Colonialism, Missionaries, and Small Boats: the power of the story

I was chatting with a couple of the security guards at the Okavango Delta campsite where I was staying in Botswana a few years ago (2013/14). They were telling me it was their ambition to move to England. The campsite where they were working was owned by a white man, I can’t remember where he was from: Australia or New Zealand. But it doesn’t matter much. His guests were predominantly white families, some Europeans but many white South Africans. It wasn’t particularly cheap (to us) but it was secure, with reasonably reliable wifi, running water, working toilets, and well maintained grounds surrounded by wildlife, and, as we were drawing towards the conclusion of 4.5 years of travel as what I termed international nomads, we needed somewhere secure to leave our vehicle while we visited England for a few weeks. We were by far the poorest of the guests when we were there. More often than not we had stayed in African ‘hotels’ (think ripped mosquito nets, pit toilets, a communal water tank with barely a dribble of water in the bottom, no electricity – and no white people). As poor as we were compared to our fellow ‘whites’, by African standards we were still rich: we had our own vehicle and we were travelling and not visibly working.

I was reminded of this ‘story’ when I was reading the Foreword by Nandita Chaudhary in The Myth of Attachment Theory by Heidi Keller, pub: 2022, Routledge, Oxon

Chaudhary writes: "As story-telling animals, human beings have been weaving tales from the earliest times. This capacity for creating narratives is unique to our species and sets us apart from all other forms of life. As a young girl growing up in Nigeria, Chimamanda Adichie was steeped in English literature about fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed children. Her imagination was trapped in those stories.  In her writing, Adichie cautions us about the collapse of our imaginations into a single story: 'What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children...I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. This is the danger of the single story, it colonises your imagination to a point where you cannot think outside of the images you feed on...You are not successful unless you have attained the next thing, until you have reached the West, because that is the world that has filled your imagination." Adichie, 2009 

In my conversation with the Botswanan security guards I confirmed just what they might earn in the UK, and their eyes widened. Then I told them what it would cost them to rent a flat, pay in taxes, the cost of food and gas and water and electricity. They looked a bit more subdued. The reality is that whilst it is ‘cheap’ for me to live in Africa for a little while, with Western, developed world resources at my disposal, the reality for me to live and work in Africa (or any of the other mostly southern hemisphere developing countries) permanently is that I would be as poor as anyone else. It is no different in reverse for the African to live in England: wherever you go in the world the cost of living is nearly always going to take up all the poor person’s wages.

I doubt if my one short conversation with those security guards will have been enough to deter them from their dream of a better life in the West, with the streets paved as they are (not) with gold. Because the white Westerners and the white South Africans they see are those who can afford to travel to their country. They are not representative of the average poor working classes. The education they will have received, steeped in years of colonialism and well meaning missionaries will have sowed the seeds for these myths that West is Best.

The ‘story’ is being perpetuated but what can we do? Can we send missionaries to Africa and South America to tell the stories of being poor in our rich lands, to be honest about how it is our policies and practices of capitalism and consumerism that is helping to destroy our planet, of the gaping divide between rich and poor and how we have food banks because so many people cannot afford to buy enough food to eat, or people living on cold damp streets, sleeping among the gravestones in cemeteries because they cannot afford somewhere to live, or because their lives are so miserable they have resorted to alcohol and drugs to block out their misery, and the emotional and mental health crisis we have been increasingly facing for several years as a result of these situations? Would we be believed after the years of receiving such different ‘stories’?

Not so long ago I read of another country for whose children their ambition is not to be a fireman or a butcher or a builder or a doctor or an academic, but to become a refugee to a better life somewhere else.

We (in the UK) threaten to turn the boats away, let refugees drown at sea, send them to Rwanda if not actually back to their homeland, no matter how dangerous that might be. But it’s not enough to deter desperate people making dangerous sea crossings, risking their lives for the gold at the end of the rainbow. They don’t hear the fear (of them) and prejudice in ‘our’ words because the narrative, the single story, they and generations before them have grown up with is so much stronger. I doubt anyone seriously believes the Illegal Migrants Act will ‘solve’ the migrant ‘crisis’ (as we perceive it).

There is no doubt that whilst some are escaping life threatening wars and terrorism, others are escaping physical and economic hardships that seem overwhelming when there is something better other people are enjoying. Until they land on our shores by one means or another, they do not ‘hear’ or understand the fear and prejudice they will face, that higher wages doesn’t mean less poverty, just different poverty.

Years, decades, centuries, of colonialism by European nations, and including the United States, has brought us to where we are today.

Somehow we have to find ways to broaden the narrative. Ironically, probably the only way to achieve that is to allow migrants to experience their lives in their dreamland, so they can tell the alternative stories when they go home. Not an opportunity our UK government is willing to risk.