Many Peace Corps volunteers, myself included, coming from an environment and concern of US racism, run across skin whitening of various sorts from photo processing, to clearly unhealthful bleach, to commercial cosmetics. We balk. In my host country there was plenty of talk of colonialism and passively offered accusations. Generally they were of questionable substantiality. In this case though, from an American perspective, the “colonial” and “neocolonialist” influence is deceivingly easy to deride. Today, danah boyd has offered me an intriguing perspective on skin whitening.
It was just out of curiosity so I can’t remember what all I read but I remembered being startled by the class-based histories of artificial skin coloring, having expected it to be all about race. Apparently, tanning grew popular with white folks earlier in the 20th century to mark leisure and money. If you could be tan in winter, it showed that you had the resources to go to a warm climate. If you could be tan in summer, it showed that you weren’t stuck in the factories for work…That we can’t see it simply in light of race, but as a complex interplay between race, class, and geography.
Its true. I never heard any East African rail against skin whitening. It is a tempting target but probably a nonissue in a different cultural context. This clash between Indian branch of Vasoline brand and the US reminds me of another cultural chasm brought into contrast by the social internet: the Makmende meme.
Ethan Zuckerman wrote about how Wikipedians adamantly wanted to erase the article for Makmende as it didn’t seem relevant or significant. As the meme crossed Kenyan blogs it was quite notable in those circles but not reachable by the average westerner wikipedia editors.
These kinds of misunderstandings rarely reach us in the US, especially not as we sit down at our computers. They greet and grate on volunteers and international workers constantly–Pretty much whenever they walk out the door of their comfy homes.
Unsmilingly photogenic. Did you think honest portraits required smiles?
Are there any more examples of Cultural Collisions that you’ve seen recently?
At the midpoint of my service I took a vacation to visit Uganda where a fledgling American-Ugandan startup incubator Appfrica had been working with local NGOs and the regionally famous Makerere University to enable computer science graduates there to find opportunities to build in their country. In the past month, they’ve been rightly and brightly acclaimed by the BBC and New York Times, TED, among many others in the tech community. I’ve also watched hugely successful, grassroots technology Bar Camp “unconferences” in Kenya and Ghana.
Tanzania, despite being admirably peaceful, has not yet achieved much in the ICT field. The reaction to the recent fiber installation has been muted. Its labor market is different too. Where only 10% of Uganda’s Makerere Computer Science graduates get jobs, Peace Corps Tanzania hasn’t been able to hire a single qualified ICT manager for its offices in six months of desperate searching. It is clear Tanzania is still scaling up its labor pool where the other countries nearby are ready to be leveraged. To me this means that Education has a lot of untapped potential. It is a very big country. Its education system was long neglected by colonialists, was always several orders of magnitude smaller than neighbors, and it is often hamstrung by bureaucracy but it is just now starting to explode.
Even through their short 2yr careers volunteer colleagues teaching A-Level have seen amazing improvements in students. Though many are failing, these are indications quality are starting to trend up. There have been challenges, like the Ministry’s poor scheduling that has resulted in empty colleges more than half the year but last week new syllabi were released which leaves me with hope that they at least realize the problems.
I intend to come back to USA for at least the next four months but after that I’m not sure. I’d like to help and work on these issues if the right opportunity appears. Judging from the relative noise on Twitter TZ vs. Twitter .UG, .KE, ICT4D members, there is so little work being done here, esp in TZ, I think my unique cultural experience and connections might enable me to foster something pretty neat.
By the way, here is one of the few neat TZ projects–NoPC, a British thin-client+cell net initiative for secondary schools instead of Teachers Colleges.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=72a9707e-b1fa-472d-ba13-8cbc339b2e7e)
Recent Comments