P. 6 HORAS LECTIVAS/5 HORAS TUTORÍAS INFORMACIÓN Y COMUNICACIÓN

Youth workers and young people in this study expressed feelings that ‘going to Africa has a power’ (Ed, Youth Worker). In particular, several well-worn tropes structured imaginaries of a homogenised ‘Africa’: exotic adventure, risk, danger and disease, a space filled with material poverty and need, but also authentic community and virtuous people. And in all these, Africa is imagined as a space for the western subject to act - as illustrated in the vignette below:

Zimbabwe Pre-Trip Briefing Meeting: March 2013

Youth and parents sit in a wonky circle in a back room of the church. There’s an air of anticipation as Emma, the youth worker, describes the itinerary. Ripples of excitement run around the room at the mention of the ‘animal encounters’ in a game reserve, and plans to paint a school and run a children’s activity camp. Emma shows two videos. The first is promotional video from the company who are helping to facilitate our trip. It’s pretty cheesy, with epic backing music and references to

‘the African skies’. Most of the footage features white volunteers, and there are plenty of safari scenes. It ends with ‘see you in Africa!’. The second is a video about a mission hospital we might visit. The video opens by saying ‘There are lots of stories. This is one of redemption, hope…’. It outlines the good works and the resource needs of the hospital, peppered with rather grandiose statements about ‘the people of Zimbabwe’ as worthy but needy. It wraps up with the invitation to

volunteer as ‘your chance to write a chapter’. The last part of the meeting is focused on practical questions. One of the parents asks ‘do we need the rabies injection?’, and Emma says yes. This causes a mild panic. Some young men exclaim ‘WHAT?!’ - and - ‘there’s wild dogs in Africa, fam!’. One young woman semi-wails ‘but there is only one hospital!’ Emma corrects her with a puzzled laugh, saying ‘of course there’s more than one hospital!’, but it’s not hard to trace this concern back to watching the hospital appeal video, which contained a dramatic line about how at one time there was only ‘one doctor’ there.

These stereotypes are not unexpected, however, they were incredibly pervasive in this research, and thus they deserve attention. Later, some of these ideas were fractured, but in anticipation of the trips, young people’s imaginations were overwhelmingly framed by imaginaries of a singular entity of Africa as closer to

‘nature’ and in need of external ‘care’. This confirms the salience of commentary on the idea of ‘saving Africa’, as having a vigorous power in contemporary culture, and structuring volunteer tourism initiatives. This imaginary is strongly racialised, with blackness linked to essentialised visions of Africa as the site of ‘suffering-poverty-resilience-beauty’ (Mathers, 2010; Darnell, 2007; Schwarz, 2015).

In this project, imaginaries of needy Africa were not only reflective of popular humanitarianism, but also central to the narrative of the transformation of young subjects through volunteer tourism. For instance, the care for young children was key to youth worker’s ideas of the power of trips. The affective responses of children were seen to be both a motivation to work and tangible evidence of a ‘sense of achievement’ in the hope to foster volunteer’s subjectivities.

Children follow you around everywhere, and they were so excited… [it]

really inspired our young people… Right, we’re only here for two weeks, lets do the best we can do … They didn’t want to let the children down.

(Rashid, Youth Worker)

Poverty is set up as an important phenomenon to be encountered. Staged - but deeply emotive - encounters with abjectly poor conditions were anticipated to prompt a visceral sense of comparative privilege, which would then fuel more hard

working and aspirational subjectivities. In the early stages of planning the Kingsfield trip, Emma was trying to decide whether to take the group to Zimbabwe or South Africa, and raised concerns that South Africa would be ‘too luxurious’, leading to a charged discussion with a South African friend over the idea that an ‘authentic African’ experience should be associated with poverty. In more explicit fashion, Springboard trips to Kenya included a visit to a community living on a rubbish dump. With uncomfortable transparency, adults expressed hopes that direct, embodied and sensory experience of poverty would play a key role in ‘moving’

young subjects away from ‘ingratitude’ and ‘selfishness’:

Instantly, they are shocked by the poverty… I think it flicks a switch where you stop thinking about ‘me me me’, and you start thinking […] What can I do to make a difference?.... There is something… deeply profound about seeing other humans in suffering. And you can watch it on TV and ignore it… but when you are out there, and you smell it, and you touch it, and you come home covered in dirt, it’s real.

(Jason, Youth Worker)

[The Kenyan residents] all dancing and singing on the dump […] You can’t help but have your thinking tested…. ‘So you think your life is shit.

What about theirs?’ You know, you don’t even have to ask that question…

It’s in your face. You’re living, breathing it. Smelling it.

(Martin, Business Supporter)

Martin’s emphasis on the life-affirming performances on the dumpsite highlights that imaginaries of Africa as poor were often expressed through a trope of the

‘happy poor’. The problematic ways this obscures structural understandings of poverty (Crossley, 2012; Simpson, 2004) will be further explored in later chapters.

However, prior to the trip, the idea of encountering ‘happiness’ in poverty indicated strong imaginaries of Africa as virtuous. Young people contrasted their idea of

‘authentic’ community in Africa, characterised by kinship and respect, to the UK.

These romantic visions featured strongly in young people’s pre-trip narratives, often co-existing with negative imaginaries of poverty, risk and corruption:

I’m like, fascinated and amazed by the culture and community… and how…. everyone just looks out for each other, and even if they’ve got so little, they are just so happy […] despite, you know, the government, being… quite corrupt…

(Sarah, Hackney)

Coexisting with views of Africa as defined by poverty, these ideas of ‘African virtue’

see travel to Africa as holding an idealised moral charge which will play a part in catalysing transformation. Some emphasised the innocence of society abroad where UK young people could ‘just be kids again’ drawing on visions of Africa as

‘traditional’ and ‘natural’ (Mathers, 2010). Religious individuals focused on being inspired by Africa as a space of fervent Christian religiosity, and international mobility holding the potential for a deepening of religiosity. The way that

transnational Christian religiosity provided a forum to negotiate the meanings of the trips will be explored in Chapter 6. For others there was an inspirational force to pan-African pride: as one second-generation Nigerian youth worker said: ‘Kenya was Africa. Africa has this thing about it […] especially for the black young guys who came. […] they know they come from Africa’ (Ade, Youth Worker). ‘Positive’

ideas of inspiration are often still based on homogenising views of Africa which ignore specific histories in favour of the idea of Africa as blackness, further explored in Chapter 6.

Imaginaries of Africa as exotic and risky also played into anticipated journeys of transformation. Youth workers framed ‘our adventures in Africa’ (Gary, Youth Worker), as epitomising challenge, achievement and responsibility. Young people expressed apprehension and fear about disease, ‘the animals, and the insects […]

lizards everywhere, and snakes…’ (Diana, Hackney), or had ideas of the strange, disturbing cultural habits they might encounter, such as ‘eating monkeys’ (Richie, Hackney) in ‘uncivilised’ places (Matt, Roehampton). Again, these drew on particularly strong representational links between Africa and wildlife, but

imaginaries of exotic wildness were overlaid onto all ‘developing country’ contexts, as captured - almost farcically - by one young woman anxiously asking me,

completely in earnest, ‘are there crocodiles in Romania?’ prior to a voluntary trip

there. This confirms the centrality of risk to volunteer tourism, engaged as a phenomenon to be consumed, controlled, marketed, and used in identity work (Ansell, 2008). In this case, the framing of risk played into an imagined journey of gaining ‘responsibility’ and hard work. Engaging in ‘risky’ volunteer tourism becomes a channel to sidestep being labelled ‘risky’ or ‘at risk’ for working-class youth. As Rashid (Youth Worker) expressed, simply ‘going to Africa’ was seen by many as:

… a massive achievement… their parents… were quite apprehensive in terms of like… that you could possibly get ill… things that could happen....

so to have them show… I’m old enough and responsible enough to go out there…

(Rashid, Youth Worker)

In these multifaceted imaginaries of Africa - as an object of care, as the locus of shocking poverty, inherent virtue or challenging risk - there was an almost complete lack of interest in the history, politics or simply factual knowledge of African nations.

A few weeks prior to the trip to Kenya I was invited by a journalist friend to a media briefing about the (tense) upcoming elections there. I hastily scribbled notes, feeling anxious about my ignorance. Later that day I went to Springboard and was struck by the huge disjuncture between the briefing and the jokes been bandied around about lions. Depoliticisation and dehistoricisation pave the way for legitimising Africa as a space of action. Young volunteers of all different heritages (including many second-generation West African youth) to a large extent adopted such imaginaries of Africa.

Depersonalising imaginaries of Africa wrap their way even around ostensibly human interactions. For instance, one youth worker expressed his feeling of the power of the trip as linked to the fact: ‘you’ve got zebras outside your window…

And then you… become like the pied piper… there were just mounds of Zambian children….!’ (Matthew, Youth Worker). This ironically sinister portrayal (given the story of the pied piper) of the colonial relation of ‘care’, presents of a mass of depersonalised human life side by side with images of animal exoticism. These visions cast the continent of Africa as blank slate (of nature, or needs to be met),

where volunteer tourism is ‘no harm and all good’, as uncomfortably expressed below:

I think it’s irrelevant the work we do there. I think whatever work we can do there is great. It’s a small little set up, and it needs all the help it can get. And if we can go there and do something… then let’s bloody do it!

(Tom, Business Mentor)

Having looked at the problematic spatial imaginaries of ‘home’ and ‘away’ in turn, I explain how these two imaginaries are interlinked.