Fear of a black planet: anarchy anxieties and postcolonial travel to Africa

Abstract

Western travel to Africa has historically involved the construction and consumption of African otherness. In the postcolonial era this is most clearly evident in Western tourism to the continent, where Africa is frequently marketed as an exoticised destination to see and consume both ‘nature’ and ‘native’. The Western tourist gaze often requires fixing Africans, both in a spatial site (‘village’) and a temporal site (‘tradition’). Africans on the move (both spatially and temporally) are often seen as threatening to the Western‐established images of Africa, which are grounded in a long‐standing fear of ‘unorded’ and ‘chaotic’ African space. After 11 September and the USA's ‘war on terror’ retributive response, the political implications of these fears are evinced in the writings of Robert Kaplan and his popular ‘coming anarchy’ thesis. The article concludes with a critique of Kaplan's work and a discussion of its implications for Africa and African international relations.

Notes

Kevin C Dunn is in the Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, NY 14456–3997, USA. Email: [email protected].

‘Britain lifts flights ban to Nairobi’, The Monitor (Kampala), 27 June 2003, pp 1–2.

In the wake of the USA's 2003 war on Iraq, Robert Kaplan published ‘Supremacy by stealth’, Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003, pp 66–83. In this article Kaplan laid out his 10 rules for how the USA should successfully manage its global empire.

For a more sustained examination of these events and their implications, see Kevin C Dunn, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity, New York: Palgrave, 2003 (esp ch 2).

Joan W Scott, ‘“Experience” ’ in Judith Butler & Joan W Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge, 1992, p 37.

Edward W Said, Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1978.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, New York: Harper and Row, 1984.

Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/decoding’ in Hall et al Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, 1980.

Quoted in Dorothy Hammond & Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa, Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1992, p 24.

Henry M Stanley, The Congo and the Founding of its Free State, Vol I, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1885, p 93.

Ibid, p 134.

Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, p 63.

Robert Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy: how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet’, Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, p 59.

WW Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, p 416.

Ibid, pp 39–45.

Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989.

Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p 63.

Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Schocken Books, 1976, pp 8–9.

D Anderson & R Grove, ‘The scramble for Eden: past, present, and future in African conservation’, in Anderson & Grove (eds), Conservation in Africa: People, Policies, and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p 4.

James Igoe, ‘Roadblocks to community conservation in Tanzania: a case study from Simanjiro District’, Working Paper No 218, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1999, p 11.

Ibid, p 4.

Ibid, p 12.

Terence Ranger, ‘Great spaces washed with sun: the Matopos and Uluru compared’, in K Darian‐Smith et al (eds), Text, Theory, Space, London: Routledge, 1996, p 161.

Joost Fontein, ‘unesco, heritage and Africa: an anthropological critique of world heritage’, Occasional Paper No 80, Centre of African Studies, Edinburgh University, 2000, pp 21, 62.

TA Singleton, ‘The slave trade remembered on the former Gold and Slave Coasts’, Slavery and Abolition, 20 (1), 1999, p 158.

EM Bruner, ‘Tourism in Ghana: the representation of slavery and the return of the black diaspora’, American Anthropologist, 98 (2), 1996, p 291.

Time, 12 September 1960, p 29.

Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, New York: Random House, 1996.

Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy’, p 48.

Ibid, p 73.

Ibid, p 46.

Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford: James Currey, 1996.

Simon Dalby, ‘Reading Robert Kaplan’s “The coming anarchy” ', in Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby & Paul Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader, New York: Routledge, 1998, p 199.

Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy’, pp 60, 62, emphasis added.

Ibid, p 45.

Ibid, p 76.

Ibid, p 46.

Ibid.

Ibid, p 62.

Dalby, ‘Reading Robert Kaplan’s “The coming anarchy” ', p 200.

Ibid, p 197.

Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy’, p 54, emphasis in original.

Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth, p 7.

Stanley, The Congo, pp 482–484.

VS Naipaul, In a Free State, New York: Vintage, 1971.

Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy’, pp 60–63.

Dalby, ‘Reading Robert Kaplan’s “The coming anarchy” ', p 201.

Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest, p xiv.

Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p 58.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin C Dunn

Kevin C Dunn is in the Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, NY 14456–3997, USA. Email: [email protected].