Please? The African Savannah?
Isn't there any other locale of interest besides the Savannah? It's only the cradle of civilization.
Isn't there a kind of person, native to Africa whose stature isn't some vaguely humanoid stretched-thin-and-tall dark shadow holding a spear? Do all people in Africa live in straw huts.
Largely, the other-ized african continent is one of sub-human primal activity. It's seen especially in the historical understanding of those belonging to indigenous tribes.
Take, for example, Ota Benga, pictured below.
This picture is taken from the 1906 Bronx zoo exhibit, where he was costumed and displayed this way. (Okay Doug, I know this isn't contemporary, but I read about this and it's so outrageous I had to blog post up a storm) Though he was able to, and later did, learn english, he was not taught it until he was freed from the park. Thus, unable to speak the language of his new location and estranged from his home, a tribe of pygmies native to the Congo, he was displayed amid animals, originally called The Missing Link. I know I go off on Conrad, but this is some seriously other-ized victim of colonization, or what Said would call, Orientalism. The insistence that other cultures are unlike in a subsidiary way to white, western-european cultures. And that what they are, is actually not a question anymore of what the are but what they aren't. What Ota Benga isn't, is an average sized-english-speaking-white-american. Therefore he is mystical, primal, and unusual. Thoughts on Benga? Other-ized African culture? Zoos?
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