White African

During Christmas and New Year Season I needed my body to be heated up. The travelling plans that I had intended did not work out. In the last minute I ended up in Sharm El Sheikh on the southern tip of Sinai Desert. Il Mercato, Hadaba, Sharm El Sheikh A rather strange place. Here everything is plastic. It has all been build for touristical purposes. The Egyptians you will meet have travelled far away to come to work here in the tourist industry. Before it was only a small fishing village, but it has long been evaporated by hotels and resorts. A white man enjoying life? - Behind one of many all inclusive resorts I will not say that I regretted to have gone. It turned out to be a very interesting experience. All of Sharm El Sheikh is a modern oasis. An oasis is an artificial place made with a huge use of water and money. So everything cost something. You cannot just wander around. Every piece of beach is property of somebody and they will charge you to enter. This is the rea...

Today is my 10 years anniversary. Exactly 10 years ago I came to Africa for the first time. In Arusha I was looking up in the Tanzanian sky. I saw millions of stars. Cristal clear. I think that I can say that I had never before seen such beautiful sight. It was as if I had a close up of the Milky way. I was night aften night amased because it was never cloudy - always clear. BUT there was none of stars that I could remember from my childhood. Not a single star formation. Everything was alian. Nothing at all ressembled my previous life. This vision of the Tanzanian sky has become a symbol of my African experience. I was a child again and had to start over. I had to gain new experiences and skills. In the beginning it was like a detective novel, but during the years I accepted what I had already read in Kapuscinskis books: That Africa will never become a habit. She will always be a condition, and therefor you cannot understand Africa but you can be Africa. In the same way as you let th...

We do not care about African music. We do not give a damn about Africa. It is only if a white man goes to Africa that we will care. In the latest issue of Udvikling (Denmarks Global Magasin) published by the Danish Foreign Ministry there is an article about Mzungu Kichaa written by Jan Kjær. But why suddenly this interest in East African music? There has been so many opportunities to write articles about African music. Only when a white man plays African music will we like to hear about it. When black men and women play their music, it is NO story at all, but when a white man adapt African music it becomes a GOOD story. Through reading the article you will discover that the only reason Jan Kjær has come to know about Muzungu Kichaa is from concerts given in white ghetto hang outs in Dar Es Salaam. So here we go againg; the only story from Africa worth telling is the story about a white man playing African music in the white ghetto. So sad that our interest in African music ...

Another white african , the photo communicator Pernille Bærentsen has written a review of Afrikablog . She calls it Africa light . They, Afrikablog, claim to do Africa right as opposed to U-landsnyt ? We don't really know. Many have worked with development, and we wanted to make Africa bright. To put Africa in the spot light, so we could see Africa. But enlightenment is also a biased perspective. I prefere the darkness. The fuggy dust over the desert. Blurry contours of storytelling. Here is no right and wrong, nor truth or lies. Only billions of stories that will fuck with your analytic worldview. None of the stories seem to make any sense, but they are, what they are – stories, perspectives of life, footsteps of experience, traces and marks – all equally important for crasping the world we live in.   In development work we believed that sending volunteers to Africa would make a difference and change our understanding of Africa. A similar idea seem to have influenced Afrikablo...

Since I first stepped on East African soil I will always miss looking up into the Tanzanian sky with star formations that I will never comprehend, because there is nothing there that remind me of my childhood. I will always miss the shores of Victoria Lake in Kisumu, in Mwanza, in Entebbe, in Ggaba, in Munyunyo. I will always miss Nairobi - and I shall never forget how well I was always recieved in Kampala - and so I will always return to my African home. Happy Easter to all of you.

One evening I am in a surburb of Copenhagen. I have seen an half bad theatre performance with a friend. She is a brillant artist - and a very sweet person whom I am addicted to share thoughts with. We have just seen a play about insanity. So she askes me if I think I am insane. After a few days I know the answer. I am not insane - but I always feel alienated. I never feel that I am part of something. Maybe I have said this many times. I did not understand it before I went to Africa. Africa made me realise many things about myself. I could never have become myself without Africa. I am always outside something, never inside. On that evening after seeing the play I was talking about who to talk to and the many situations of feeling misunderstood or just not understood at all. Maybe this has nothing to do with Africa?