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.