Survivor: Africa

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 9 DECEMBER 2001

AFRICA IS A big place. How big is Africa? Oh, it’s very big. It is bigger than, say, Milwaukee. It is bigger than disco ever was. It is bigger than you and it is bigger than me. It is bigger than both of us put together. People who say foolish things like “It’s a small world” need only spend a day with a WeedEater, trying to mow Africa, to realise precisely how foolish a thing that is to say.

I think we can agree that Africa is a big place. Still, as big as it is, 10 minutes of watching Survivor: Africa (SABC3, Tuesdays, 7pm) is enough to suggest that it is not big enough.

Survivor: Africa does what the combined tourist authorities of the African continent cannot do at the moment: it brings a group of Americans to a place in Africa that is not Cape Town. Specifically, it brings them to an especially arid stretch of savannah in a Kenyan game park.

You know it’s Kenya because there is footage of Masai warriors leaping in the air in the traditional dance of welcome. You know it’s the savannah because one of the Americans mentioned being in the jungle, and whenever Americans talk about the jungle, they always mean the savannah.

Americans, when they are away from home, can make the world seem like an awfully small place. Not all Americans, admittedly, are like the American with whom I once shared a luncheon table on a cruise boat on the upper Nile. (The Nile, incidentally, is also in Africa, although I had to spend several increasingly surreal hours trying to convince the American of that fact.)

This American lady at lunch stared dolefully out of the wide picture window, just as the grand ruins of the temple of Edfu came floating into view, slow and shimmering like a mirage left over from a thousand years ago.

“Don’t you just get sick of these old rocks?” said the American lady, without the hint of a smile.

It is the kind of story that people usually make up about Americans, but it really happened. Not all Americans are like that lunching lady, but when they are, there are few cultural experiences more primally gratifying than banding together to laugh at them. Ordinarily when we laugh at them, Americans don’t say much in reply: they just hold up a dollar bill, and we blush and fall silent and shuffle away to watch some rugby. Which is why Survivor: Africa is such a boon and a godsend: not only have we American tourists to laugh at, but we have American tourists in a position where their money cannot help them.

From the moment in the first episode when a contestant scanned the savannah like Alan Quartermain in sunscreen and neatly pressed khakis from JC Penney and said, “This is Africa, man, this is the jungle. There are lions and tigers and bears out there,” I knew we were in for a treat.

This week the poor saps had to drink beakers of warm cow’s blood, fresh tapped from the vein by willing Masai. It is one of East Africa’s most stirring traditions that the Masai herdsmen shun their greens and steaks, living on a steady diet of blood and milk. Personally I have never quite recovered from the occasion on the plains of Tanzania when I wandered past a thorn tree and came across a couple of amiable Masai munching on a peanut butter sandwich, but I am all for a stirring tradition.

The Yanks actually did quite well when it came to drinking the blood. Better than, say, I would have done. It was a little disappointing.

We were on firmer ground watching them throw away their vats of drinking water because they were too heavy to carry on a forced march.

“Ho ho,” we said, down at the Chalk ’n Cue. And also: “Stupid Americans.” We even slapped each other on the back. And how we hooted as we watched them try to make fire by rubbing twigs or clacking rocks together.

“These Americans know nothing!” gurgled Porky Withers happily.

“Ho ho,” we agreed.

Ordinarily someone would have produced two twigs or a pair of rocks and invited Porky Withers to demonstrate precisely how fire should be made, but we were having too much fun laughing at the rich folks. No one wanted to spoil the mood.

Our deepest, darkest motivation in watching, of course, was the unspoken hope that someone would be eaten by a wild beast. Isn’t that a terrible confession? But it’s true. Deep down inside there is a wicked voice that wants to say to some glubbering Yank nursing a bite wound: “So, how cute do you find The Lion King now?”

We want to lay claim to the authentic experience of wild Africa, even if the closest some of us get to wild Africa is a Nando’s chicken with extra peri-peri. The fact is that we are protective of Africa, precisely because being African is the last thing we have left to boast about.

Living in a game park doesn’t have much to do with living in Africa – and it is not something that many of us would be in a position to do any more successfully than the average American – but it represents an idea that we defend with jealousy. We laugh at the Americans because it is a way of asserting that we live in Africa, that we live here, even if the here in which we live is more like America than it is like the wild savannah. We laugh at the Americans because it makes us feel good about being us.

But also, of course, we laugh at the Americans because, well, because it’s fun to laugh at Americans.