Poverty Tourism

The story of the honeymooning bride who was abducted by strangers in a South African township and murdered haunts me. It is a horrible story. This morning I am saddened by her supposed wish to see "the real Africa."

I will never set foot in Africa, with the possible exception of Tunisia, and then only with a lot of care and planning. Conversations with African priests and nuns have led me to believe that Africa is no continent for a woman, especially a foreign woman like me. I read term papers by a Congolese priest who detailed how his female parishioners have been raped so often, they no longer have control over their excretory functions. One African nun I know works hard for women in her own country where no man, not even a priest, respects women. There was once a papal commission examining the problem of African priests raping African nuns. I wrote about this--and my experience of being hit on by an African priest in Germany*--in my book, but I was advised to take it out. It didn't work with the book's sunny tone, and it might leave me open to charges of guess what.

It frightens me how women are so terrified of being thought racist that they will take risks they would never take otherwise. For example, there is the Scary Guy Gets On the Elevator issue. If a Scary Guy of your own race gets on your elevator, your gut says "Get off," and you get off. If a Scary Guy of another race gets on your elevator, your gut says "Get off" and your anti-racist training says "But what if that's racist?" Hopefully your anti-rape training screams back, "Who the **** cares what some Scary Guy thinks? Get the **** off the elevator!"

I've read a lot about rape and South Africa, and according to everything I've ever read, South Africa is the rape capital of the world. In South Africa, 64,000 woman and children are raped each year. South African women are three times more likely to be raped than women in the USA. Even babies are raped, and sometimes they die.

While watching the scenes of the World Cup and all the incredibly patronizing cooing over "the Rainbow Nation," I noticed that there wasn't much talk about South Africa being the rape capital of the world. There were heartwarming scenes of small black children playing football, of colourful dances, of dives with cheering fans, even of pretty prostitutes telling reporters that they expected trade to improve. And now I understand celebrity chefs have got in on the romance of plucky South Africa, extolling township grilles. No wonder poor Anni Dewani wanted to get in touch with her inner Graham Greene.

The tourism industry has a lot to answer for. To leave Africa aside for a moment, Canadians flock to Mexico every winter, completely oblivious to the fact that Mexico is an incredibly violent, dangerous country. Canadians react in shock year after year to news of yet another murdered Canadian or Canadian couple on holiday in Mexico, despite DFAIT advisories that Mexico is a dangerous country. When I worked for DFAIT, grilling passport applicants, I used to tell the Mexico-bound myself. They were usually surprised. Tour guides rarely stress how freaking dangerous a place is; it's bad for business.

My fellow blogger Andrew Cusack went to South Africa for a year and survived. However, I don't think Andrew wandered around looking for "the real Africa." If Andrew wandered anywhere, it was in someone's villa in search of a gin-and-tonic. A South African guy in Toronto told me "Afrikaans is the language of the oppressor"; for Andrew Cusack, Afrikaans seems to be the language of gin-and-tonic.

Anyway, that's my rant. Impoverished communities are not safe places for foreign tourists to gawk at the poor and revel in their colourful ways. A Jesuit pal of mine told me that where he served in Jamaica he was called "Father" years before he was ordained because the only white men who ever came to that area were priests. And I think that is just fine. Unless you are serving the foreign poor, you have no reason to be hanging with the foreign poor. And, incidentally, my Jesuit pal's Jesuit supervisor was murdered in his Jamaican rectory, shot through the chest. He wasn't a tourist, that man. He knew exactly how dangerous Jamaica was, but he stayed to serve, and frankly, I think that makes him a martyr.

Update: By the way, colonialism no doubt sucked, but the fact that it existed (and no doubt still exists) doesn't make men rapists. Choosing to rape makes men rapists. Meanwhile, I would love it if my South African reader would offer her thoughts in the com box, especially if to tell me that I'm totally wrong.

Update 2: Not that Scotland is perfect. I was not happy to find myself alone after dark in Glasgow with a papal flag and a rolled up picture of the Pope. On the one hand, Edinburgh people are overly nasty about Glasgow. On the other, Glasgow. So I prayed like crazy to the now Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman to lead my footsteps to the train station, and he did. Yay!

*I've met a lot of African priests, and he was the only one who ever did so.