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Taylor Swift Is Dreaming Of A Very White Africa : Goats and Soda The video for
her new song, "Wildest Dreams," conjures up a colonial-era Africa of magnificent
landscapes, beautiful animals — and virtually no black Africans.


GOATS AND SODA

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OPINION


GOATS AND SODA


TAYLOR SWIFT IS DREAMING OF A VERY WHITE AFRICA

September 1, 20153:43 PM ET

By 

Viviane Rutabingwa

, 

James Kassaga Arinaitwe

Enlarge this image

In the video for "Wildest Dreams," Taylor Swift is all decked out in African
colonial-era style. YouTube hide caption

toggle caption
YouTube


In the video for "Wildest Dreams," Taylor Swift is all decked out in African
colonial-era style.

YouTube

The video for American singer Taylor Swift's new song "Wildest Dreams" has been
viewed more than 10 million times in the two days since it debuted.

The video was shot in Africa and California.

This essay reflects the opinions of the authors, Viviane Rutabingwa and James
Kassaga Arinaitwe.

Rutabingwa was born in Nairobi, Kenya, at the twilight of the Ugandan civil war
to Ugandan parents. After completing her higher education in public health, she
joined the Global Health Corps (GHC) and spent a year working as a Policy
Support Officer in a maternal and child health project in rural western Uganda.
In 2014, together with a team of three Ugandans and GHC Alumni, Viviane founded
A Place For Books — an initiative to empower local communities by supporting
village/town libraries across rural Uganda to advocate for literature.

Arinaitwe grew up in rural Uganda. He lost his parents and four siblings to
infectious diseases — AIDS, measles, malaria — and to cancer. He was raised by
his grandmother, who sent him on a 300-mile bus journey when he was 11 to seek
financial help from the president to cover his secondary school fees. With help
from the first lady, he continued his education and went on to attend Florida
State University. Since graduating, he has worked to help at-risk youth in
Uganda and has been a 2012-13 Global Health Corps Fellow and a New Voices Fellow
at the Aspen Institute as well.

In it, we see two beautiful white people falling in love while surrounded by
vast expanses of beautiful African landscapes and beautiful animals — a lion, a
giraffe, a zebra.

Taylor Swift is dressed as a colonial-era woman on African soil. With just a few
exceptions, the cast in the video — the actors playing her boyfriend and a movie
director and his staff — all appear to be white.

We are shocked to think that in 2015, Taylor Swift, her record label and her
video production group would think it was OK to film a video that presents a
glamorous version of the white colonial fantasy of Africa. Of course, this is
not the first time that white people have romanticized colonialism: See Louis
Vuitton's 2014 campaign, Ernest Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro, the 1962 film
Lawrence of Arabia and of course Karen Blixen's memoir Out of Africa.



But it still stings.


GOATS AND SODA


THE DIRECTOR OF THE TAYLOR SWIFT VIDEO DEFENDS HIS WORK

Here are some facts for Swift and her team: Colonialism was neither romantic nor
beautiful. It was exploitative and brutal. The legacy of colonialism still lives
quite loudly to this day. Scholars have argued that poor economic performance,
weak property rights and tribal tensions across the continent can be traced to
colonial strategies. So can other woes. In a place full of devastation and
lawlessness, diseases spread like wildfire, conflict breaks out and dictators
grab power.

Swift's "Wildest Dreams" are a visual representation of what the Kenyan author
Binyavanga Wainaina writes about in his Granta Magazine essay, "How to Write
About Africa."

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with
rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are
starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't
get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries,
900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and
emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles,
highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about
all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular."

YouTube

Why be encumbered with the African people or show them in your "Wildest Dreams"
video when they are busy mutilating each other and their genitals?

The bigger problem is that many Americans have never had an African history
lesson. So we don't totally blame Taylor Swift, but the people behind the video
should have done a little more research. They should have wondered how Africans
would react.

To those of us from the continent who had parents or grandparents who lived
through colonialism (and it can be argued in some cases are still living through
it), this nostalgia that privileged white people have for colonial Africa is
awkwardly confusing to say the least and offensive to say the most. Allison
Swank in her critique of the 1985 movie Out of Africa explains it well when she
considers the character of Karen Blixen, portrayed by Meryl Streep: "The
nostalgia her character creates for a time when an elegant, strong white woman
could run a farm in Africa covers up the ugliness of that [colonial] idea. It
undermines key colonial truths, like the fact that her 'strength,' or privilege,
relies on the colonial order."



Across the continent, we are in the middle of an exciting African boom and a
technological and leadership renaissance of sorts, led by the children and
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the formerly colonized and enslaved.
Waterfalls and mountains and majestic animals do not represent a full picture of
our homelands.

Swift's music is entertaining for many. She should absolutely be able to use any
location as a backdrop. But she packages our continent as the backdrop for her
romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline, and she sets the video
in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized
and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic.

And then she decided to donate the proceeds from advertisements linked to her
video to the charity African Parks Foundation of America. If you travel to some
of Africa's parks, you'll see the rangers and guides are black Africans.

So why not show them in the video?

James Kassaga Arinaitwe is an Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow and a Global
Fellow at Acumen. He worked as a special projects manager at LabourNet, an
organization in Bangalore, India, that seeks to improve the lives of workers. He
tweets @JamesArinaitwe

Viviane Rutabingwa is a public health professional with a focus on the uninsured
and refugees. She is a Global Health Corps alumni and a founding member of A
Place For Books. She tweets @Rootsi

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