Rather than going 'international', there is immense possibility in being originators

Addis Ababa is one big building site. The amount of construction is impressive. The city is on the move. Not only is one impressed by the changes that are imagined for the city but also the realization that urban Ethiopia has an aesthetics unique to itself.  We were told there were more than a hundred embassies in this city as well as comprehensive representation by multilateral organizations such as the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations. That also means politicians and NGOS are full on the ground.

Though Addis seems to be responding to the imperatives to develop and ‘intenationalise’, for a good part it is doing so on its own terms. We were left wondering what that might mean. Does it mean the infrastructural development of high-rise condominiums and global brand hotels? Is it the overzealous officiousness of what looks to be impotent security measures: not just at the airport but at hotel doorways you are subjected to full security checks with old, weary saluting men in garish colonial military uniforms? Is it calling yourself an international enterprise?

One observed a number of companies name themselves as international this or that. In itself this is not bad or specific to Addis as many  supposedly global companies call themselves international. In Addis however, one is left with the feeling that there is a certain amount of anxiousness in this naming practice because these supposedly international companies are not really part of the global economy in quite the way they project.

As African as we are we are still seasoned travelers. We have learnt certain expectations of ‘the international’: no magic disappearing water while taking a shower or brushing teeth in your international hotel room; not something that ‘tastes like chicken’ but chicken; provision for stable electricity so we can buy a cup of coffee at an international resort; road signage would be good; less donkeys on the freeways please; convenient access to money; the recognition of multiple currencies (not just the US dollar, the euro and the British pound);  the facilities to pay one’s bill in any credit card; and knowledge of electronic transfers.

Perhaps you will argue with this. Perhaps international does not mean capital flows freely everywhere or that its reach is uniform. Maybe donkeys, cows and goats do have rights to use main city roads. Maybe privilege does not mean reliable free-flowing water and electricity. Contrary to what we expect perhaps a little plastic card should not simplify life everywhere  in the world.

What Addis Ababa teaches one is the uneven access to ‘the international’.  It reminds us of the problems of trying to play catch-up games with the economic system of Western Europe and North America many African countries get caught up in. There is immense possibility in being originators, we learn when we notice the ridiculousness of being searched and saluted all at the same time at mall doorways. We marvel at architecture that is not all sharp angles but gently rounded in the most surprising ways and wonder why there isn’t more of that. We realize that modernity is organic and becomes what it needs to be, and we ask ourselves why is Addis the city to teach us this. Contemporary Ethiopia, we learn, will emerge from where it has come. What is more, in spite of the bourgeois Africans on its doorsteps and the international community it hosts, its desires will be realised whilst proclaiming there is no one size fits all African – donkeys on the freeways, pummeled roast chicken and declined Mastercard ( it does not take you everywhere).

ConsumingTradition

On Saturday morning, passing through Woodstock Lower Main Road, I saw a bustling space.  It was the first time in many years I was on this road again. I remembered it as run-down and seedy. The hazy stories that populated my memory contained drugs, prostitutes, danger and risk.

The place in my memory had disappeared, however and I took the flowing crowd of urban elites[i] streaming in and out of the entrance to a courtyard to be indicative of an urban hotspot. Of course, I went to have a look. It was only as I crossed the road that I noticed the signage and realized I was at the Old Biscuit Mill.

I’d been told about this market and the words that were used to describe it were organic, recycled, vintage, traditional and food. Everyone raves about the food (rightly so, as it turns out). I was surprised.

There was a market inside reminiscent of the traditional flea-market. But all resemblances ended there. The clothes were designer, the home-ware was designer, the food was designer, and the old and recycled kitsch was called vintage. The food was hand-crafted and the exotic produce was organic.  

And the people, well shall we say consuming the rustic and traditional is a costly business and stepping out of the crowd requires a cosmopolitan’s discernment. It requires understanding the values contained in things and desiring things whether it is to be eaten, sat on or drunk out of to have histories. Within this tradition, aesthetics alone do not create value and therefore the crowds in this space of High Neotraditionalism collect stories through which to make their free choices and craft their individuality.

You know the kinds of people I mean, they are found the world over [ii]. They are always gushing about the authentic experience. How fortunate they were to experience things the way the locals do. Invariably, they consider themselves connoisseurs of the traditions of others and yet, seem without any traditionalisms of their own.

That is, until one remembers that the liberal practices of choice: experiencing the traditions of others and consuming authenticities, is a tradition. It's been fashionable for a while to devour traditions. This liberal, usually elite and often colonial tradition has its own rules, its own patterns, its own ideologies, its own functions, its own internal coherencies, resistances and refigurations.

It makes its own communities: we call them/us liberal, foodies, greenies, locavores, etc. but mostly we call them middle-class with the luxury of choosing their ideologies to show how individual and conscientious we are about how we spend our mass-disposable incomes. At any rate, we recognize each other the minute we say “oh my I saw the most beautiful vintage butter dish, it so much better for the environment to spend more and recycle other’s discards,” or, “You just can’t get good food anymore, that’s why I buy organic, its expensive but what can you do?”[iii]

As for some of our traditional practices, they/we hunger to know the special history of their/our food: how the bread was hand-knead and the producers learned the recipe from their grandmother/ grandfather/ great-aunt or uncle who taught them to knead the bread in the traditional way with love and thus insert themselves into the thing that will be consumed by strangers. Or maybe the maker of authentic, traditional bread woke up one day and realized they no longer wanted to be alienated from their labor and so they gave up their corporate lives and decided to live simply and make really expensive bread (sometimes known as trying out tradition without sacrificing toilets and hot baths). Of course, mass-consumption is out, so the wheat you know comes only from that tiny mill that hand-grinds all their flour. And on and on, the stories go.

The spinach, the artisanal cheeses, the walnut, the dates, the special food thing that is not like the passé store-bought mass-produced industrial food things. Its individuality is all mine, yours, theirs if you have enough money to pay for it and enough time to pause for the endless chain of unique little stories in gentrified Woodstock at the once-was mill …

[i] Yes, affluence has a certain look and is instantly recognizable.

[ii] Shall I shamefacedly admit that I have my days where I revel in being one of them? Naaah, chances are you have your own version of this and like it too. Let’s not feel too bad about it, but hey no self-congratulatory pats on the back either.

[iii] All of this is usually accompanied by knowing, reverent and slightly mournful nods. And because you are part of this tribe, you don’t need more than the wink and twitch to finish the triumphant, thank God we can afford organic misshapen individual carrots unlike those poor people who have to buy their standard, uniform buncha carrots

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Myths and misconceptions of tradition

We are located on the southern tip of Africa. We are the heirs of the Enlightenment, its upside and horrors. Thus we believe some things about a concept that has come to define this continent.

If you have been attentive, you would have noticed the word tradition come up again and again and again. The work we do is about rethinking tradition, not to assert traditionalisms or to use tradition as a political tool. Instead what is needed is to refigure the following misconceptions and myths about tradition:

  

• Traditions are static
• Tradition is backward
• All traditions are bad
• Only certain people have tradition
• It is possible to live without tradition
• Tradition = culture = race

Would you agree? What is your definition of tradition?

Photo: Guy Stubbs.

No matter the colour, the essence of traditional boeber remains!

Anyone familiar with Cape Malay cuisine knows boeber. It’s that sweet tantalizing to-die-for dessert Malay’s make with milk, almonds, sultanas and sago. Most importantly, it is white! The colour of milk! Absolutely divine to the palate.

Well, not so long ago a close friend offered to bring some boeber to work. We were all so excited and rubbed our hands in anticipation at the thought of getting boeber on a cold day. Elated and eager, we sat down the next day as she started dishing the boeber into cups, because that’s how it’s done. Lo and behold, as soon as my eyes came to rest on the contents in my cup, I freaked out and said, “What the hell is this? Who makes pink boeber?” This is an absolute insult to our traditions, and our ancestors, who, for hundreds of years, made white boeber. We were all so taken aback.

However, not wanting to offend our friend too much, as to her it was quite normal, we started bringing the cup closer to our lips. Apprehensively, hesitant and very slowly the cup eventually reached our mouths and lo and behold, it tasted the very same! You can imagine our relief, but even more so our surprise. The boeber, a pink fusion, still conformed to our tradition, but it made me realise that tradition is not static, it evolves and even though we may be hesitant to accept and adapt to changes in culture and tradition, it is possible.

So, no matter the colour, as long as the taste is there, the essence of traditional boeber remains.

http://www.driveout.co.za/food/boeber               

by Naiema Taliep

Eating tradition

It has been my view that going out to dinner has less to do with eating than with "doing tradition". Contextually speaking, if you are hungry you cook at home or get take out. If you fancy you can have a braai also.  Though this performace of eating tradition obtains in Stockholm, Hong Kong,  Paris, Moscow, New York, London and other parts of the overdeveloped world too, in Brits, Tripoli, Lusaka, Harare, Mbabane, and other economies of that size and attitude, eating out is a ritual. You go out to celebrate, if you can afford it.

True, there are those who can't cook, have disposable income, have restaurants within reasonable distance, blindly or deliberately try to strike a pose to indicate that they too belong in this class of seats, right here in Le Quartier Francais, Mathias, Dahlgren, El Bulli, or wherever, they also have use for restaurants. Even they do more than eat when they go out don't they. For one thing, they have to dress up. They usually have company. For I have seen it masterfully done, but I can't muster the art of eating out alone without appearing lost. 

While I have been talking of restaurant patrons, the same point applies to chefs: what they make is not so much food as giving you an experience whose significane is better illumined by the concept of tradition. Food taste so much better if you know its routes, perhaps roots too. You can imagine how interested I was to see something on the matter in the recent issue of Taste magazine (http://www.tastemag.co.za/TheMag.aspx) where Luke Dale-Roberts has these thoughts about the whys of frothing your food:

Take the mousse. The epitome of 1960s nouvelle cuisine, the mousse actually emerged on the culinary scene during the 18th century, when chefs to French royalty discovered the frothing power of eggs and proceeded to make foams out of everything they could get their hands on. They assigned these airy, cloud-like concoctions the name 'mousse' from the French for 'lather' or 'foam' and, by the mid-1700s, everybody who was anybody was taking their nourishment in foam form, though not yet sweets (perhaps delayed by the French Revolution, it would be another 100 or so years until dessert mousses began to proliferate).

Branded the height of kitsch in the post-sixties bistromania, mousses have been assigned the same status as polyster tracksuits and garden gnomes. But, in truth, a mousse is the ultimate expression of French tradition...and, in my view, there's nothing as timeless as tradition.

Today's chefs are, for the most part, master jugglers keeping aloft the balls of tradition and innovation, convention and trend, and choosing which works works when and where. 

We got to budge and make some room around the braai for others

Years back I picked up Manthia Diawara’s We won’t budge: An African exile in the world because it looked like the sort of book that interests me. The blurb, and read me. Flipped through the contets and I said, buy. I did. Read the book and obviously didn't forget it. Liked the story and narrative style quite a bit.  

At the end of the book Diawara intersperses his memories of starting a new job as pantry man at a restaurant with remembered feelings about gor-jigen, jege and jaa. This is a moment full of contradiction, but illumination too.

Gor-jigen, jege and jaa were local terms used in the Bamako of the author's young days for man-woman, cowardice in males, homosexuality. Back then a job in the pantry was associated with femininity, gays, or one might say, deficient manliness. I suspect there might be some of that associated with men preparing vichyssoise or salad in restaurant still. There are of course other kinds of jobs and other activities in different places with similar associations.

In Cape Town they have other words with like associations, like moffie. In Johannesburg townships they have is’tabane. In other cities they will have other words. What all these names and labels have in common is that they underline the importance of sexuality to masculinity.

A fascinating narrative about what it means to be young in Mali, arriving in France in 1972, and ending up in the US, We won’t budge, which was published in 2003 and has sold thousands of copies, is not really about masculinity. Then again, it is. Very much so.

So what is it about? It is about an Amadou Diallo getting killed in America, young people wanting to get out of African countries to Europe and the US; about exile, home, identity and alienation; about music, Africa’s failures, racism, migration and writing; about kin and family ties, getting caught up between tradition and modernity, globalization, cultural assimilation, and cosmopolitanism. Is that all? No, actually. The book is about many things. It is after all a story “about how one African sees the world”. And this African sees and reflects on quite a number of things of the world he travels. It would be better if you read it for yourself.

One question that has bugged me for a while is why does a memoirist who spins such a good yarn fail to underline that this tale is about African men as a gender, about their powerlessness and power, their hardships, evasions, triumphs, fights, and freedoms? Because the question of African males as men, imbricated with the question of African men as Africans, is one that has tended to get barely a look. 

Men's gender power games, troubles and pains is one gaping hole in many stories of the failures on the continent or inequalities within countries. To be sure, looking into this man-hole changed only around two decades ago; but not by men here. (Interestingly it has been mostly African women who have investigate manhood). And, where change about how to think of the economic, political and cultural problems created and expereinced by men has come to these parts, it's been very slow.

Even then, the consequences for societies arising out of men’s gender practices still get short shrift, left, it seems, to sexually, frustrated women, lesbians, wacky feminists, sellouts, brainwashed men, gays, and queers in general.

Why is it so hard to recognise that masculinity is a key axis of social divisions between not only men and women but also intra-male group struggles? The thing is, how a man imagines himself is the flipside of how he views women. How a man loves a woman can’t but be about the cultural construction of manhood. The way one “holds” his body, “pictures” women, views other men, drives, gives his name to his offspring, names his penis, names women’s genitalia, drinks, prays, sings, shakes hands, kisses and braais – these being only some of many signs – are instructive because they are markers used to “separate man from boy”, not only boys from girls.

The moral of the story? How you hold your body around the braai is what ties you as one sort to your men-tribe. That can’t be too difficult to comprehend.

It is, though, one moral of this story. The main theme is that doing stuff in order to affirm masculinity can be everywhere but usually remains unspoken.

I have my eye trained on a map of Africa, but I have the world in my head. If you look and listen closely, men’s innocent activities, including writing about their activities, are the marrow of social power. What one needs to do is simply point them out, to speak about them. That is where to start.

To be sure, in themselves, as activities that make you sweat or test you’re your limits, rock climbing or playing footsie are ok, actually. Yet there is no getting around the fact that time-use highly favours powerful men – and the rest of the male group gets the patriarchal dividend. Unless a man has a few slaves at home to cook for him, intellectually stimulate his pre-teen son, bathe his infant daughter, and wait for him with nothing but do-me-bad-stilettos on the kitchen counter, me-time for men is time to cash in some hegemonic masculinity shares. Unless, that is, the use of time has been democratically negotiated, paid for or agreed to let none say there is no sweetness to be king of one's shack.

Doing stuff that on the surface appears to have nothing to do with men’s power over women and other men while it is precisely about patriarchal masculinity is of course how tradition works. At its most effective, tradition never announces itself by name. It happens while we appear to be doing, or not doing, other things – like not washing dishes, like watching rugby, like sitting in a strip club, like sitting on company boards with other men.

A publisher’s blurb and customer reviews of We won’t budge can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/We-Wont-Budge-African-Exile/dp/0465017096

A 2006 review of We won’t budge published in The Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom appears here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/we-wont-budge-by-manthia-diawara-469225.html