I’m fighting off a cold, which is a bit of a bummer, as colds while travelling, even on long trips where you settle into a real life model at least a little, seem worse than colds at home. It is not bad enough to keep me from living my life (or to excuse me from real life responsibilities) but it’s annoying enough for me to wish it would go away and to disrupt the one thing that could make it better, which is sleep.
So my friend has monkeys in his neighborhood who generally make nuisances of themselves. They tip over the garbage in search of food and they scamper through the trees and across the rooftops. Now I’m supposed to be an experienced Africa hand and so I am supposed to reject the whole idea of Africa as a place for westerners to view animals. But still: Mionkeys! Scampering on the rooftops! Making nuisances of themselves!
Hell yeah, I took pictures.
A second day with no games. I think we are going to go to a national park or something — game reserves are something else I am supposed to be too jaded to experience, but the fact is, because of that jaded approach I have not been to a game reserve in more than a decade. As long as they are not one’s sole conception of Africa, and as long as they do not make up our dominant images, it’s ok to think that game parks, safaris, and what have you are pretty cool.
My fellow Africanists can sometimes be a bit, let’s say, sanctimonious about their views on Africa. We spend so much time correcting misconceptions that we sometimes get a little priggish about the shorthand that most Africans themselves use — just that word, “Africans,” is oftentimes frowned upon by Africanists who want us to acknowledge the particularities and specificities of life on this continent of 53 countries with thousands of various groupings. This is all true — and in the classroom and in certain audiences I do that too. But let’s be clear — throughout Africa Africans refer to the people of this continent as Africans and to the larger place as Africa. This World Cup has served as a pretty good reminder of thae tenuous but real balance between particularity and Pan-Africanism.
So, yeah, I’m always gonna be just a bit stoked about Monkeys! On Rooftops!
