Last April in Berlin, as part of a group of travelling poets and writers, I watched a panel of individuals profess to speak about European–African relations. It was excruciatingly stilted in its attempted political correctness. There were four German panelists against the Kenyan, the well-known rapper MC Kah. When Kah was asked what he thought Africans generally thought of Europe, he seemed to fog up, lose his usual easy, natural rapper self, which has made him a Nairobi crowd favourite, and finally blurted, as if in pain: “It’s old. Europe is old.”
In the 1960s, after independence, African education curriculums retained large doses of centuries of European history, which continued to be forced on new generations. A push for Africanization later introduced the continent’s own post- independence history and, in comparison to European history, these new narratives seemed contemporary and immediate to Africans.
Official images of Europe, mediated through TV, postcards and magazines, remain generally monumental: heavy, grey and imposingly permanent castles, ancient battlefields and cobbled villages. Even recent ubiquitous statistical reports on Europe that are distributed in Africa constantly paint European populations as old, adding to an imagined narrative of Europe as ancient to Africans. MC Kah’s reaction represents a larger African idea of Europe. Age. Authority. The Old World.
However, Africans’ daily encounters of contemporary Europeans are with the tourist, the missionary or the expatriate. Adding to simplistic ideas of ancient authority, these encounters create false impressions of affluence, confidence and knowledge. Europe thus becomes an object of desire, especially amongst younger generations of Africans. It is pining for the imagined good things of Europe that makes young Senegalese, Eritrean and Somali men get onto the tiniest of skiffs and brave the storms of the Mediterranean. In Nairobi’s coffee joints, one now observes tall dark young women with mixed race babies. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if one can imagine equal relations in the couplings of middle-aged white men and young Kenyan women.
This African desire for Europe has created a veritable cottage industry. A young Kenyan woman without the right education or middle-class upbringing can find a safe and solid exit strategy by seeking out a middle-aged or older white male, either a tourist, development worker or expatriate. A sizeable population of young Kenyan men also make it their life-quest to pursue white female UN workers and interns from international government agencies that are housed in Nairobi.
This pursuit in nightspots has cultivated its own sub-culture and economy. Even when it’s clear that these white young women have very little economic wealth, the sheer perception of whiteness and Europeanness, in and of itself, presents enough value for certain Kenyan youth. This desire to have some connection, however tenuous, with the larger idea of Europe or America looms for these youth.
James Baldwin observed that “No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted.” The colonial experience is at the heart of the skewed encounter between the European and the African. The countereffect of the African’s perceptions of the European.
Billy Kahora, the author of this article, lives and writes in Nairobi. His short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Chimurenga, McSweeney’s, Granta Online, Internazionale, Kwani? and Vanity Fair.Zoning” was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2012, and a new story, “The Gorilla’s Apprentice”,has recently been shortlisted for the 2014 prize. He is also managing editor of Kwani Trust and an associate editor with the Chimurenga Chronic. He was a judge of the 2009 Commonwealth writers’ Prize and the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
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