Nobody in America really knows or cares about South Africa. We all just have a sort of paternalistic affinity for a story we think ended well. And we have a dead symbol.
When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that one day, we black people would take over South Africa and get all of its gold and diamonds and we'd be so strong and powerful that white people all over the world would repsect and fear us. That idea stayed in my head, unaltered for so long that I found myself lying about it for no reason in high school. I told one of my prep schoolmates that I had been to Cape Town. I hadn't of course, but I had imagined myself there with a house overlooking the city. There's a lot of fantastic romance surrounding Nelson Mandela and South Africa. So all the foof around his death is familiar to me.
Read more: http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2013/12/obligatory-seriousness-on-nelson-mandela.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FBWZR+%28Cobb%29
When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that one day, we black people would take over South Africa and get all of its gold and diamonds and we'd be so strong and powerful that white people all over the world would repsect and fear us. That idea stayed in my head, unaltered for so long that I found myself lying about it for no reason in high school. I told one of my prep schoolmates that I had been to Cape Town. I hadn't of course, but I had imagined myself there with a house overlooking the city. There's a lot of fantastic romance surrounding Nelson Mandela and South Africa. So all the foof around his death is familiar to me.
Read more: http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2013/12/obligatory-seriousness-on-nelson-mandela.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FBWZR+%28Cobb%29