Africasplaining Is A Thing That Happens

The other day, I made some chapati, pilau and stew for dinner and posted it on my Instagram because I don't usually cook that lavishly on a daily basis with no reason. While composing the caption, I got the idea for this blog post because really it was this or have a really long caption on Instagram.

Nobody wants to read a blog post on Instagram, they're there for the pictures, right? So here we are.

Anyway, when I was writing Cinderella By Any Other Name, I had a beta reader tell me that I had gotten the food wrong.

That the protagonist's wedding was full of Indian food. That's because the guests were eating chapati, samosas, mahamri, among other things. Now when I saw that, my first instinct was to burst out laughing because what? You're literally telling me what people in my own country eat?

But then I asked myself, "Hey Annemarie, did you tell her that you were a Kenyan?"

And the answer to that was "No." 

I just assumed she knew since I found her on Instagram.

I guess we all know what they say about assumptions.

Food connects us. Indians and Arabs have been trading with the East African coast since medieval times. So a lot of what is known as Swahili Dishes by us here may be known as Indian food elsewhere. It's like the mystery of Mexican Beans and Rice which is very similar to African Beans and Rice. Where's the connection? My guess would be slavery.

This food thing, had me thinking about other instances where I was told by people from 'away' what was 'normal' for my region in my story. For example, another beta reader, for In Search of Paradise, told me that it was unrealistic for one of my heroes, Ben, to be a rugby player and also intellectually advantaged. Because he was a "jock" he couldn't also be a "nerd".

I don't think I need to tell you where that beta reader was from.

And so I had to explain that, "No, where I come from, the people who excel in sports - especially rugby - are also the brightest students. I know one actual rugby player who is also an actuary. And then I was thinking about why that is. Why are the brightest students also the sportsmen here, while in America, you cannot be both?

And what it comes down to is opportunity. 

In Kenya, the best sports-equipped schools with the best coaches and whatnot, are also the same schools which do well academically. However good you are at sports, you cannot rely on it to make a living. The backup is always a good education - so both things are valued. In the States, as long as you're good at sports, you're given a pass academically. Also for many of the economically disadvantaged, playing a sport is perceived as the only way out of poverty. So those people might not have the best schools in their districts but they can play football, or basketball or baseball use that as a ticket to a better school/university/life.

And so the myth grows that you can be either/or but you certainly can't be both.

The other major incident I remember of being corrected about my own fucking culture was when I saw one of the writers I was following was writing a book and they posted a snippet on Twitter. One of the creatures was named after a Kiswahili word but the way that he'd used it was wrong within that context. So I told him the correct way to do it.

He asked me for my sources.

So I say, "Me. I'm the source since I speak that language."

But, he says, "according to my research, this is how to write it. Do you have any conflicting resources?" So I sent him all the links still quite shocked that I don't qualify as a credible source for a language that I speak.

I tried not to take it personally but it still shocks me. I don't have to tell you what race or what country he was from, do I?

What all this comes down to is that there is one more type of 'splaining that is severely underestimated. That is telling Africans what actually happens in their own continent. The saddest part is that other Africans will also tend to accept that foreigners are better sources of information about themselves than they are. The other day, when Obama's brother sent that quickly debunked tweet about Obama's birth certificate, I replied that the man trying to retweet it as proof of something (I'm not sure what) should have just first read the replies to save himself some embarrassment.

So some other #MAGAT replied to my tweet with baseless justifications about why the tweet could be true. I laughed and congratulated him for Kenyasplaining my own country's history to me. And what do you know? Some Kenyan man came to the MAGAT's defence in my mentions. 

This lends credence to my theory that men are natural idiots, but that's a blog post for another day.