A Culture Lost

A couple of years ago, Mel Lastman, the outspoken mayor of Toronto, embarrassed himself and our city with a demonstration of his lack of knowledge about Africa.

On the eve of travelling to Mombasa Hamisi Mboga, Kenya, Mr Lastman joked with reporters that he feared being hoisted into a vat of boiling water while natives danced around him.

He was preparing to travel to Kenya to promote Toronto's 2008 Olympic bid. The remark didn't help our city's chances to win the Olympic Games and vault itself onto the international stage, and the Olympics were eventually awarded to Beijing.

(Yes, there are infrequent reports of cannibalism in Africa, just as there was in Germany in 2001.)

Fears of boiling pots of cannibal soup aside, the tragic reality is that much African culture, like much native culture in North America, has been lost in large measure because of historic ignorance not unlike that exhibited by Mr Lastman in Toronto.

Traditional tribal languages have also been pushed aside in favour of European languages, though this is changing somewhat.

Laura and I recently had the opportunity to visit a cultural village established to celebrate the heritage of the Shangana tribe, which is the predominant tribe in southern Mozambique. We witnessed traditional clothing and dance, and partook in a traditional meal.

The meal, as it turns out, was very similar to the one that we experienced at Paulo and Olga's wedding. Traditional food, it seems, has not been lost.

The most significant difference was the wedding's lack of traditional appetizers: worms, crocodile and impala. These delicacies weren't in short supply at the cultural village. (Laura and I were thankful that they were well sauced!)

The very fact that we had to travel to a living museum to witness the traditional culture of the people in whose land we are immersed is telling. Today, many Mozambicans (particularly men) have shed traditional African flamboyancy in favour of the standard uniform of westerners' clothing: pants and a shirt.

In some places, this is because of used clothing arriving courtesy of westerners' donations. Evidence of this is common. People have no inhibitions about wearing t-shirts with tourist slogans scrawled across their chests, or sweatshirts advertising some little-known college in the United States, or someone's long-forgotten amateur softball uniform.

In Africa, a shirt's often just a shirt.

But this doesn't accurately paint the picture. Many Africans in Mozambique wear clean and well-pressed clothing. Tasteful clothing. But not traditional African clothing. Their colonizers taught them to wear Western clothing.

Men don't wear copalanas anymore. Civilized men don't wear skirts.

Contempt for the culture practiced by the majority population of the derisively-named Dark Continent was widespread among colonizers. Ian Smith, the last European Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), demonstrates this contempt in unapologetic fashion in his 1997 memoirs:

It is difficult for people who have never lived in this part of the world to appreciate that sub-Saharan Africa is different. It was the last part of our world to come into contact with western European civilization... The wheel had not even evolved, nor had the plough. The change which has taken place is absolutely phenomenal, and is a tribute to what the white inhabitants did over a period of ninety years. (Smith, The Great Betrayal, p. 55).

The colonialists and the naive, it would seem, saw native Africans as monkeys in the jungle needing to be modernized. Or exploited.

It's shameful that so much of African culture has been lost.

And it's a shame that Africa must battle its image as a continent where visitors will be encountered at the airport by a throng of salivating cannibals dancing in their leopard-skin loincloths.