In the imagination of many in the West, Africa is principally a place where the wild life roams, a destination for safaris. Now in South Africa, with its sophisticated infrastructure, this conceit has been commercially extended. Some Britons fly here for cheap dental treatment. There are even adverts for “plastic surgery safaris”. The most radical off-shoot is the murder safari. South Africa is currently attempting to extradite Bristol businessman Shrien Dewani, accused of hiring township hitmen to shoot his bride while on honeymoon here. More recently, an Australian based in London had been stalking a woman. He followed her to Cape Town and allegedly attempted to set up a meeting with hitmen.
Clearly, there is a perception in Britain that South Africa is the place to go if you want to knock someone off at a discount. You’d think aspirant murderers would do a little more research. The Dewani case shows that there are still parallel universes here, side by side. There are hundreds of murders in townships which barely get investigated. Yet when someone from the first world is killed the police spring into action. But in this instance what has shocked South Africans, black and white, is the venom spewed out by much of the British press, especially the tabloids. They have, of course, been singing the vile tune orchestrated by the unscrupulous public relations agent Max Clifford.
But conducting a campaign of barely disguised racism goes far, far deeper. In the lead up to the World Cup last year, the British press whipped up a campaign suggesting that South Africa was incapable of hosting such an event. Shortly before, when President Jacob Zuma went to London on a state visit, there was another epidemic of vitriol. The Daily Mail frothed that Zuma was “a sex-obsessed bigot”, and asked, “So why is Britain fawning over the vile buffoon?” The bigot, of course, is the Daily Mail, which vies with its Sunday stable-mate to manufacture whoppers. These papers never tire of predicting – year after year – that democratic South Africa will implode. In 1999, for example, the paper concluded that whites would be driven into the sea.
Such prejudices have deep roots. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o saw that these racist attitudes were casually embedded in exotic novels and adventure yarns going back to such popular writers as Rider Haggard. In his classic study Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o observed, “Thus imaginative literature had created the necessary racist vocabulary and symbols long before the television and the popular media had to come to dominate the scene.”
Max Clifford, the Daily Mail and much of the British press are still intent on repeating exactly the same fiction, but with ever increasing hysteria. In most Western fiction about Africa, local people are written into the background, so white heroes can strut (or shoot) their way to fame or fortune. Doris Lessing said white writers used the continent as a peg on which to hang their egos (she included herself). A more obvious example is Ernest Hemingway, who appeared to view Africa as a sort of gladiatorial arena for white men to test their character and courage.
It seems that colonial attitudes haven’t changed that much. Tourists still come to see lions and elephants. Today they also fly in to have their teeth fixed or faces lifted by plastic surgeons. In 1946, in Tribune, George Orwell wrote a famous tongue-in-cheek essay, Decline of the English Murder. “Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been roughly between 1850 and 1925,” he wrote, identifying what made a satisfyingly gruesome News of the World read. And now – with hit men available for just over a thousand pounds in Cape Town – even murder has been outsourced. But not the racism. No decline there. That remains home-grown.
