it. The U.K. is easily the country I know most about of those I’ve never visited. Without my realizing it, it’s been in the background of my mind as a sort of friendly “Other”, a reflection of my own country—or some sort of parallel universe. London and New York, the U.K. and the U.S. occupy similar spaces for most of the world, and yet there’s a distinct identity (primarily reinforced by them). Comparisons between the two places abound.

As I navigated my way to meet up with a friend, I walked into a place that had only existed in my mind. I paid for my ticket with POUNDS! I was on THE UNDERGROUND! It was charming and small! I emerged from the station and all of the buildings around me were stunning and I was in awe. Give me a few years in this place, I thought. Let me repeat: I had zero expectation of feeling this way. But I recognized my behavior. It was the same as someone from another country visiting the U.S. for the first time and seeing the iconic NYC sites and recognizing that, yes, this was the place in the movies and books and news. There’s something about being, in the flesh, in places that permeate our culture and our imaginations for years before we visit in person.

I was thinking about how the U.S. holds that position for many people around the world, and how it’s our cultural hegemony that engenders such widespread curiosity and desire to come to the U.S., not just hopes for prosperity (even if this is commonly expressed). On the other hand, I was also thinking about how different such a trip would be for someone coming from a developing country or the Global South. In my case, patriotic narratives and America’s global stature easily counterbalance British critiques of the U.S., but many others would have been told implicitly or explicitly that this other, more powerful country and culture was superior to theirs. The internet and other new technologies both challenge and reinforce this dynamic.

On that note, I thought of this beautiful letter on decolonial aesthesis from a Singaporean woman to her younger self about her experiences studying at Cambridge University. How many people would feel, in the face of Britain’s imposing cultural stature, as she did: “There’s not much culture [where I’m from]… There’s not much nature”? She writes, “[Colonialism] happens these days not by the strength of arms or the power of states, but by the captivation of the eyes, the training of the taste, by unwritten rules of thumb – that we all learn everywhere, without even knowing it.”

A recent map showing all the countries Britain has invaded reveals the global spread of its potential cultural influence. Source.

My entire time in London, I didn’t think for a moment about the fact that Botswana had been a colony of the U.K. That even if Botswana wasn’t itself Britain’s most lucrative colony, it was still part of a structure that gave the country wealth and power in the international arena, that had helped install British culture as a dominant aesthetic. Botswana had made London lovely, and I didn’t even notice it until I had landed in Gaborone.

When I left Ghana last year, I had a layover in Amsterdam, where I was also charmed by the beauty of a European city. I stopped into the Rijksmuseum and saw a portrait of a couple that had been based in Elmina, Ghana. The placard announced that they’d worked for the Dutch West India Company, which traded in gold and slaves from Ghana for nearly 300 years before the British took over. I remember the jolt of connecting the two sides of the same story, having seen the slave forts and trading posts owned by the Dutch in both Ghana and Benin. A recent AIAC post on Dutch denial/ignorance of their historical slavery practices notes that less than half of Dutch history textbooks in a recent study so much as mentioned slavery, and even in those, the emphasis was on hardships the Dutch colonists suffered, rather than those of the slaves. Walking through that museum less than a day after leaving Ghanaian soil, I was taken aback by the normalization of this terrible history and the narrow-minded focus on what the Dutch got out of this trade, the nostalgic pride in the Dutch empire at its peak. Ghanaians certainly hadn’t forgotten the price of that empire.

In Gaborone, I stood on my new balcony and looked out at the dusty scrub in the afternoon sun and crisp, dry air, wondering at the difference in my reaction to arriving here. I was excited, exhilarated and absurdly happy, to be sure, but the truth of it was I just didn’t know Botswana and its cultural references as I did the U.K., and that’s a sad fact. Normally the lure of exploring the unknown is a huge part of the joy of travel, but I’d sampled another style of encountering a foreign place the previous day and I couldn’t help but feel I was missing out. What would it have been like to feel in Gaborone that same sense of arrival in a mythical place?

Botswana challenges popular notions of “Africa” – including my own, based on previous travels. (This is not terribly surprising.) The airport lacked that smell of heat and fruit and human bodies that has greeted me in Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana. Sometimes I think I’m in Arizona. The city, like the rest of the country, is sparsely populated and the lack of traffic, the lack of bustle, the relative lack of streetside vendors throws me off a little. The clinic is, as my housemate said, “nicer than any clinic [she’s] seen in the U.S.” and the teens I work with would fit in at your typical American middle school. I live in a wealthy area, and have only been here a week, so my perception is drastically limited, but I like that I’m forced to re-evaluate perceptions of the continent I didn’t quite realize (still) I had.

I’ll end with a quotation from that letter preparing the Singaporean girl for life in a new culture.

Modernity is someone saying to you: look, we have made you better. And you believing it.

But the question is not how to retreat or how to prune yourself back to some pristine, native state. In fact, it is the opposite: how to recognize the narrowness of this so-called broadened mind – to realize that Europe is not the universe – and to take your sensing and knowing beyond those dominant ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful. To move towards a pluri-verse that gives dignity to both the girl in the pajamas and the one in the little black dress – and yet to do so in a way that, unlike Western liberalism, is not naïve about either the ‘equality’ of the two, or about how we got from the one to the other.

I loved London, truly, but I don't want to lose sight of its context. And I look forward to wondering at all that makes Botswana magnificent.

 

Setting out on a new adventure

Welcome back to the latest incarnation of my blog, which I hope will be more active than the last. I write this from my new apartment in Gaborone, Botswana, where I will be living and working for the next year. Before we dive into Gaborone and my plans for the coming year, though, let me back up and explain why I’m here.

During my year in Ghana working with students trying to go to college in the U.S., I had a chance to finally dip my toes into something approaching “development work” in Africa—just what I always wanted. Over the course of the year, I had my share of disillusionment with the project (though I also came to see why the organization had chosen the strategies that it did), but there were a couple of things that I found particularly rewarding. I loved getting to know the students, through conversations and their essays and their aspirations for college. It was also a job that played to my strengths: I understand far more of the American college admissions process than your average African student, and I can comfortably say I wasn’t doing work that a local person who better understood the nuances of the local social, political and cultural context could have done better (more on this later).

So as I began to think about future directions, I knew I wanted to have a skill set that would make me valuable even as a foreigner, and that I’d like to work directly with people. On a recommendation and a whim, I checked out a public health master’s program, and realized it was exactly what I wanted. There’s something very concrete about working in medical fields, but I hope that there will also be room in public health for attention to the political and cultural influences/outcomes.

This year, I will be working with HIV-positive teenagers at a clinic in Botswana. Many of my roles and responsibilities will likely change over the course of the year, but generally my job will be to support the teenagers in building healthy, happy, productive lives.

I’m entering this new stage with a lot of questions in mind, mainly about how to do the best job possible. I’ve recently read Susan Wicklund’s This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. The first is the memoir of an abortion doctor working in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Montana, and the second is a biography of/love letter to Paul Farmer, the public health superstar physician who began Partners in Health.

At one point in the second book, Farmer is quoted as saying that “it’s not about a quest for personal efficacy” —that is, we should focus not on improving ourselves, but on improving the lives of others. Of course, true selflessness is impossible, since we gain something from helping others, even if it’s just a brief easing of moral discomfort, but the quotation struck me. If we’re focused on improving the lives of others, shouldn’t we make sure we are doing the best job of it as possible, and isn’t that a question of personal efficacy?

Kidder follows up with an explanation from one of Farmer’s colleagues, who says that the doctor represents a model of what should be done—proof that extremely difficult problems can and should be addressed—rather than a model for how it must be done. I think the same could be said of the abortion doctor. Focusing on trying to be Paul Farmer or Susan Wicklund is not important (and certainly there are many criticisms to be made of both). Nevertheless, they do both present a model for improving the lives of others, and share an intensity in their passion for caring wholly and specifically for the individual patients in front of them that I would like to carry with me as I begin this new job.

It’s really important to think about systemic problems and large-scale changes that need to be made (and, indeed, both doctors are engaged on this level as well), but without a focus on the individual, you perhaps risk allowing those systemic problems to overwhelm you. They might become an excuse not to act at all. Both doctors share concerns about the costs of losing sight of the individual, and Farmer in particular is presented as being afraid of allowing work on large-scale issues—like international advocacy on treatment procedures—to crowd out seemingly less impactful tasks, like day-long trips to see a single patient. At least as a starting point, I think it’s worthwhile to have a grounding in the personal and the specific from which to build a broader political awareness/advocacy agenda.

It will be hard, much harder than I’d like to admit, to fully relate to the patients I will work with and to consistently see through their eyes. I come from a vastly different cultural background, and from a position of both absolute and relative privilege: can I really hope to understand the perspectives of HIV-positive Motswana teenagers? I look forward to holding myself to the challenge of doing my absolute best to listen and learn from them, and to use what I learn to make whatever improvements for them possible.

This clinic is at the top of its field, and I know I have so much to learn from my experiences here. I hope that the lessons I learn will help me wherever and with whomever I end up working, but for now I would like to put thoughts of my own future aside to concentrate on the lives of these teenagers. Wish me luck!