Another international trip means it's time to dust off ye olde blog again. On this excursion I, as well as 7 other F&M (my college) students, will be joined by 8 people from other institutions of the higher education variety to work with the Social Entrepreneur Corps. (SEC) in and around Cape Town, South Africa for 6 weeks. The F&M contingent leaves June 1st, the other people leave May 30th...or so I have pieced together from the Facebook group that was started for all of us.
So what are we doing now? Why am I writing about this trip now from my temporary accomadations in F&M's Dietz Hall (quite possibly the oldest residence facility on campus)? Well, our classes begin tomorrow at 9am and in preparation we were asked to read this essay from Granta titled How to Write About Africa. For full disclosure, I had never heard about Granta before getting this assignment, but I gather it is a literary magazine of some sort...for more detailed information, I invite you to explore the site and leave a comment or two on this post for my benefit :).
Anyway, the essay was a tongue and cheek (or is it tongue in cheek???) look at how to correctly exploit Africa for the purposes of a book about the continent:
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize...If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.
The dead pan humor aside, the article was scarily true to form in its description of almost every book about Africa that I've seen produced, with a few exceptions. I reference the article to assure you, assuming you aren't a bot that will waste my time with a completely irrelevant comment about the bath tiling in the picture that I didn't post, that I have no intention of writing about South Africa in any sort of Western supremacy voice. Hopefully I will be able to capture what I experience on a personal level and avoid pictures of Masai or Zulus, unless they'll let me pose with them...just kidding.
Well I think that is enough for now, especially since there really isn't anything to report. Of course, I must add that I do not edit my posts beyond correcting errors that I catch when I read it over after publishing. I find that editing a blog post of this nature takes away from the natural feel of thing, and I want this to be as natural as possible...I hope that doesn't offend anyone. With that I will take my leave.
Thanks for reading!
-Diggs
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