There’s a major flaw in this plan to embrace social distancing from Braidwood by blogging about living here – and that’s the fact that social distancing anywhere, no matter how picturesque, is still about avoiding other people. That means we’re not meeting the individuals that make the community what it is, so you get posts that probe the crannies of the writer’s psyche rather than much more interesting stories about local characters. I can see how that might become tedious for everyone.
So let’s talk geopolitics.
You know that song ‘Africa’ by US soft-rock combo Toto? When they say, “I bless the rain down in Africa”, it sounds like Africa is a little farm a few miles down the road. Not a colossal, diverse continent with 54 countries, six timezones, and 1.2 billion people.
In an indictment of the musical tastes of the masses, this woeful dirge – geographically inaccurate to boot – went five times platinum. That’s ten million sold, if we’re counting singles. Composer David Paich apparently wrote it after seeing a TV documentary about the continent and spent six months – six months – working on the lyrics.
And let’s not dwell on the official video. It’s a hotchpotch of superficial images quite in keeping with the profundity of the words.
Anyway, leaving Toto to the misery of their royalty millions, I hear their “down in Africa” treatment of the continent quite a lot in Australia. On the news the other day, some talking head was discussing COVID-19 infection statistics: “The US has x number of infections, the UK has xx number of infections, Spain has xxx, and Africa has xxxx.”
To be fair, this is by no means unique to Australia – even Isak Dinesen did it: “I had a farm in Africa” she would say in the voice of Meryl Streep. “At the foot of the Ngong Hills,” when obviously she should have said, “I had a farm in Kenya.”
Years ago, when I’d just arrived in the UK, people would say to me, “you’re from Zimbabwe? I went to the Gambia on a package tour once,” with a sort of expectant look, as if I might know the people they met in a country 9,312.2 km from my home. For perspective, it’s a mere 2,871.1 km from London to Moscow.
In the backpacker pubs of London, you’d often hear, “Aw yeah, did Italy, Greece, and Germany last summer so now gonna save my money and do Cambodia, Thailand, Africa.”
There’s a website devoted to examining the news from Africa called Africa is a Country, a title which acknowledges this tendency. It’s worth a look.
But it’s sad really how the world can’t or won’t get its collective head around the ancient richness and variety of the so-called Dark Continent. When he said ‘ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ (out of Africa always something new), Pliny the Elder clearly hadn’t heard of COVID-19, the ‘novel’ coronavirus, which is something new out of – perhaps – China. But if the future belongs to China, which economists like to predict, Africa comes next (assuming human life still exists by then).
It’s not just the fabulous wealth beneath the soil, the incredible landscapes and wildlife, or the teeming cities – it’s the mind-boggling variety of cultures, the people’s voracious hunger for learning. Just look at what African music, by way of gospel, jazz, R&B, soul and hip-hop, has done for popular culture. There is so much more than the famine, revolution and corruption we see on the news – it’s the raw potential oozing out of every pore.
Of course, this is a huge generalisation of the order of ‘the rain down in Africa’, and is liable to the same weaknesses. But Africa is more than one song, one country, one image. It will always bring forth something new – for example, now aliquid novi is right here in Braidwood.