East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.
On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.
The West’s fascination with Africa as a wild jungle or uncivilised continent has a long history that still lives with us today. Most Americans know Africa through National Geographic specials, topless natives and free roaming animals – a continent void of civilised people and culture, only famine, danger and wild landscape.
Africa has also long been a place for Westerners to fulfill their peculiar fantasies, their wildest dreams, as a destination to escape the clutter of modern life and get back to the primitive, the pure.
“The last 400-500 years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery,” said Nigerian novelist and poet, Chinua Achebe.
Recent events bring home these truths to us. President Obama – with his much talked about African background – just visited his father’s birthplace in Kenya. He couldn’t help himself, but had to lecture Africans about democracy and freedom. Hollywood made over $6bn dollar movie called “The Lion King” about an African lion called “Simba”.
Continue reading Notes from America: The dark side of Western fascination with Africa
