Now that I’m back to “normal” after my trip, I can reflect a bit on my experiences there. I’m not going to reiterate my take on the surreality of the Emirates, but rather focus on my African visits and the benefits of travel in general.
It’s easy for travelers to talk in terms of “doing” a particular place these days, as if 48 hours in Florence will give me anything more than a superficial sense of people and place. This is particularly true if I concentrate on the big ticket items: famous sites, museums, the hot restaurant de jour. Those who have the time/money/lifestyle to do more extensive visits know that they get a far richer/deeper experience than can just be measured in days in residence.
Even more so for places and cultures further from the modern West, since the differences in mentalité, pace, and meaning become more visible.
In addition, such visits make it possible to move beyond the “check list/bucket list” approach to travel. One of the problems with the “lists” is that they reduce a place, a site, or an event to a name and cover up the complexity and diversity behind the label. There’s probably no place more susceptible to this phenomenon than “Africa” (India may be a close second): it’s huge, diverse, underdeveloped (i.e., less “modern” than most places), it has a history of being denigrated in modern Western culture and subjected to political, economic, and cultural imperialism, it’s heavily racially “othered,” and most maps substantially reduce its apparent size.
Africa includes 54 countries covering an area more than three times that of the entire US. There are about 1.5 billion people (projected to grow to 2.5B by 2050). Yet, its total GDP is about 2/3 of California’s. Of course, the 54 “countries” reflects the modern concept of the nation state, imposed in almost all cases through boundaries drawn by European imperial powers; there were probably many hundred ethnic groups, chiefdoms, and other polities in place prior to the 20C.
So, it’s ludicrous to talk in terms of “doing” Africa. Leaving aside the immense differences between Mediterranean/Muslim Africa and “black” sub-Saharan Africa, the latter (including hundreds of cultures and environments) is mostly a target for Western visitors for the animals and environments; the people are pretty much furniture.
Still, there’s no denying that the animals and environments are amazing. I got a taste of the high-end experience at the two safari camps in Botswana. I still had to get up at 5 am (prime time for animal viewing is dawn and dusk), but the food, guides, and accommodations were great. I got to see the “big five,” as well as giraffe, hippos, wild dogs, crocs, hyenas, assorted antelope, and 98 species of birds (including your odd ostrich). Stark visuals of nature (“red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson said) gave evidence of food chains, immense landscapes showed that even after millennia, human presence is still just a part of the story.
Probably the highlight of the trip was the stop at African Parks’ Rhino Farm outside of Johannesburg (www.rhinorewild.org) where about 10% of the world’s rhinos current live. Over the next ten years they will be shipped to various places around the continent to rebuild and strengthen herds and the species as a whole. It was an impressive operation and a meaningful step in repairing the damage done by decades of hunting/poaching/environmental destruction.
As I noted in my posting a few weeks ago (Into Africa 092724) I also got a chance to meet with some of the senior management of African Parks. As a donor, it’s rare to see such professionalism and effectiveness in a project with such a broad impact across many regions of Africa.
Similarly, AP’s management of the Majete park in Malawi showed that with hard work and thoughtful care, a fully-populated wildlife reserve can be resurrected from dust and despair, and move toward sustainability. I was quite taken with the management team, their passion, and their pride in their success. One of their principal efforts is engaging the long-standing local communities around the park with the success—natural and financial—of the restoration and preservation effort. This means education and involvement in park decisions and activities. It also means strengthening the local communities’ capabilities and opportunities.
I got up at five my last day in Majete to drive a couple of hours to Blantyre and the flight to Johannesburg, thence to Dubai. It was a stunning shift of scene—in terms of people, wealth, and glitz. Malawi, for all its poverty, is steeped in a sense of place; Dubai felt like it could have been in many places around the world (Vegas on steroids).
I flew on Emirates Air from Jo’burg to Dubai: pretty sleek and modern (and luxurious). The planes to and from Blantyre were totally fine (the President of Malawi was on one flight (or, perhaps I should say, I was on his); reliable and comfortable Boeings with modern ticketing systems etc. Nonetheless, those Malawi Air flights highlighted another benefit of travel. The passenger lists from the US to South Africa, South Africa to Botswana (mostly tourists), small planes to the game parks (all tourists), and then on to Dubai were, in a phrase “mighty white.” On the Malawi flights, I was one of (literally) a handful of white people. It was an important illustration of a point I have made here previously, that only 5-10% of the global population is white males. Citing statistics is one thing; physical manifestation—as I looked around the plane—is another. I live my “normal” life in a highly selective (and somewhat distorted) slice of the world as a whole. I was glad to be reminded so.
We are, in an important sense, all Africans; regardless of where our forebearers stopped for the past few thousand years or how recently they crossed the ocean. So, there’s more to being there than merely tasting another culture or seeing the sites of some history. The resonance goes beyond the story of shared humanity. There is an ineffable sense of place and landscape in which some (pre-) humans hung out a long time ago from which we are (a few thousand generations later) descended.
It’s easy for travelers to talk in terms of “doing” a particular place these days, as if 48 hours in Florence will give me anything more than a superficial sense of people and place. This is particularly true if I concentrate on the big ticket items: famous sites, museums, the hot restaurant de jour. Those who have the time/money/lifestyle to do more extensive visits know that they get a far richer/deeper experience than can just be measured in days in residence.
Even more so for places and cultures further from the modern West, since the differences in mentalité, pace, and meaning become more visible.
In addition, such visits make it possible to move beyond the “check list/bucket list” approach to travel. One of the problems with the “lists” is that they reduce a place, a site, or an event to a name and cover up the complexity and diversity behind the label. There’s probably no place more susceptible to this phenomenon than “Africa” (India may be a close second): it’s huge, diverse, underdeveloped (i.e., less “modern” than most places), it has a history of being denigrated in modern Western culture and subjected to political, economic, and cultural imperialism, it’s heavily racially “othered,” and most maps substantially reduce its apparent size.
Africa includes 54 countries covering an area more than three times that of the entire US. There are about 1.5 billion people (projected to grow to 2.5B by 2050). Yet, its total GDP is about 2/3 of California’s. Of course, the 54 “countries” reflects the modern concept of the nation state, imposed in almost all cases through boundaries drawn by European imperial powers; there were probably many hundred ethnic groups, chiefdoms, and other polities in place prior to the 20C.
So, it’s ludicrous to talk in terms of “doing” Africa. Leaving aside the immense differences between Mediterranean/Muslim Africa and “black” sub-Saharan Africa, the latter (including hundreds of cultures and environments) is mostly a target for Western visitors for the animals and environments; the people are pretty much furniture.
Still, there’s no denying that the animals and environments are amazing. I got a taste of the high-end experience at the two safari camps in Botswana. I still had to get up at 5 am (prime time for animal viewing is dawn and dusk), but the food, guides, and accommodations were great. I got to see the “big five,” as well as giraffe, hippos, wild dogs, crocs, hyenas, assorted antelope, and 98 species of birds (including your odd ostrich). Stark visuals of nature (“red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson said) gave evidence of food chains, immense landscapes showed that even after millennia, human presence is still just a part of the story.
Probably the highlight of the trip was the stop at African Parks’ Rhino Farm outside of Johannesburg (www.rhinorewild.org) where about 10% of the world’s rhinos current live. Over the next ten years they will be shipped to various places around the continent to rebuild and strengthen herds and the species as a whole. It was an impressive operation and a meaningful step in repairing the damage done by decades of hunting/poaching/environmental destruction.
As I noted in my posting a few weeks ago (Into Africa 092724) I also got a chance to meet with some of the senior management of African Parks. As a donor, it’s rare to see such professionalism and effectiveness in a project with such a broad impact across many regions of Africa.
Similarly, AP’s management of the Majete park in Malawi showed that with hard work and thoughtful care, a fully-populated wildlife reserve can be resurrected from dust and despair, and move toward sustainability. I was quite taken with the management team, their passion, and their pride in their success. One of their principal efforts is engaging the long-standing local communities around the park with the success—natural and financial—of the restoration and preservation effort. This means education and involvement in park decisions and activities. It also means strengthening the local communities’ capabilities and opportunities.
I got up at five my last day in Majete to drive a couple of hours to Blantyre and the flight to Johannesburg, thence to Dubai. It was a stunning shift of scene—in terms of people, wealth, and glitz. Malawi, for all its poverty, is steeped in a sense of place; Dubai felt like it could have been in many places around the world (Vegas on steroids).
I flew on Emirates Air from Jo’burg to Dubai: pretty sleek and modern (and luxurious). The planes to and from Blantyre were totally fine (the President of Malawi was on one flight (or, perhaps I should say, I was on his); reliable and comfortable Boeings with modern ticketing systems etc. Nonetheless, those Malawi Air flights highlighted another benefit of travel. The passenger lists from the US to South Africa, South Africa to Botswana (mostly tourists), small planes to the game parks (all tourists), and then on to Dubai were, in a phrase “mighty white.” On the Malawi flights, I was one of (literally) a handful of white people. It was an important illustration of a point I have made here previously, that only 5-10% of the global population is white males. Citing statistics is one thing; physical manifestation—as I looked around the plane—is another. I live my “normal” life in a highly selective (and somewhat distorted) slice of the world as a whole. I was glad to be reminded so.
We are, in an important sense, all Africans; regardless of where our forebearers stopped for the past few thousand years or how recently they crossed the ocean. So, there’s more to being there than merely tasting another culture or seeing the sites of some history. The resonance goes beyond the story of shared humanity. There is an ineffable sense of place and landscape in which some (pre-) humans hung out a long time ago from which we are (a few thousand generations later) descended.
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