Africa and Critical Studies

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies August 2001
Tomaselli Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold
Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold: Doing

Reverse Cultural Studies in Africa
Keyan G Tomaselli
University of Natal
This article is a theorized diary of three field trips to a remote part of South-
ern Africa. It develops a reflexive argument for a reverse cultural studies in
discussing problems in fieldwork, globalization, academic access, and
research accountability. Academy-bound scholarship claiming to be study-
ing the popular is questioned. An argument is made for an empirical space
in cultural studies for a greater acknowledgement of fieldwork done in the
Third and Fourth Worlds vis--vis theory development in the Western
metropoles. The narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications
industry for kinds of cultural studies done in Africa, in which detail is as
important as theory, in which human agency is described and recognized,
and in which voices from the field, our subjects of observation, are
engaged by researchers as their equals in human dignity and thus as pro-
ducers of knowledge. Theoreticism is questioned.
Postmillennium cultural studies for me largely conjures up images of highly

educated scholars at work in their offices, pounding away at their PCs, often
overtheorizing their arguments, and talking esoteric language to each other in
air-conditioned First World Conference environments. Among these are many
academic celebrities who charge high appearance fees on the conference and
lecture circuits. These are the scholarcrats of the international academocracy
who often pour scorn on field workers who write about their research experi-
ences in terms of arrival tropes, environmental hardships, and basic survival in
remote and often dangerous places.
Authors Note: The travel and field work was sponsored by a Natal University research grant. Our unan-
ticipated sojourn in Jwaneng was partly sponsored by the Mokala Lodge, which was a much more func-
tional establishment on our departure than on our arrival 7 days earlier. Thanks to Danic Hattingh and
all the lodge staff members who so generously looked after us. We are greatly indebted to Wafula and
Richard, who worked night and day in repairing our engine, and to Phatudi and members of the Sekoma
kgotla, who stood out from the largely unhelpful road workers domiciled in this settlement. Thanks to
Anthea Simoes, Jeffrey Sehume, Gibson Boloka, Caleb Wang, Chantel Oosthuysen, and John Williams
for their discussion and contribution to aspects of this article. Thanks also to Safaris Botswana Bound
and to the Viljoen Family in Hukuntsi who, as always, generously granted us access to their borehole
water and workshop facilities. Gibson had to hitch home on the day we departed to Ngwatle due to a
pressing personal engagement. Anthea observed that we all mourned his departure. Thanks, too, to
the Ngwatle community for its warm welcome, willingness to host us, and discussion on various topics
of mutual interest; and to Robert Waldron for his facilitation.
Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Volume 1 Number 3, 2001 283-318
2001 Sage Publications
283
284 Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies August 2001
When selecting students to visit Ngwatle Pan, a floating community of a

hundred or so displaced San, Bakgalagadi, Balala, and Batswana in the Kalahari
Desert in south-central Botswana, I make it known from the outset that the
temperatures are extreme, subzero at night in winter and 40-plus Celsius dur-
ing summer days. The water ration, whatever the season, is only 5 liters a day
(for washing, drinking, and cooking). At this point, the less adventurous drop
out, realizing that this is less than a single flush of a lavatory cistern. Moreover,
there are no lavatories where we are going. As my 11-year-old daughter told my
hygiene-obsessed mother in April 1995 when she asked if we were staying in a
hotel, No, we are camping. Her grandmother probed, Oh, are there ablu-
tion blocks at the camping site? No, replied Catherine, there is no camping
site, and there are no bathrooms. Oh, dear, grandmother responded, how
do you go to the toilet? Catherine went to the 4 4 Nissan Sani and returned
with a spade and a toilet roll. Grandmother by this time was speechless.
I mention this anecdote not to dwell on the hardships of field work but to
point out that when cultural studies talks about studying the popular, this
refers mainly to sanitized First World spaces, places, and people, where daily
luxuries taken as the norm by researchers are simply beyond the experience of
most of the worlds population. Even 5 liters of water, drawn from the 180
transported by ourselves in and on our 4 4 to Ngwatle, could mean the differ-
ence between life and death. When we drove to the hunting grounds during the
1994 and 1999 visits, the Ngwatle hunters told us about how they nearly died
of thirst here or there, of how they struggled to find the plastic water containers
they had stored in trees along the way (see Jeursen, 1999). In the week after our
July 2000 trip there, no water at all was to be found in one of the three settle-
ments, Ukhwi, just like in the good old days, stated Amber Pollock of Safaris
Botswana Bound (SBB).
Where the celebrity scholars rarely permit the facts to get in the way of their
exquisitely crafted, wonderfully jargon-laden, and often self-referential argu-
ments in which they appear to be negotiating their own subjectivities and
self-identity as much as anything else, the field researchers are often confronted
by the facts that are disparaged by the theorists: vehicle breakdowns in the mid-
dle of nowhere, subject communities destroyed by structural and political con-
ditions beyond their and the researchers control, and student researchers who,
unable to cope with poverty and degradation on mass scales, unadvisedly take
on the liberal guilt of 400 years of colonialism. These are the same researchers
whose very hardships are unimaginable luxuries for our subject communities.
Such poverty cannot be easily reduced simply to a text. Hunger is real, malnu-
trition is debilitating, and thirst is excruciating.
This article thus speaks as a diary from the field.
First, I aim to address academy-bound scholarship claiming to be studying the popular.

Tomaselli Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold 285
Second, I argue for an empirical space in cultural studies for a greater acknowledgement of field-
work done in the Third and Fourth Worlds vis--vis theory development in the Western
metropoles (cf. Stanton, 2000).
Third, my narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications industry for kinds of cultural
studies done in Africa, in which detail is as important as theory, in which human agency is
described and recognized (cf. Stanton, 2000; Tomaselli, 1998; Wright, 1998). Contradictions are
usually much sharper in societies where scrambled developmental periodizations are the norm.
Finally, the narrative will offer some passing comments on how media globalization affects Third
World and Fourth World societies.
Doing Fieldwork Around the 4 4
I am writing this article as I and four students are holed up in a dusty cross-
roads, Jwaneng, in Botswana. Jwaneng Motors is stripping and repairing my
Nissan Sani, which broke down in the desert. Fortunately, the engine stalled
near a Botswana Government Department of Transport road camp, at the
Sekoma crossroads. No one at the camp was interested in our problem, even
when we spoke to them in Tswana. They pointed to where a mechanic lives but
declined to drive us to him. Ph.D students Jeffrey Sehume and Gibson Boloka
walked 4 kilometers only to learn that the mechanic was elsewhere. They then
went to the settlements only shop/bar on their return and bumped into a pass-
ing mechanic from the Botswana Agricultural College. He brought them back
and checked our vehicle, drinking Castle Beer, brewed by the South African
Breweries, which in 1998 became the worlds fourth largest brewer. A faulty
spark plug might be the problem, he concluded. Off he went with Boloka and
Sehume in his Toyota 4 4someone in this remote rural area must surely
have an old plug. They came back an hour later with another three passengers,
members of the local kgotla (Tswana council), clutching three old plugs and
more cans of Castle (cf. Holt, 1998). The three kgotla members had been play-
ing pool in the shop/caf bar. No one at the Road Camp had yet taken any
notice of us. Jeffrey suggests that Botswanans, known for their surliness, are
kind hearted, but not lighthearted. The five kind hearts huddled over the
Sanis engine, all entertained and frustrated by the diagnostic process, while
Anthea Simoes, an M.A. student, constructed sculptures in the sand and Hon-
ors student Caleb Wang read poetry.
An abiding image of Africa, apart from ungainly loaded roof racks that reach
to the skysuch as on our Saniis old broken vehicles on the side of the road
being fixed by large numbers of amateur mechanics, their heads all bent simul-
taneously under the bonnet. I wondered if this meant that I was now really an
African, as I also anxiously peered into the engine. The plug was not the prob-
lem; it was much more serious, Phatudi the college mechanic told us. We
needed a tow back to Jwaneng. We then phoned the Automobile Association
(AA) from one of two phones (card and coin) serving a very large area. Being
nighttime, we flagged every passing vehicle with a torch, most of which turned
out to be 18-wheeler freight trucks hurtling through the Trans Kalahari High-
way on their way to Namibia. Not one stopped. Eventually a 4 4 with a tired
German tourist couple stopped to ask us where they could camp. We told them
the next camping site is 300 kilometers north, or 84 kilometers back. This is a
road construction camp, not a tourist spot. They didnt believe us and drove
away slowly, shaking their heads. My Michigan parka failed to keep out the
cold, so I left Jeffrey and Gibson at the entrance to the camp to flag down the
AA. I thought of the many clothes and shoes stuffed into every nook and cranny
in and on the Sani. We are hoping to give these to the poor Ngwatle community
to help them ward off the winter cold. The AA van arrived 3 hours after the tele-
phone call.
The AA mechanic, a Zimbabwean, talked incessantly to his girlfriend on his
associations cell phone for much of the 2-hour trip back to Jwaneng Motors. Is
this perhaps why I had to pay an outrageous fee for the tow? (I was incorrectly
told that I could claim back a portion of the fee from the AA in South Africa.) I
insisted that the Sani be parked where the petrol attendants could watch
itpacked as it was to the hilt inside and on top. The AA man said not to
worry, there is no crime here. Being South Africans, we are disbelieving. Seven
days later, we left Jwaneng without a single item having gone missing. This
reminds Jeffrey, Gibson, and me of the 18-wheeler furniture truck we came
across in June 1999 shortly after it had overturned on the Trans Kalahari High-
way on the way to Ghanzi. The goat herd who had caused the truck to swerve
had no inkling or concern that the accident was due to his animals crossing the
road without looking for oncoming traffic. He carried on as if nothing had hap-
pened. Life in the fast lane simply did not connect with his mundane herding
existence. The furniture that had spewed out of the truck was still lying next to
it a week later when we returned.
The extraordinarily expensive and run-down Mokala Lodge next to the
garage where we are staying boasts state-of-the-art integrated showers and taps,
badly installed and often the wrong way round. Blue indicates, at times, hot
water; red sometimes indicates cold. At Johannesburg International Airport,
one of the public phones I saw there in October 1999 identified the card phone
as coin and the coin phone as card. There is no consistency. This is another
characteristic of Africa: Conventional Western signification is often reversed, if
not totally confused. Doing fieldwork locates one in a kind of liminality: Noth-
ing is as it seems. This is partly because the laborers who install plumbing,
telecoms, and electrical devices dont themselves always have the wherewithal
to use them or dont understand the color and spatial codes of the West. It is
also partly because Cartesian logic is often subverted by indigenous forms of
reasoning, which operate on circular and nonlinear patterns (Masolo, 1994;
Shepperson & Tomaselli, 1999; Tempels, 1959). The collision of these differ-
ent forms of reasoning often have bizarre results, which none of the parties to
the encounter can easily comprehend. Jeffrey reminds us that Stuart Halls
(1981) encoding/decoding model has little validity under these conditions,

especially with regard to Fourth World ontologies.
The new South African Lodge manager and his girlfriend, who have been in
Jwaneng for just 4 days, are trying to refurbish the motel at breakneck speed.
They are fixing the plumbing, getting the TV sets to work, gardening, and
cleaning and have a meeting to persuade the waitresses to boost their service.
The service gets worse even as the reception desk tells us that the lodge is now
customer driven. I ask to whom the parked Mercedes belongs. The owner, I
am told. He is doing OK even if the lodge is in need of major refurbishment and
staff training. The manager took pity on us, and because all five of us shared one
twin bedroom, would charge us for only two guests daily. Every day its a lottery
to see which two get to qualify for the hotel breakfast, which is not much better,
but vastly more expensive, than the local eating houses in the strip mall across
the road. A lodge questionnaire asks, If we were not the only restaurant in
town on todays [sic] performance would you return? We appreciate the man-
agers generosity and tell him that we will acknowledge him and the lodge in
our articles and dissertations.
Instead of contemplating our navels as the Sani is stripped in the garage, we
help the two mechanics. I am initially concerned as they ask me for my tools;
theirs dont fit a 6 cylinder. We later learn that neither has ever worked on an
engine this sizeand that they were as apprehensive as we were. The engine is
progressively stripped in three different places: the forecourt, the outside work-
shop, and eventually in the garage itself. My now-flat battery is switched with
another vehicle belonging to a policeman; well get it back later, they tell us. We
never did. Engine parts are spread over a 25-meter radius. Where will this end?
It takes 2 days to diagnose the problem: damaged valves caused by a slip in the
brand new timing belt. I mutter some obscenities about the expensive com-
puter- and gadget-driven service station that had fitted it in Durban. It takes
another day to fetch the spare parts from a variety of places and towns and 2
more days to reassemble the engine. We begin to wonder if we will ever get to
our destination. So we start looking for individuals with Khoisan features in
Jwaneng. One woman working at the lodge assures us that she is from here, that
she is a Tswana (San tend to be treated as second-class citizens in Botswana)
(The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2000). In the lodge
reception is a calendar. The calendars montage contains pictures of various
Botswanan presidents. Happy childrens faces in monochrome are contained
within a map of Botswana with a caption stating that they are our future. A
vignette of President Bill Clinton, standing in a safari truck in the Okavango
swamps, shows him pouting for the camera rather than observing the elephants
behind him. He is not an average tourist. Elephants, not cameras, are what
tourists have come to see in this land of Eden. Clinton comes to see the camera.
The calendar, issued by a chemical company, also sports a picture of a group of
naked dancing Bushmen, labeled Traditional Dancing.1 Is this as close as
well get to the San? Then Anthea is told by the local hairdresser of a woman
who once used her services and who insisted that she is a Bushman. Is this
response indicative of identity politics in Botswana? We think of talking to the
garage pump attendants, who have some San features. Is this wishful thinking
perhaps? Or are we simply trying to create the object of our study? Maybe well
be able to justify our grant after all! I tell the students about a book called The
Innocent Anthropologist (Barley, 1983) where the author writes about his year-
long run-in with bureaucracy in getting a permit to study a remote village in
Cameroon. He never gets there. How will he explain this to his funders? Its a
false relief for us.
We actually need to get to Ngwatle, where we have been twice previously
(Boloka, 2001; Jeursen, 1999). So we decide to write this article to justify my
research grant, hoping that Ngwatle, a mere 350 kilometers away, will be even-
tually reached. I send the students out from the lodge to undertake
microethnographies of the Jwaneng shopping area. Caleb does an olfactory
semiotics, Jeffrey something more personal, and Gibson helps the mechanics
(Wang, 2000). Here are two topics that will intrigue and possibly bewilder the
Facultys Higher Degree and Research Committee. Can the findings of this
study be generalized? will be one of the committees questions. We run semi-
nars every day in the motels dining room.
While in Jwaneng, we eat where and what the locals eatmuch to their
amazement and delight. The food is basic and filling, and because it is cheap,
eating here twice daily will help reduce the projects spiraling accommodation
and subsistence budget deficit. We think of requesting a frequent dining card.
The owner of the Menoa Masweu takeaway has never heard of such a thing, but
he does have a computerized cash register. The cashier goes to great lengths to
also write up detailed receipts I can submit to the Universitys Finance Divi-
sion. We feed the mechanics breakfast and supper. Wafula Nerubucha is a Ken-
yan and Richard is a Zambian, both doing sterling voluntary overtime.
Media, Soccer, and Digitalization
We punctuate our days talking to the mechanics as they work and explain
what they are doing. We watch on TV in our lodge room the South African
cricket and rugby teams being trounced in Sri Lanka and Australia, respec-
tively. The TV offers only a fuzzy picture, which keeps losing the satellite feed
and irritating the manager, a patriotic Afrikaner who lives for his rugby. We
learn from extended news leads on all three multilingual South African public
service channels that South Africa did not get the 2006 soccer World Cup.
Nothing seems to be going right. To us, stuck in another country, South Afri-
cans seem obsessively fixated on failing to secure the bid, in looking for con-
spiracies on the part of the six-nation Oceania delegate from New Zealand who
did not vote, thereby ensuring that Germany wins by one vote. The media inex-
plicably fastens on this single delegate rather than targeting the majority who
voted against South Africa. The New Zealand foreign minister apologizes to
South Africa, and his ambassador in Pretoria complains about abusive tele-
phone calls. South Africas President Mbeki reassures New Zealand that for-
eign relations between the two countries will not be harmed. An international
inquiry has been requested by the South Africans. This goes on for days on end
and resembles the repetitive and self-indulgent tedium of election coverage.
Africa has been spurned yet again by the racist West, scream the South African
media (SA Loses, 2000). A South African brokerage firm comments that the
market has responded negatively to the loss of the bid. South Africa is punished
for losing. The Third World is always being punished by the Wests financial
institutions for failing, for not playing ball, and for being unable to compete
globally.
Three days after the World Cup vote, there is pandemonium at Zimbabwes
Harare soccer stadium, where police overreacted by shooting teargas at a few
fans throwing bottles at a South African goal scorer. The game was abandoned,
with players and spectators alike fleeing the continued firing of canisters. A
Zimbabwean soccer official tells the interviewer that Africa is a fishbowl, the
worlds looking at us to see if we can deliver; the spectators came here to enjoy a
game not fight a war. Would this have happened in the First World? we ask
ourselves. No one knows how many are injured. Will Africa ever grow up?
asks the official.
We just want our engine fixed. The Botswanan press barely mentions the
loss by South Africa of the World Cup bid but lauds their own team for actually
beating Madagascar. Botswana does not have a TV station, but in the paper, we
find an advert for a professor and lecturer in media studies to be appointed at
the University of Botswana. The satellite transmissions of the three SABC
channels and M-Net, the South African pay-TV channel, are constantly inter-
rupted by a message headed Analogue to Digital Exchange. If you dont get
your new subsidized digital decoder now, you will have to pay full price after
October 31. The accent of the voiceover is South African. Is this imperialism
at work? I muse. Some of my more deterministic colleagues would think so.
This notice interrupts just about all important news items and other programs
during the 6 days we were intermittently watching TV.
Discouraging Productivity
We loan a jerry can to a South African who ran out petrol 30 kilometers
away, who hitched into Jwaneng and found us at the garage. He works for a
laser printer refill company. His colleague, left in the car, is missing a leg, lost
when hit by a petrol tanker while cycling. That put an end to his triathalon
career. They give Wafula a lift to Gabarone to fetch some spare parts for our
engine. We watch as Wafula, holding the two Sani cylinder heads on his lap and
sitting on a cushion where the back seat should be, is driven off in a clearly
un-road-worthy motor car. I wonder if I will ever see my cash and cylinder
heads again. I am reassured by my students. Wafula fails to return that night; he

was to have hitched back. On Saturday, he returns midmorning with the spares.
My students are cleaning all the engine parts. Caleb is learning to use a new dig-
ital video camera. He is chased away by some of the hawkers who dont want to
be videotaped. Wafula, I am told by Jeffrey, has a philosophy on cars,
Botswanans, and society in general: Because we are stuck here, we should be
interviewing him. Wafula told us he has been in Jwaneng for 2 weeks as he was
retrenched in Kenya, where he was a quality controller in a vehicle assembly
motor plant, whose owner ripped off the Kenyan government and fled to the
Middle East. We are sad that he lost his managerial job in Kenya, but we are
pleased that he is the one working on the Sani, especially as he has Higher
Diploma in Automotive Engineering. He has also worked as a desert rally
mechanic in Kenya. His approach is deductive, systematic, and logical. Wafula
also has a teachers diploma and regales us during supper with stories about his
inability to write 500-word essays. Calculus and calculations are his forte. We
learn a little bit about the Kenya schooling system. He thinks Botswanans are
lethargic and sets the standard with his Zambian colleague by working 18
hours a day on my Sani. I worry that they are not getting enough sleep or food.
Wafula asks me if Natal University has a distance-learning section; he wants to
study management, because being an engineer limits ones upward mobility.
We have attracted a lot of attention since our arrival. The playschool chil-
dren next to the garage told us that they really like the big car. They show us
theirs: steering wheels connected by a pipe to a rubber wheel that they push and
pull around the playgroundmetonymy in action. The garage attracted a lot
more customers as a result of the huge job being done on the Sani. Caleb also
fascinated the locals: A White going barefoot (in the middle of winter) is exotic
behavior; most Black adults wear shoes all year round. The owner and manager
seem uncomfortable with the professionalism and productivity of the two
mechanics. We later learn that neither mechanic is employed by the garage.
They had declined a low salary offer and preferred to work independently,
using the garages facilities. The Kenyan manager instructs the mechanics to
curtail their hours of work and locks them out of his house where they were liv-
ing. On another night at 9:30 p.m., he turns up at the garage in his pajamas and
demands that they stop work. They were employed by the manager to work on
his car, not mine. So they fix his car at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. I wonder
about my legal status as a client and whether the mechanics will get paid at all.
I remember my own experience as an employee in the film industry. Initia-
tive tends to be distrusted. In the mid-1970s, covert and overt surveillance of
my daily expenditure, correspondence, telephone calls, and movement was the
result of my instituting cost-saving measures and working 18 hours a day,
including weekends, to help a new company get onto its feet. The owner
refused to pay service providers until being sued. Many months later, he would
whip out his checkbook on the steps of the Supreme Court and sign, deducting
10% for cash. Thus is productivity and company income impeded, national
economies stifled, and competitiveness destroyed. Is this business practice in

reverse? The broader African response is to blame the West for its resulting
woes, not itself.
Can I pay the garage by Mastercard? Because I am running out of pula. My
question is met with a cautious yes from the garage manager, who tests me any-
way by insisting that I pay cash for the parts that have to be fetched from
Gaborone, 157 kilometers away. He drives us to the First National Bank, and I
draw the money. He asks me about fees at Natal University; he has to sponsor
his brother to do a Masters in Science in Analytical Biology. A few days later, I
phone my wife, Ruth, and ask her to ensure that my credit card account is liq-
uid. When I do pay, I tell the students that the huge repair bills for the Nissan
will have to be paid by myself. If my program covers these costs, then I get taxed
at the marginal rate of 43%. I bite the bullet and cough up. Academics are the
only class of professional in South Africa who are forced to pay tax on expendi-
ture in pursuit of their profession. Some of my colleagues at the University of
Natal when faced with this double taxation after 1998 simply stopped doing
field research, even contract fieldwork. I think of the economic consequences
for the Ngwatle community of my following suit. Apart from filmmaker Rob
Waldron2 (Jeursen, 1999), between 1995 and early 2000 we were the only visi-
tors to the jobless, displaced, and poverty-stricken Ngwatle community. We
packed only two sets of clothes with which to live in the desert. Few wash regu-
larly because water is for drinkingby people, donkeys, horses, and dogs.
Dogs are underfed and mistreated animals used for hunting. In civilization, our
clothes are beginning to reek, and motel guests are looking at us askance. Part of
this response, however, might be our groups composition: two White men,
one White woman, and two Black men. The motel management couldnt ini-
tially understand why we suggested staying in one room on the first night, all
the other rooms being occupied. The racial and gender composition suggested
that we were from two or three separate parties that had arrived simultaneously.
The next section attempts to develop a theory to explain this kind of category
confusion.
Theoreticism: Cultural Studies Critiqued
We discuss two articles during our morning seminars. One is by Gareth

Stanton (2000), an extensive review of Paul Stollers (1997) Sensuous
Ethnography. The other is a draft of an article on San tracking by Canadian Ted
Chamberlin (2001), whom we are supposed to meet in the Northern Cape,
South Africa, after our stint at Ngwatle. Both are hostile to theoreticist cultural
studies. These are among a number of articles now beginning to appear in the
anthropological and cultural studies literature on the value of anthropology to
the field (Stanton, 1996). Some question the assumption of Western Cartesian
logic in studying the Other as well (Harbitz, 1996; Katz, Biesele, & St. Denis,
1997; Muecke, 1999; Stoller, 1984, 1992; Tomaselli, 1999a; Young, 1995).
We note that Stoller claims to have become the Other; we have yet to get to the
Other (on this trip). And among us is the Other (the two Black students) as well
as the European Same (the three Whites). Hence the interest and confusion at
the lodge and the eating houses and by the German tourists on distinguishing
who is the Other and who is the Same.
Stanton (2000) sees little point in academy-bound learning only and draws
attention to the lesser known but much more significant empirical studies of
those anthropologists whose theoretical work has been feted by cultural stud-
ies: Clifford (1982), Geertz (1979), Rabinow (1977), and Bourdieu (1979).
But it is in their fieldwork, beyond the academy and the First World, in the
dust, dirt, sounds, and often obnoxious smells of the Third and Fourth Worlds,
largely ignored by Western cultural studies scholars, that the seminal theories
of these scholars were originally forged. It in the south and east of the north
Atlantic that the most populous popular is to be found, where thick descrip-
tions disrupt the neat and clean continuities of cultural studies theoretical
banquets (cf. Stanton, 2000, p. 260; Stoller, 1992). The non-European world
is examined by these scholars for its conceptual use value, and some cultural
studies synchronic theoreticism ensures that this historically discursive Other
dimension is largely erased from further analysis when applied in the First and
Second Worlds.
Places where ordinary people eke out a basic existence have adapted First
World inventions to their Third World conditions. Survivalist microecono-
mies are grist to the development studies mill. Informal shopping stands in
Jwaneng, for example, face formal shops and South Africanowned chain
stores. These stands are evenly spaced along the alley from one side of the strip
business district to the other, bounded by South Africanowned First National
Bank on one end and a British Petrol filling station with a Chicken Licken
South Africanfranchised fast food outlet on the other. The informal shopping
stands are covered with shade cloth. Each boasts a large ghetto blaster powered
by a motor car battery, each blaring out African music tapes. The hawkers sell
scarves, belts, cheap jewelry, purses, makeup, toiletries, sunglasses, jackets, and
bags. Individual stores display the same assortment of music. The music is West
African but with Tswana titles. Walking down the alley, one is bombarded
sequentially by each radio tape playing different tracks. Each stand has a wheel-
barrow parked next to it. These are used by the hawkers to transport their
wares, and they become mobile music carts as they push their still playing radio
tapes and unsold goods home at the end of the day to the shiny corrugated iron
shack settlements surrounding the shopping area. The music continues in
these dark candlelit abodes at night. The batteries are recharged by the garage.
A laser-printed note in the garage informs battery owners that up-front pay-
ment is now required to recover electricity costs lost when owners fail to collect
if they suspect the batteries to be damaged. In Accra, Ghana, drivers can do
their shopping from their cars, stuck in endless traffic jams, as street hawkers
ply their goods up and down the arterial roads.
This is how most people in Third World cities earn a living and do their
shopping. Even Johannesburg, a miniNew York in its formal architecture, has
the flavor of West African street markets as its hawkers jostle and struggle with
formal shop owners, whose customer access they impede and whose same
goods are cheaper. The hawkers are often homeless and live on the street. Or
they are political and economic refugees from other African countries or illegal
immigrants with entrepreneurial flair. But as was pointed out in a SABC pro-
gram I watched in Jwaneng, the new democratically elected South African gov-
ernment treats hawkers and the homeless as a diseasethe sanitary syndrome
by which the apartheid government rid itself of street people (R. E. Tomaselli,
1983) continues in the postapartheid era. Everything changes, but nothing is
different. In Jwaneng, however, there are no homeless, and the hawkers are part
of the shopping choice.
Beating About the (Bush) Text
Getting studies of the kind being developed here published in the First
World cultural and media studies journals is often very difficult. Why all the
empirical detail? authors are asked by editors. Wheres the theory? There
should be more theory. Focus on that. Whats all this stuff about starvation and
hardship? Form prevails over content (cf. Stanton, 2000; Tomaselli, 1998). My
former students who study and work in Europe and the United States are often
discouraged by their supervisors from the allegedly slight African research top-
ics they propose. Thus is academicism linked to racism and an exclusion of
some of the most populous parts of the world from the Western academic
enterprise. I now think of the problems we have with external examiners from
the First World. African Ph.D.s are expected to include rich detail, extensive
empirical data, and textured paradigmatic overviews. Certain overseas examin-
ers complain when they receive 400- to 500-page theses. They further insist
that they are being underpaid, usually 7 to 10 times what internal and external
examiners in Africa receive. Among the wingers are leftists in cultural and
media studies, the very people who constantly jabber on about democracy,
resistance, and the value of difference. External examination and peer review is
a major investment for most African universities. In the Ph.D. theses I have
marked from overseas, I am constantly struck at their terseness and brevity,
often lacking in detail, corroboration, sufficient empirical data, and cross-
referencing. This is cultural studies as a personalized form of writing; it is not
necessarily a form of critical pedagogy as it would have to be to qualify as cul-
tural studies in Africa. It is more of a contribution to speculative theory and
argument than to knowledge; it mediates personal rather than collective expe-
rience; it is largely lacking in strategy. Everything is different, but nothing
changes.
English-language book publishers are not interested in the non-European
world, lamented Larry Grossberg at the Birmingham 2000 Crossroads Confer-
ence. I told Larry then, and my students here in Jwaneng now, that James
Curran and Myung-Jin Park (2000) managed to persuade Routledge to publish
their anthology, De-Westernizing Media Studies. I had assumed on invitation to
write a chapter that I was to submit a non-Western theory of political economy.
As it turned out, the Korean coeditor preferred the object to be non-Western
but the method and theory to follow the familiar Western theoretical contours.
Yet, the non-European world is where most of the globes population live,
where even the remotest of communities are affected by a rampant postcold
war capitalism. I mention my own book to my students, Appropriating Images
(Tomaselli, 1999a) published in Denmark. Its about being an African
scholarnot a scholar in or of Africa but about being an African who is also a
scholar, writing from African perspectives. It is therefore about the semiotics of
identity and how that subjectivity is inscribed into ones research, writing, and
publicationand experience. It is about African encounters with the West,
from African perspectives. It is also about the way that that encryption is often
erased in the commissioning and editing processes and in the way that interna-
tional reviewers read and respond to works emanating from Africa. Books from
Africa are rarely published in the West, especially if there is too much detail and
if the examples are not instantly recognizable to a Western readership.
Although Africa is not in Appropriating Images title, it is on the cover in the
form of a stylistic San rock painting, it is in the very extensive contents pages,
and it is (with the Third and Fourth Worlds in general) in the theory and illus-
trations used. My African (and especially my South African) location features
very strongly in the books contents, examples, and films discussed. Appropri-
ating Images is my attempt to come to terms with Africa, my fellow Africans,
and the often weird, wonderful, and contradictory occurrences on the conti-
nent. The preface to the book is about mystery, and the book is about the
semiotics of that mysteryboth spiritual and cultural. Its about trying to
come to terms with power and power relations and about the scientifically
unexplainable. Its about my and my colleagues experiences in making movies
on situations and people whose discourses and achievements are often incom-
prehensibleto us at least. Its about peoples, countries, and a continent, in a
double millennium-old asymmetrical engagement with Europe, in which
nothing is as it seems. Everything is different, and sometimes it is actually the
samebut the African Same sometimes needs African-derived methods and
theories to make sense of things, behaviors, and processes (cf. Mudimbe,
1989).
Although the book has a dual thrustsemiotics and visual anthropology
my aim is also an attempt to reconstitute these two methods from the perspec-
tives of the Other, the Third World, and Africa. The book is not about the First
World, although it draws on and develops, rearticulates, and modifies methods
and theory from that world, into Third World contexts. Drawing on Charles
Sanders Peirce (Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935, 1958), I and my colleagues
have attempted to Africanize semiotics, to find ways of applying it such that it
does not fall foul of accusations of conceptual imperialism. Being a method

rather than a theory, this rearticulation becomes possible and also avoids the
problems of essentialism (Shepperson & Tomaselli, 1999). Cultural studies in
the 1970s and early 1980s also emphasized method (Willis, 1981; Tomaselli,
Tomaselli, Louw, & Chetty, 1988) and proposed strategies to overcome repres-
sion. This strategic thrust is now much less visible within the field as a whole,
however.
Africa in the book was an issue from the start. The U.S. publisher wanted me
to erase the lesser known Third World film examples. Their refereewho was
solid enough on the conceptsmissed the African orientation. The second ref-
eree, who would have picked up the African orientation, unbeknown to the
publisher had inconveniently died before submitting his report. The Danish
publisher had worked in Mozambique as a development anthropologist, where
everything was stolen from his 4 4, including its wheels. If the U.S. publisher
had no inkling that the world beyond the United States was different, the Dan-
ish publisher was keenly aware of the difference. What the former saw as a mar-
keting weakness, the latter considered a conceptual strength. The book lost its
U.S. publisher, and I agreed to forego my royalties from the Danish publisher.
This was a price I was prepared to pay to ensure the books integrity and to
retain a work that examines the encounter between the Third and Fourth
Worlds and the West rather than a book in which the West looks at the Third
and Fourth Worlds primarily in terms of its own perspectives. The power rela-
tions of looking needed to be reversed.
Reverse Cultural Studies
Meantime, back at the Lodge. We discuss Chamberlins attack on cultural

studies and on Walter Ong (1982) in particular. Now I remember that
although I have relied heavily on Ongs theory of orality in my own analyses of
African cinema, that I never really was very comfortable with his binary func-
tionalism (Tomaselli, Shepperson, & Eke, 1999). Chamberlin had helped the
penny to drop. Our group agree that the West has not the faintest idea of what
goes on in the rest of the world: Its the West versus the rest. I relate some of my
experiences at the Crossroads Conference, where even the activist sessions
tended to ensnare themselves in sterile book-bound theory. Keynote speaker
Daniel Mato (2000) critically regaled the 950 delegates with stories of how cul-
tural studies has a much longer pedigree in Latin America than in Europe and
the United States, certainly longer than the Birmingham trajectory. A similar
argument was made by Sierra Leonian Handel Wright (1998) for cultural stud-
ies in Africa at the first Crossroads Conference in Finland in 1996. Why is it,
both asked, that the great Western gurus are assumed to have had an influence
on the Third World non-English-speaking scholars? In reversing the gaze,
Mato questioned the influence of these Third Worlders on the First World
scholars. The audience laughed, perhaps mildly embarrassed. Jeffrey mentions
Manthia Diawaras video on Jean Rouch, Rouch in Reverse (Harrow, 1999).

Diawara, a West African teaching at Columbia, tried to turn the tables on
Rouchs film gaze at Africa. Diawara is defeated by a defensive Rouch in the
Parisian metropole itself. Like us in Jwaneng, he returns home to the United
States, wondering about how to implement reverse anthropology.
I remind my students that under apartheid, our programs sources were as
much African, Latin American, and Russian as they were European and Ameri-
can. We are reassured in our diachronic theoretical cosmopolitanism. Now we
are trying to develop African approaches to cultural studies (see Critical Arts
Vol. 13, 1999), although a longer version deriving from culturalism has existed
since the 1970s (Sitas, 1986). I tell of the South African Vista University dele-
gate, Jane Starfield (2000), who offered one of the best, and one of the few stra-
tegic, papers at the Crossroads Conference in the sessions I attended. Couched
in the discourse of resistance, Starfield spoke of how an undergraduate cultural
studies curriculum has been developed to break the hold of apartheids funda-
mental pedagogics on this national eight-campus university. She explained that
Vistas students are Black, disadvantaged, and brought up via rote learning
through which all initiative and critical thought is institutionally stifled. She
implicated the new Black university administrators in perpetuating the prob-
lem. Rather, we are told, education must start from the students experience. I
got excited. But then she added that the students will read Foucault and
Bhaktin. I am disappointed but not surprised. In South African universities,
the post-LitCrit crowd teaches cultural and media studies from their White,
middle-class, sanitized Western perspectives rather than also incorporating
African approaches and the dirt and the muck of this Third World society. I
suggested that Franz Fanon (1972) and Paulo Freire (1970) might be better
starting points for Vista, as their work derives from the kinds of experiences
that should be instantly recognized by the Vista students. I am reminded of a
large architectural impression stuck on a hoarding concealing building opera-
tions at the Johannesburg International Airport in October 1999. The impres-
sion promises Your world class duty-free shopping mallyour patients [sic]
will be exceptionally rewarded. I think I must be negotiating a Foucauldian
nightmare. Are we indeed still unwilling prisoners and patients of both Euro-
centric theory and the Airports Company? The latter is the most profitable
firm in postapartheid South Africa but is also the most inefficient and the most
insensitive to the needs of those who use its facilities. Capitalism rules in both
academia (the books we prescribe) and business (surplus value is God).
The Vista delegate responded to a question on where to start by referring to
the popularity of the Bold and the Beautiful U.S.-made soap opera, which pulls
in the highest Black TV audience rating in South Africa. I confirm that this
could be a point of departure as research shows that this program, among
others, offers a way by which Black South Africans are negotiating via the
media their encounter with the wider globalizing world. I explain that Zulu-
speaking viewers in KwaZulu Natal tend to read the program in terms of gender
struggles related to their own vicious patriarchal circumstances in the province

in which we live (Tager, 1997). Disbelief, I think, was the response of most of
the delegates. We move on to the next speaker. The moment is lost in First
World conceptual irrelevance. The visual imperialist thesis rules. We never
return to Starfields crucial intervention. Cultural studies lauds the popular
but rejects it when it comes to the Third World. Now, back to the desert.
Ngwatle: Being There
Ngwatle is a community of perhaps 100 displaced people, located in a con-

trolled hunting area called KD/1 in Botswana. KD/1 is 13,000 kilometers
squared, and three villages within its boundary include Ngwatle, Ukwi, and
Ncaang, with a total population of about 800. This population has organized
itself into the Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust, supported by a nongovernmental
organization (NGO), the Thusano Lefatsheng Trust, via which community
interests have been represented since 1996.
In 1995, it took us 3 days of driving in deep sand after crossing into Bot-
swana from South Africa to get there. In 1999, it took 1 day, mostly on tar.
While in Ngwatle in 1995, we saw only two other vehicles during the whole
week, apart from the weekly water truck, its pistons screaming as it struggled
through the sand to the 100,000-liter water tank. In 1999, vehicles were pass-
ing through every second day.
During the first few mornings in 1995, everyone turned out to greet us. We
videotaped and photographed the interactions, especially between Miriam3
4
and my daughter Catherine, who immediately befriended each other. The
small children referred to our 35 millimeter still cameras as snappies but paid
no attention to the video cameras, possibly because they were used to them
from Rob Waldrons previous visits.5 In 1999, they referred to his large
Betacam camera as video video and made up a song with these words, sung to
a traditional melody. Gadiphemolwe Orileng told us about a mobile video van
operated by a missionary organization that had passed through their commu-
nity in early 1999. They showed a film on Jesus Christ. Now I know what he
looks like, Gadi told us in June, delightfully collapsing the signifier into the
signified. In 1999, Tshumo, an elderly hunter, fixed my snapped audiotape
that Durbans finest technicians could not. He declined my offer to buy it back
from him. Now, 1950s rock n roll complements the South African 1990s
Kwaito music at this Pan. He still had the tape in 2000, which he played for us
when we finally got there. Every family has a radio, and they listen to the Bot-
swana radio stations. The skerms (grass huts) of the community in Ngwatle and
DKar further north sport centerfolds of South African soccer players. On
inquiry, we were told that this was a protest against repressive Botswana gov-
ernment policies regarding the San (or Basarwa, as they are officially known in
Botswana). South Africa was their model in the light of its new democracy and
its progressive indigenous minorities policy. This is an indication of resistance
rather than of South African imperialism. Some media political economists I

know would disagree, seeing imperialism everywhere.
On being questioned as to his reasons for visiting Ngwatle, Waldron told
Jeursen,
Friends of mine had come to the Western Kalahari, Botswana, many years ago
and told me of the beauty of the scenery. . . . They mentioned that they had
encountered a group of Bushman in the area. At that stage, I thought that possi-
bly it would be nice to meet them, but that was not the main focus of my trip.
However, when I arrived, I met two young men on the pan, one of whom is here
this time, Maleka. . . . I heard them clicking in their !Kung language and saw their
excitement, and they took me to their so-called headman, Hiwa Nxai. I found
myself overwhelmingly attracted to the openness and friendliness of these peo-
ple. When they invited me to stay and make camp here, I did . . . in communing
with these people, and because they are supposedly the First People, one becomes
curious, so that curiosity was a driving factor, finding out how their society
works, how they could survive out here in waterless desert. I was interested and
intrigued to see that they are still partially a hunter-gatherer society, but not in
the romanticized sense.
The community identified themselves as !Kung and their language as

Sesarwa, with some speaking Afrikaans and Tswana as well. Afrikaans had been
learned by the men who had worked on farms in Namibia, particularly
//Kuru!ka (Petrus) Nxai and his brother Baba (Kort Jan) Kies Nxai. The names
in brackets are the White names they gave themselves. Kort Jan identified the
melons Catherine had collected along the route as Boesman se water (in Afri-
kaans, Bushmans water), although they were too bitter in this case to be
eaten.
In 1999, the adjacent Pan was where the community had to dig deep to find
water during winter to complement the water trucks ration. Merideth
Regnard, my niece from Australia, helped with the digging, but its back-
breaking work. We dont use the communitys water; thats why we take our
own. The more water, however, the more donkeys that drink the water. The
more donkeys, the more water is needed. Donkeys are the prime means of
transport here. They pull carts and are ridden to the hunting grounds and are
used to transport water from the water tanks to individual homesteads. In
2000, a number of horses had been added to the transport mix.
Our best interviewee is Gadi. He has a story to tell, something about a muti
(sorcery potion) murder of his brother in Hukuntsi, 80 kilometers and 3 hours
drive south. His tale is deeply compelling, plausible, and commanded the
attention of filmmaker Rob Waldrons Betacam camera and all the visitors dur-
ing our June 1999 visit. We listened spellbound and felt his pain and frustra-
tion at the lack of progress on the part of the police. Then he asked Waldron for
a job. The power relation was instantly inverted. Waldron agreed to employ
him on his game farm in South Africas northern province. Gadi later phoned
Waldron twice from Hukuntsi, the nearest phone to Ngwatle, saying he could
not take up the offer. We wanted to ask Gadi why he was unable to take up the
job. But, lest my narrative get ahead of me, we are still in Jwaneng, where the
manager is working frenetically to upgrade the lodge even over the weekend. I
see a notice in the kitchen banning employees from playing casino at any time
or drinking alcohol while on duty. He has a difficult job ahead of him.
Its a Male Thing
Our visits seem to primarily occur within a masculinist discourse. A bumper

sticker distributed by the Hukuntsi Trading Store (on the way to Ngwatle)
reads Hukuntsi: A Mans Paradise and a Womans and Vehicles Hell. The
sticker gives some idea of the state of the roads, little more than cut lines
through the bushveldon which in 1994 we had to travel often at little more
than 15 to 25 kilometers per hour in four-wheel driveto get to our eventual
destination. The phrase a mans paradise invokes the stereotypical notions
usually associated with safaris through inhospitable terrain, which the Camel
cigarette company popularizes in the masculinist The Camel Trophy. The
1994 trip, however, was everyones hell, as my vehicles suspension was much
too soft for the track, with the Sani often bouncing like a bucking bronco, giv-
ing us all whiplash. As driver of my Sani, I grittedly held onto the steering wheel
while the four female passengers bounced and banged their heads against the
roof over an 80-kilometer stretch. I replaced the suspension before my next trip
to the Kalahari, this time to Namibia (Tomaselli, 1999b).
Waldron explains his interest in Ngwatle in terms of hunting:
I am particularly interested in the bonding that happens between men when they
go hunting. I believe that this bonding, harmony and great friendship and deep
love for each other that is evident and is echoed in their statements about each
other, is a very valuable thing that we could learn something from and that all of
us, having probably derived from hunter-gatherer societies at some time or
another, would have had that would have united our societies rather than disin-
tegrating them. (Jeursen, 1999)
The women were discouraged by Waldron from accompanying the two vehicles on
the 1994 visit to the hunting grounds, a 3 hours drive away. This male activity is
fraught with danger and trust and ability in the hunt is a crucial survival
mechanism.
I went hunting with Petrus Nxai, also called //Kuru!Ka, which means green-
ery. . . . Just myself and him went off with assegais, and whilst I have been on
hunting trips with Petrus before, I have never been an active hunter. This time I
was and we ran off with his dogs. It soon became apparent to me that he needed
my reassurance that we could work together. His phraseology was Saamwerk,
saam lewe (AfrikaansWorking together, living together), and he was giving
me a brief bonding and education lesson about this as we were running after the
dogs, telling me what to do with my spear. Once we saw a gemsbok that was
brought to bay by the dogs I was to throw my spear into the hindquarters of the
animal while he dealt with the working end. We walked sometimes, we ran
sometimes, and we did follow the dogs which eventually brought to bay a
Bat-Eared Fox which we killed and ate later. But what was particularly interest-
ing was how we could converse while we were hunting and the camaraderie
which developed between us, which was quite unique because I had a very strong
sense of a longing fulfilled. I felt a deep sense of relevant meaning and I think that
he did too. In that situation when two men are helping each other to survive and
at the same time to find food for their brethren there can be no room for dissent,
there is great pressure for harmony and brotherhood. I believe that that can be a
great healing factor for all types of people, uniting in a common cause that goes
beyond many of the so-called western bonding processes. (Jeursen, 1999)
Craig Fosters 2000 film, The Great Dance, also revisits the hunting hypoth-
esis in a search for essential man, which in African communalist terms requires
community and hence bonding rituals and behavior. Perhaps this is why seri-
ous hunters respond so empathetically to John Marshalls 1958 The Hunters?
Male bonding via the stalk is as important as is the kill itself, if not more so (cf.
Wieczorek, 1999).
A Womens Hell?
During our three sojourns, the Ngwatle women visited us in groups with
their babies at our camp site to be interviewed and videotaped and individually
to sell us artifacts. Belinda formally interviewed Miriam in 1994; Anthea in
2000 established a close relationship with Miriam, both in terms of a formal
interview and informally. Gregarious Meri, who was not a researcher and who
only speaks English, was a hit with all the women and a few young men in 1999.
The rest of us spoke among us English, Afrikaans, Tswana, Sotho, Zulu, Span-
ish, Portuguese, and French. (Wafula also spoke Swahili.) We still needed
banks of interpreters when trying to make sense of Tswana idiolects mixed with
all these languages as well as Sekgalagadi (Tswana dialect), Selala (Tawnana and
!Kung), Sesarwa (!Kung), and various other Tswana dialects, all these within a
100+ community.
We played soccer in Ngwatle in 1999. The field was deep, with loose sand;
the ball was old and limp. It did not bounce. The players were barefoot. Fortu-
nately, it was winter, and the scorpions and snakes were hibernating. I,
Merideth, and my three students, together with Rob Waldron and his sound
technician, were assigned four of the Ngwatle youth to make up our team. The
San women, who did not play, screamed their support for Meri, but we were
beaten hands-down. Perhaps gender roles had eased up a little since Catherine
was first discouraged from participating in the boys kudu hunting game? This
time we had brought two prepumped soccer balls for the community. Their
handing over awaited our arrival at Ngwatle.
Reversing the Learning
What did we learn from our two Ngwatle trips in 1995 and 1999? This is the
discussion in Jwaneng on the Saturday. Perhaps we learned more about our-
selves than we did about the Ngwatle community. All student participants
spoke of being changed by their respective experiences. Catherine, on her
return, told her primary school teacher that the San part of the Grade 5 syllabus
taught her prior to our trip needed revision, that the course content assumed
the San of old, a static image of a people caught in time. Ironically, her teacher
had only used the politically correct term, San, in the classroom. Catherine did
not initially know who I was talking about when I used the term Bushmen. She
had told me I was wrong when I queried the sketches of traditional Bushmen
given her by the school prior to our trip. At Ngwatle, Catherine met, talked,
and played with children from the village where we camped. She learned their
gamesthe melon-tossing game, the kudu hunting game, and knee dancing in
the sand. She taught the !Kung children English nursery rhymes and Spanish
dancing, and they taught her !Kung songs and how to gather wood. Catherine
was surprised, however, to be denied the opportunity of joining the kudu hunt-
ing game with the boys. That was not girls play, she was told by Miriam. On
returning to school in Durban, primed with photographs, video, an ostrich
egg, and a variety of other artifacts bought from the Ngwatle villagers,
Catherine became the teacher. Her school gave her the opportunity to tell of
her experiences in the Kalahari. On show-and-tell day, Catherine bought some
melons and, using the video record of the melon-tossing game, she rehearsed
the game with some of her friends in the lounge of our house. Came the day that
the game was to be enacted at school, she returned home furious because one of
the troupe had thrown the melons forward instead of backward. Catherine, if
not some cultural studies scholars, saw clear merit in empirical detail and fac-
tual accuracy. What we learned from Catherines experience and responses is
that children
1. are outside of the encumbrances of the judgmental attitudes of science and modernity;
2. learn very quickly the proper ways of doing thingsbut that experience overrules the roman-
tic orthodox teaching that sometimes dominates the classroom;
3. appreciate cultural difference to be an enriching element of existence and to learn when commu-
nity-oriented tasks and cooperation override individual preferences (this was why Catherine felt
that some !Kung cultural convention had been broken when the melon was thrown forward
rather than backward); and
4. quickly learn about gender roles in a different society.
Belinda had given a seminar in the English Department, arguing implicitly

for a greater emphasis of context over purely textual analysis and
hypertheorizing with little allegiance to the material world, like the M.A. study
she had done on oral /Xam narratives (Jeursen, 1994). Being there (a term
that draws on Peirces phaneroscopy), she confessed, was the missing dimen-
sion in her early workas I knew it had been in mine prior to 1994.
Boloka (2001) used the two experiences to discuss globalization from Third
and Fourth world perspectives, citing instances of political resistance through
the mobilization of the soccer images made possible by globalization. Anthea,
who had joined us on a previous visit to a different group of San at the Kagga
Kamma game park in the Western Cape in April 1999, on the 2000 visit
applied Stuart Halls (1996) two models of identity, as developed by Grossberg
(1996), in coming to terms with the diverse ways in which the San cope with a
world largely destructive of their former open spaces where as independent
people they roamed large tracts in search of food and water (Simoes, 2001).
Jeffrey confronted the impacts of cultural tourism, and I answered some ques-
tions as to why some Americans see racism in The Gods Must be Crazy films (in
1983 and 1989), whereas the San themselves have completely different inter-
pretations based on their own cosmologies.
Waldron learned about myth and human rights:
Im also very concerned with their land rights. . . . the group I visit most, dont
have any entrenched land rights. . . . They have established that in their living
memory, they have always lived in this area. When I talk about this area, I am
talking about one hundred kilometers in any direction from here, because when
you are a hunter gatherer, you have to be mobile over those kinds of distances. . . .
My largest concern here is that if somebody comes along to you, for example,
and asks if you own a piece of land and you then produce a title deed, you are
enacting a role within a Westernised infrastructure. These people dont have a
piece of paper entitling them to land that they and their forefathers have been
born on. It is rather like asking a tree for the title deed. Because of this, and
because of their almost total unfamiliarity with Western systems dominant in the
area, they are not informed about the number of choices that they can make, to
enable them to make an effective decision, whatever that decision might be. So
that has shifted the focus of my visits.
Responding to our reflexive questions about the nature of the encounter and
the Western image of Africa, Waldron replied,
I suppose it is inevitable to create or recreate a myth in terms of your attitude,

how one has been brought up, what kind of life/world background one brings
with one to this environment, but even if you try and strip this away and get
down to basics, you are creating another myth. So I doubt that it is possible to
ever strip away ones ego entirely, which is what causes the myth to surround one.
However, again I go back to basic human rights as the fundamental here; if that is
the focus of an interaction, then rights that have been agreed upon by the vast
majority of the world can be attempted to be entrenched. Of course there is the
argument that asks who we are to have the right to entrench rights for other peo-
ple or to inform them of their rights, but then that leads to insanity. (Jeursen,
1999)
These rights extend to issues of representation, the Western gaze at Africa,

and the consequences of this gaze.
I think the real dangers lurk in people who are trying to create something that
was never there, or was there in some convenient distant past, the loin cloth clad
Bushman surviving off the land and living in harmony with nature. I doubt that
that was ever the case.
We all considered ourselves the students and the Ngwatle community our
teachers. Waldron, for example, explains one learning encounter relating to
exchange:
What happened was that we [the two 4 4s with me, Keyan, archaeologist/
development worker, Conrad Steenkamp, Petrus, and his older brother, Babba
(Kort Jan) Nxai] drove for three hours to the hunting area, which is also used by a
safari company. We went with these men, in their territory, with their spears,
with their skills and very little of ours. We transported them and their dogs to the
hunting grounds which are some forty to fifty kilometres away from the village
because the animals are pretty wary of hunters and tend to skirt around the vil-
lage. Under normal circumstances they have to travel very far by donkey with
water containers. They ride or walk next to their donkeys, as the donkeys carry a
lot of water. After the hunt by Petrus and myself, and whilst we were eating after
we had rejoined the vehicles, I realised that Petrus had been teaching me a lot
while we were hunting.
Im familiar with the basics of tracking but Petrus was teaching me the finer
points of tracking, how to tell the time the animal had travelled through the area,
male or female etc. It occurred to me that this knowledge, which is very valuable
to me, should be paid for, because if I was asking a university professor or a pro-
fessional consultant for my business for advice, I would pay him for this kind of
information. So we discussed it and pre-negotiated a deal in the vehicle, coming
back. However there was a misunderstanding.
There was Kort Jan, who also speaks Afrikaans. However, he was in the back
of my Land Rover looking after the dogs and Petrus was sitting next to me. I had
negotiated 40 pula as a fee for him and 20 pula for each of the other hunters.
However it seems that he has been a guide for a hunting safari company in this
area when hunting was still allowed here. It is now going to be allowed again this
year and they had negotiated 50 pula for him as the chief tracker and 30 pula for
the others per day. In that negotiation I informed him that we are not one of the
large safari companies that can pay for the privilege of hunting the animals out
here, that we dont have those kinds of funds available but that maybe we could
reach a compromise in between because we felt that the services should be paid
for. At this point, his older brother Kort Jan interjected and said, Yes, want julle
is mos vriende, jy kom kuier hier (Yes, because you are really our friends, you
come here to visit). We havent agreed on a final price but it will certainly be
lower than the safari prices. It seems that they enjoy our company and we enjoy
theirs; however we are taking up their time when they could be doing other
things. Perhaps we are even impeding their progress in the hunt?
Once they were aware that we are not similar to a safari hunting group and
they had of their own volition come to the conclusion that we are visitors and
friends, we reached a different agreement. It also occurred to me that they have
never asked before; theyve allowed me to camp here for many years and I have
never paid them any fee for doing so, although I have brought gifts of tobacco,
sugar, tea etc. (Jeursen, 1999)
The history and cultural lessons, however, were not all one-way. At one of
the extensive pans in the hunting area where I, Conrad Steenkamp, Babba, and
another tracker were waiting for the return from the hunt of Waldron and
//Kuru!Ka, Steenkamp had found some stone-age flints in the pan and was
showing them to the hunters. The extraordinary thing about this discussion
was that these two hunters claimed to be totally unaware of the history and use
by their forbearers of these flints as arrowheads. Here was an academically edu-
cated archaeologist literally excavating the history of Basarwa hunting technol-
ogy for two Basarwa who insisted that they had always used metal spearheads.
Reversing Information Flow
We always send off-prints of our reports and articles to the various San and
indigenous minorities organizations and to the few critical anthropologists and
filmmakers getting their hands dirty doing social action projects in Africa (Ed
Wilmsen, Rob Gordon, Bob Hitchcock, Megan Biesele, John Marshall, Polly
Wiessner, Waldron, Craig Foster, etc.) Sometimes the off-prints are received by
authors as much as a year or more after publication, as we did the 1999b theme
issue I edited for Visual Anthropology (Volume 12, Number 2-3) on Encoun-
ters in the Kalahari, and this only after much nagging. Even my appeal that I
would like Lorna Marshall, then 102 years old and living in Boston, to see this
issue on the pioneering work of her whole family in the Kalahari between 1949
and 2000, before she moved onto the happy hunting grounds, failed to
unscramble the delay on the part of the journals publishing multinational. No
one seemed there to know whose responsibility it was to send the off-prints or
to supply the fully paid-for copies. Perhaps the Third and Fourth Worlds are
not quite as perverse/reverse after all.
I have learned to my dismay that the U.S. academics home universities
dont always support the much-needed kind of community-based action
research and development that African universities take for granted. Theory,
the PC, and the desk ensure form over content, sanitized theory (or sanitheory)
over messy reality, and cleanliness over dirt and disease. Developmental work is
the raison dtre of most African universities, however. A cultural and media
studies in Africa without policy, development, and critical pedagogical
approaches would be inconceivable. We are always thanked by the NGOs for
the written- up research we send them, as this seemingly minor gesture is a
courtesy not often observed by other academics who use the NGOs facilities,
who take information and pictures from communities and individuals and who
write up their results in expensive European and American journals that are
completely beyond the affordability of these NGOs and development workers.
But these academic studies are often very useful for day-to-day policy planning,
where the world changes faster, is often more diverse, and where people strug-
gle against Herculean odds. A years delay in provision of off-prints can occur
against major social changes in even so-called traditional societies. The logic of
time is reversed: In the First and Second Worlds, time is money, and money
rules; in the Third and Fourth Worlds, time is timeless, according to tourist
brochures, but means everything where resources are concerned. In 1999, we
videotaped the Ngwatle community hunting. In 2000, hunting by the Ngwatle
hunters is no more, a point I return to below.
We now find that documentary filmmakers across southern Africa are
becoming deeply interested in our research. They want us to work with them
on current and future projects. Is this theory in practice, perhaps? They too are
concerned about the destructive nature of Sans encounter with modernity. As
Waldron commented on the 1995 Ngwatle trip in which two vehicles arrived
with seven people,
The most that have been here are three people; this is the highest impact on their
resources. For the first time, we have used some of their water from the water
tank. So this is the anthropological version of fiscal creep, slowly starting to
abuse their resources if we continue this way. Well have to watch that. (Jeursen,
1999)
Filmmakers such as Waldron and Foster see themselves as cultural interme-

diaries between the Fourth and the First Worlds, where audiences of hundreds
of millions can be influenced by more sensitive depictions, through which the
San speak for themselves. The video makers are battling on two fronts, how-
ever, first with the global TV commissioning editors who often think in terms
of Western stereotypes and myths of Africa and Africans and solely in terms of
TV ratings and global competition for audiences, and second with restrictive
conditions where the San are being systematically stripped of their hunting
grounds, hunting rights, and water holes. European tourists are often to blame
for this: They dont want to see Bushmen living with animals; they want the
animals separate from the Bushmen in the national game parks they visit.
Our extended delay in Jwaneng means that the hunting season at Ngwatle,
where quotas by species apply, may have come to an end. Bows and arrows are
not used for hunting any more in this part of the Kalahari. The hunters used
dogs to locate the game and then trap the animal, which is then speared. Until
March 2000, single men riding donkeys, some with dogs, could be seen leaving
the village daily to go hunting. The hunting area was a day by donkey and 3
hours by 4 4. They returned a few days later, their dogs sometimes following
in the days after that. Although hunting was clearly in evidence while we were
there in 1995, the village was littered with rusting tin cans and decaying card-
board packaging. Our hosts always seemed a little surprised when they saw us
burying our rubbish, and it is probable that this was dug up after our departure.
Up to early 2000, the community lived on hunting, gathering, and state

handoutsa meager income from those who have obtained work elsewhere
and from the odd visitors like ourselves. In February 2000, the KD/1 area was
declared a conservancy, and Safaris Botswana Bound (SBB) allocated a conces-
sion. This is a joint venture tourism project, involving the three villages, the
Safari company, and the Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust, located at Ukwi. The
Ngwatle ceded their hunting quotas to the safari operation. White rangers or
clients shoot animals with rifles, and the meat is delivered to individual home-
steads. The San hunter in Botswana is now mainly a fiction on TV. The great
White hunter, usually a man of integrity and cultural understanding, is in cin-
ema (e.g., in Out of Africa), a classless individual who often represents
counterracist tendencies. Where these hardy men are a social and sexual ideal
(Cameron, 1994), now, in the guise of adventure tourists, they tend to be lazy
slobs who kill from the comfort and safety of 4 4s and helicopters. As Gadi
told us in July 2000, he does all the tracking; the White hunters simply pull the
trigger. They are more interested in trophies and pictures of their kills to show
off back home than in the meat and its life-sustaining qualities, social means of
distribution, and cosmological meaningGod provided it for us, as Kort Jan
told us while skinning a fox in 1999. We wonder about issues of dependency
and cultural cohesion notwithstanding the benefits of having entire carcasses
delivered to family abodes.
Periphery and Center: Reversing the Relationship
Is cultural studies really concerned with power relations and their often neg-
ative consequences for the less powerful? Whereas the post-LitCrit strand cele-
brates the resistance behavior of mall rats in shopping centers, reading the
beach without interviewing those who use and abuse it, and celebrating the lib-
eration of the body, how can cultural studies offer any real solutions beyond the
Western world? Explanations are offered aplenty by this kind of cultural stud-
ies, but social action is barely evident. This is not so in the Third World, which,
as Starfield (2000) among others have suggested, is praxis based (Tomaselli
et al., 1988; Wright, 1998). For those located in Ngwatle, the degree of libera-
tion could be measured by a constant water supply, the restitution of their
hunting grounds and rights, the return of water holes, and consequent upon all
these, food, education, and jobs. Without food and water, the liberation of the
body in Western feminist and masculinist terms means little.
Cultural studies in the Third and Fourth Worlds obviously must incorpo-
rate the First and Second World theoretical trajectories, as the processes they
explain clearly affect the worlds in which some of us are working. But the
scrambled development periodization in these less developed countries
imposes largely different responsibilities on cultural studies approaches. As
Wright (1998) and African and Latin American scholars insist, these are partly
to be found in action-oriented praxis long pioneered on these two continents.
The most important statement made by Stanton (2000, p. 259) is that much
Western cultural theory derives from fieldwork in the Third and Fourth
Worlds. The First and Second Worlds, however, have largely failed to pay their
dues to these non-European sources.
Off-Roading: Its All in the Image
Its late Sunday, 5 days after we broke down. Anthea returns to the motel
from the garage and tells us that the engine is looking more holistic, that its
taking shape. We then push and pull the vehicle onto the Bosal lift so that we
can replace the engine. Jeffrey tells me that his father was a taxi driver, with a car
that broke down every day. He wishes now that he had spent more time with his
father learning how to fix cars. I tell him I once could strip my 1948 Willys
Jeep and repair anything that went wrong with it, that I and my fellow students
spent many a weekend fixing the damn thing and camping on traffic islands in
remote towns, looking for spares in rubbish dumps and local farmers garages.
But these new 4 4s are much too complicated for amateurs like me. The South
Africanmade Nissan Sani is still largely mechanical and can be fixed in the
bundu (countryside), but the modern range of Jeeps and 4 4s are so cluttered
with computerized technology, flashing lights, and beeping gadgets that they
cannot even be jump started without blowing up their systems. This is Africa,
modern computerized motor technology, like the taps at the lodge, coexist
uncomfortably, often in reverse signification, in ways of life which have little
need for them. In the June 30July 6 edition of MMegi, I read about the
Mitshubishi Pajero reinvented, which tames the wild in quality and com-
fort, and about the launch of a new South African designed and made utility
vehicle in which one can Fly to freedom in your new go anywhere do anything
Toyota Condor. The Number 11 issue of the Adventure Leisure magazine sold
at the Jwaneng Gift Shop has a high-angle shot on its front cover with two Con-
dors off-roading in Maputoland, South Africa. Walking toward the camera in
single file alongside the two vehicles, which shield any sight of their occupants,
are three traditional Zulus, two women and a man, bare breasted, smiling.6
Four fours are taken off-road mainly for advertising and promotional pur-
poses. I remember a relative declining to join my family on a trip to the
Okavango Swamps because he feared damaging his Land Rover Discoveryor
even using it on the tar, because thats building mileage. Those who own
4 4s rarely take them off the tar. And those who really need them use donkeys,
horses, and oxen on tracks that hardly can be called roads. The world is indeed
back to front.
In the Kalahari, Toyotas are king. Few other makes survive the rugged ter-
rain. Of all 4 4s and vans, however, only Nissan has tried to link its advertising
to African cosmologies. The 1997, South African TV advertisement is a meta-
phorical play on hard body (an old man, a Black bakkie [van]) and the Africans
ancestors, land, and heritage. This metaphor is worked through the leathery
Black man who survived apartheid and who is now putting the finishing
touches to his house in a rural area. At last, he has a stake in the country. He also
has a stake in his own land, his own house, his own identity, and his lineage.
The old man says he is going to leave his hard body (i.e., the van) to his son,
thus setting up associations of symbolic succession: religious, psychospiritual,
and personal, via the land in which his ancestors are buried and who talk to him
via indigenous healers or sangomas. These metaphors are linked to independ-
ence (personal, racial, spiritual) and political liberation. They cohere meta-
phorically in a TV commercial that marries the political, the cosmological, and
the mobile via the bakkie. The product is a hard body van, not dissimilar to my
Sani station wagon. This is the mixing of the sacred and profane for commer-
cial purposes. My Michigan anthropology students in 1998 were mystified by
the advertisement, although one accused it of being politically correct. Wafula,
however, tells me that our plight has been a Godsend for him, that this is the
first proper job he has had since arriving in Botswana 8 months previously, that
it has given him a new sense of purpose, meaning, and motivation; hes gotten
his hands dirty again and found some friends in a strange and alienating coun-
try where the people are unfriendly, inhospitable, and remote. He seems to be
undergoing a metaphysical reawakening in working on my Sani and describes
it as mechanical spiritual journey. I have, however, learned that my Sani,
despite the advertising hype, is mortal after all.
Theoreticism and Essentialism: Being Un-African
The youngest in our group, Caleb, and Anthea, who moonlights as a profes-
sional model in Durban, get cabin fever on Monday. They hitch to Gaborone,
the capital city, to where I should have, in priceless hindsight, had my Sani
towed. There they meet a Rastafarian who claims to be a Bushman. I worry
about their safety. Jeffrey says not to worry, They are too exotic not to get a
lift. In this country, we (White) South Africans are the Other, different, and
easily identified. Caleb is especially easily identified for his earring. He has
already been asked by a Botswanan at the lodge if he is a lesbian. A press report
in The Mirror (July 11, 2000, p. 13) reports on some school children in Selebi
Phikwe who think it is un-African for men to wear jewelry, that this connotes
homosexuality. In Zimbabwe, it is against the law to be homosexual, where
they are considered by President Mugabe to be less than dogs. In contrast,
homosexuality has constitutional protection in South Africa. Caleb is neither
homosexual nor lesbian, but he does read the I-Ching (Wilhelm, Baynes, &
Jung, 1951), a book prescribed by his father, Derek, a physicist, when he
cotaught a course on science as a cultural expression with another physics rene-
gade in our center during the late 1980s (Wang & Bedford, 1985). This course
was not popular with the powers that were in the Science Faculty, which rarely
examines its own practices and assumptions on research and which found its
abiding positivism now being thoroughly questioned in a faculty more open to
critical debate. As Derek would tell our students, Beware of actors wearing
white coats pretending to be doctors and scientists in TV commercials.
CNNs BizAsia is being transmitted by SABC when I return to my lodge
room. On the edge of my consciousness, I hear that Nissan Japan has sold one
of its companies to an American firm. What does this mean for my Sani, I won-
der? The channel switches to the SABC 1 p.m. news, and I hear that 14 people
including 2 children were killed in the Harare soccer stadium on Saturday.
Zimbabwes President Mugabe blames the Parliamentary Opposition [sic].
The spectators were waving the partys open-handed solute and brandishing
small plastic squares to symbolize giving the red card to Mugabe for his dictato-
rial and failed policies, which were wrecking Zimbabwe. The International
AIDS Conference in my hometown of Durban is told that South Africa, Bot-
swana, and Zimbabwe have such high rates of HIV/AIDS that a negative popu-
lation growth rate is expected by 2003. I read of rape in the Botswana press, and
I again worry about Caleb and Anthea. The South African President who
opened the conference doubts the link between HIV and AIDS, and his health
minister still refuses state hospitals antiretroviral drugs now to be offered at no
charge to Third World countries. This offer is made the day before the opening
of the conference by a German pharmaceutical company. The minister ques-
tions the companys motivations. Are we now truly stuck in reverse? The presi-
dent formulated his views on AIDS from the Internet, one of the few outlets
where the AIDS dissidents can still get published. We must keep the dialogue
open, he argues; Africa is different. He reiterates this in the face of 20 years of
unprecedented international empirical research into any virus at any time in
history. African scientists are key contributors to this research. Thus does an
entire government legitimize a debilitating theoreticism. How many at
Ngwatle will die from AIDS, I wonder? No one will ever know. I recharge my
electric razor, thinking of the TV advertising song, What did you do with your
Philips today? Use value is replaced by consumption value. Where and who
am I? Why has our president and his cabinet become so entrapped in this devas-
tating theoreticism? I grieve for those denied antiretroviral treatment. I was the
media expert who had been tasked by the South African Department of Health
to draw up the guidelines for its national media and educational campaign
strategy (1996-2000), very ably implemented by a number of our former grad-
uates via the Mediaids and DramAidE NGOs, against sometimes incredible
bureaucratic odds, government mismanagement of the pandemic, and oppor-
tunistic politicking. It belongs in the dustbin, says Mbekis representative,
responding to the Durban Declaration signed by 5,000 scientists asking
Mbeki to reconsider government policy on AIDS. When will our government
realize that they are now a government, not an oppositional liberation
movement?
The last few hours are in sight. But Wafula is not sure how the fan belt fits.
Caleb runs after a passing Nissan bakkie, and its driver helpfully agrees to let
Wafula inspect it. Later, Caleb returns from the Internet Caf, near Chicken
Licken, where the pamphlet says, The Tech-World is zooming past. Dont be
left behind. This seems to be an allegory on our situation. South Africa beats
Pakistan in the triangular cricket tournament in Sri Lanka. I remember Alan
Shermans summer camp lament, Wait a minute, its stopped rainin, guys are
swimmin, guys are sailin, playing baseball, gee, thats better, Mudder, Fadder,
kindly disregard this letter. But Ill write on.
On Wednesday after an all-night stint in the workshop, the two mechanics
and the students arrive triumphantly at 4:30 a.m. at the garage managers small
and sparsely furnished house, where we are staying for the night, sleeping on a
floor still wet from a plumbing accident the previous day. His loud music wakes
us all at dawn. In his lounge is a Bible studies book, Witnessing: Turning the
World Upside Down. Is this the conclusion of our liminal story? If this article is a
theorized view of our stay in Jwaneng, one or more to follow will deal with the
arrival trope at Ngwatle. (Will the Sani break down again in the next 300 kilo-
meters?) Earlier, Jeffrey had in jest invited Wafula to join us. Gibson had had to
return home from Jwaneng, which left one space. Wafula came with us in
exchange for food, a sleeping bag, and the ethnographic experience. He later
fixed a front shock absorber.
Getting There
On finally reaching Ngwatle, we realize that massive changes have occurred

in this remote village and the area as a whole. We learned from the owner of the
Hukuntsi Trading Store that there is now a camping site, which he built, at the
request of the community. On arrival late at night, we are taken to a gate
guard who recognizes us and kindly agrees to let us camp where we have always
camped, close to the community. The new camp site is at the other end of the
pan, well away from the community, fitted with a boma (encampment),
shower, and drop toilet.
The next day, we are greeted by the gate guard, who carries a padlocked
money box, an A4 book in which to record our stay, and a request for all kinds
of payments. This development involves two agencies: SBB, which secured a
concession in February 2000 to manage tourism and environment, and the
Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust. Being short of ready cash, most of it having been
used to pay the lodge and garage, we ask for leniency at these unexpected pay-
ments. We explain that we have come as friends and researchers, not as tourists,
and that we also have about 500 items of clothing to distribute as well as a new
soccer ball. We agree to donate the clothing to the gate guard and her kgotla,
who will be responsible for the distribution.
One Week in Jwaneng
On publication of this article, I will now brace myself for the post-LitCrit
and theoreticist counterattack. After all, where is the (reading/textual) pleasure
in our experience? I remind myself that I am an African in Africa studying

Africa and Africans. As Ian Player, the renowned conservationist, told me and
conservation sociologist Malcolm Draper in 1999, A wilderness experience is
an inner and outer enlightenment of mans position in the world. Unless I
understand this multiple location of identity, place, and space, I cannot really
understand the significance of our week in Jwaneng and the many weeks spent
with different communities in the Kalahari Desert. The periphery (e.g.,
Jwaneng), as Stanton (2000) implied, often offers the empirical fodder to the
theory developed at the center, where the source of this theory is often erased in
its subsequent appropriations and rearticulations. However, we still have to get
to the edge of the periphery, Ngwatle, before we can return to the center
(Durban and its links to First and Second World scholarship) and write up fur-
ther articles. We hope some of these might be of developmental value to the
Ngwatle residents and those developmental and conservation agencies work-
ing in KD/1.
This article has attempted to marry, both textually and in practice, the bio-
graphical, personal, anecdotal, and reflective. This was, we hope, achieved via
our regular group discussions to ponder/assess our sojourn as invaders/friends
in San territory. It also is hoped that it illustrates that academics, although
striving to be objective, through the dialectical interplay of human cognition as
perception and narration interpreted can simultaneously become subject of his
or her own investigations.7 It is in the nature of this kind of encounter to which
this study has been addressed. Such are the demands made on academics in a
postmodern world (cf. Buraway, 2000).
Remodelling the Cultural Studies 4 4
In some ways, cultural studies may have partly become the discipline in
which a discursive struggle over who generates the most quotable quotes pre-
dominates. In analogous terms, the conspicuous consumption of top-of-the
line 4 4s is more important than the ability of these vehicles to get their
wheels and chasses dirty. The little homilies of cultural studies good sense
offered ad infinitum by a growing cadre of authors, especially the highly paid
celebrities, are shown to be sometimes seriously deficient in the empirical test-
ing and application (Tomaselli, 1998). Similarly, off-roaders are sold more by
their slick advertising images than by any owner need for the vehicle or under-
standing of the off-road routes themselves.
Theory brackets out the mess, smells, and contradictions of everyday life
and struggle. Accidental circumstances such as in Jwaneng provided us unan-
ticipated empirical opportunities to write theorized diaries of sortsnot easily
possible in the increasingly commodified practices and top-heavy bureaucra-
cies that universities have become, especially in South Africa. We need to make
cultural studies subversive again, just like done by Starfield (2000) and others.
The radical origin of cultural studies in Birmingham during the 1950s was an
attempt to recover democracy through critical engagement of articulations of

socialism. There is nothing better than experiencing a few days of hardship in
the field to ensure that cultural studies does not absorb the fundamental stasis
associated with any form of ideology, paradigm, or assumptions about just
what is popular or the conditions under which people assigned to this category
have to do to survive. Writing critically about arrival tropes and other experi-
ences is just one way of linking practice to theory and back again.
In short, cultural studies should provide a way of not only analyzing power,
text-context relationships, and media-society relations but of engaging these
for democratic outcomes. The power brought by the SBB Land Cruisers and
their hunting guns to the KD/1 area is just one example of how a fundamental
change in political economy can occur almost overnight. New sets of relation-
ships are thus generated, resulting in both anticipated and unanticipated
effects. The growing plethora of academics, filmmakers, NGOs, and other
agencies all involved in the KD/1 area (and the Kalahari generally) adds to the
complexity and the noise. Where once a small floating community like at
Ngwatle coped irrespective of these outsiders, now it has to negotiate with
them, almost on a daily basis. Articles like this one additionally place them
inexorably within international networks of discussion. Power, and those who
now have it, is now visible where it was previously invisible, where it was work-
ing quietly within community networks mostly beyond the view of develop-
ment agencies, filmmakers, and academics.
The power relationships at Ngwatle have been fundamentally altered not
only in terms of community-SBB relations but also internally. Those employed
by SBB are the new power brokers; they control the roger roger machine (one
of three SBB-supplied two-way radios managed by the gate guard in each of the
three villages). The gate guards largely decide on how incoming donations to
the community will be distributed.
I and Jeffrey noticed immediately on the day following our arrival that the
community was better dressed than we had seen them on our previous trips.
Clearly, more regular resources are now coming into the community as a result
of the SBB presence. A number of people from the community approached us
independently to request a different distribution procedure with regard to the
clothes that we had offered to hand over to the gate guard for allocation within
the community. Past experience suggested to them that donations tended to be
rather narrowly distributed. Four hours of very difficult negotiations on how to
allocate the clothes ensued. We were assisted at our request by a Hukuntsi
councillor, who owned the only spaza (informal shop) in the area. He was visit-
ing us because he had found one of my two spare wheels, which unbeknown to
us had come off my Sani as we bounced over the track between Hukuntsi and
Ngwatle the night before. (We later discovered that we had also lost two gas
stoves and a 25-liter water bowser, which we found the next day when retracing
our route.) We set up an ad hoc distribution committee of the councillor, the
gate guard, and Pedris, Miriams brother, to distribute the clothes on an equal
basis to each of the 30 families. The entire community turned out to receive the
clothing. Even with this care in devising a fair distribution mechanism, the gate
guard managed to play both distribution committee member and recipient.
Having outmaneuvered our distributive mechanism, however, the committee
was challenged by the other recipients who realized this and that they were
again being disadvantaged. The recipients of handouts do have power and use
it when necessary (cf. Katz et al., 1997, pp. 147-152).
How can power relationships be negotiated to the benefit of all parties to the
encounter? This is one of many difficult, uneasy, and unclear questions we kept
asking ourselves. Perhaps cultural studies scholars should ask them more often
than they do. In writing this article, Waldron constantlyand correctly
challenged us on our motivations, objectives, and imperatives. The people of
Ngwatle asked him about us. We asked the Ngwatle community about SBB.
We wondered to whom Waldron held himself accountable: His relationship
with the community is based on a deep friendship; our relationship with
Ngwatle is less clear. We remember his comment about insanity. Waldrons
link is particular, that is, the Ngwatle community; ours is more general,
because we are analyzing structure, processes, and broader relationships. The
variety of NGOs working on San issues from Cape Town to Windhoek them-
selves have varying and often difficult relationships with communities with
which they are working and often between and within themselves as well. Hav-
ing to negotiate all thesesometimes competing and antagonisticnetworks
is difficult enough, as John Marshall found out to his cost after 45 years of work
among the Ju/hoansi in Namibia (Barnard, 1996; Tomaselli, 1999c; see also
Biesele & Hitchcock, 1999). Trying to unravel the power relations that under-
pin interactions between all these agencies, individuals within agencies,
fieldworkers, consultants, advisers, state agencies, and all manner of academics
is a task of extraordinary complexitybut a very necessary one. As Anthea
concluded,
It is difficult enough for us, involved in the field, to facilitate productive out-
comes for our objects of study. How much more unlikely is it for academics who
dont wish to get their hands dirty? Bring on the subversive cultural studies of
origin.
Notes
1. See Buntman (1996) for an analysis of how the San are imaged in print
advertising.
2. Waldron is creative director of Klatzko and Waldron, an advertising company in
Johannesburg. He holds degrees in anthropology and communication and a diploma in
environmental conservation. He is also a wildlife documentary filmmaker in addition
to being a television commercials producer. We met in late 1993. Klatzko and Waldron
have not opportunistically exploited the mythical image of the Bushman in their adver-
tising campaigns as have many others (see campaigns for Telkom, Colgate, Mazda,
United Bank, Spoornet, etc.) (see Buntman, 1996). Yet Waldron is probably the only
advertising executive to have a personal and comprehensive knowledge of Basarwa
groups and individuals, their locations and lifestyles in the Central Kalahari Desert.
Waldrons video on changes in Basarwa tracking techniques, made with the help of the
Ngwatle hunters, won an award at an Italian Film Festival in 1999.
3. Miriam Motshabise was in 1995 16 years old, part Basarwa and part Tswana. She
completed Form 2 (Grade 9) in 1995 and wrote matric in 1999 at a school in Hukuntsi,
80 kilometers south. Motshabise told Jeursen (1999) that there were 34, mostly Tswana,
students in her Form 2 class. About 15 people shared her sisters dwelling in Ngwatle, a
cross between a traditional Bushman skerm and a Tswana homestead. Miriam has five
brothers and sisters, one of whom, Pedris, acted as a translator for us during our 1999
and 2000 visits (Jeursen, 1999).
4. Miriam spent a lot of time with Catherine, 11 years of age. Photographs and a
video show them teaching each other folk dances and songs, watched and joined by the
assembled children of the village. This expressive intercultural interchange occurred
during the two mornings after we arrived in April 1995. As the week drew on, Catherine
and Miriam spent less time dancing and more time talking to each other (Jeursen,
1999).
5. The issue is important in the light of mythical Western media perceptions of the
Bushman, the exploitation of this image in advertising and the media generally, and in
the light of numerous philanthropists who couch their visits in the expeditionary dis-
courses of saving the Bushmen (Perrott, 1992).
6. Just before submitting this article, I saw an advertisement for Land Rover in Time
(November 27, 2000, pp. 11-13). The advertisement covers three pages, beginning
with a single full-page photo (p. 11) of a bare-breasted woman of seemingly Himba
appearance. She is alone in long shot, with her eyes and breasts bizarrely airbrushed at
an angle that looks toward the lower right-hand edge of the page. A dust haze covers the
lower third of the desert picture to just above her knees. On turning the page, one
encounters a full-page spread depicting the Freelander whizzing past. On the left page,
the caption The new more powerful Freelander is written in the sky above the desert.
The right page, which continues the panorama, hosts the vehicle leaving behind a trail
of dust stretching back to page 11. The Himba womans breasts are thus now under-
stood to be blown by the wind generated by the speed of the passing vehicle. Apart from
being in bad taste, this advert also juxtaposes wheel-less premodern (wo)man with an
unseen jet setter. Where in the Condor advert the primitive Zulu people carry on walk-
ing untouched by passing civilization, the Freelander advertisement symbolizes the
ability of this other postmodern dimension to affect the very body of a person living in
premodernity through whose time and place it is travelling. In Namibia, tour guides
now tout the Himba as the oldest tribe in Namibia, displacing the Bushmen for this
honor (Gordon, personal communication). Although the Himba womans breasts are
distorted in an asexual way and her open-mouthed expression is one of skepticism/
defiance/amazement/indignation, the usual direction of the gaze has been inverted in
both adverts: The gaze is by the women toward the 4 4s, not the Western Sames gaze
at the exotic other; 4 4s are usually depicted as time machines taking their occupants
back to a primitive past, indicated by the remotely located unclothed Other. The vehi-
cles and their unseen drivers are simply passing through time, free of spatial/sexual/
temporal restrictions.
7. These insights are derived from John Williamss comment on an earlier draft of
the article.
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Keyan G Tomaselli is a professor and director of the Graduate Programme in

Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Natal, South Africa. He is an
external examiner and/or staff assessor for the Universities of Ghana, Swazi-
land, Zambia, Maseno (Kenya), and Nigeria and was informally consulted by
the University of Botswana on its Media Studies program. Tomaselli cowrote
the governments Film White Paper and has consulted for United Nations Edu-
cation, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; the Department of Arts, Cul-
ture, Science, and Technology; the Human Sciences Research Council; and the
Durban Metropolitan Electricity Department. He is on the Training in
Developing Countries Board of the Association of International Film and TV
Schools. He is also chair of the Commission on Urgent Anthropological
Research in South Africa, a project of the International Union of Anthropolog-
ical and Ethnological Sciences.

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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies August 2001

Tomaselli Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold

Blue Is Hot, Red Is Cold: Doing

Postmillennium cultural studies for me largely conjures up images of highly

When selecting students to visit Ngwatle Pan, a floating community of a

First, I aim to address academy-bound scholarship claiming to be studying the popular.

Doing Fieldwork Around the 4 4

(1981) encoding/decoding model has little validity under these conditions,

Media, Soccer, and Digitalization

heads again. I am reassured by my students. Wafula fails to return that night; he

economies stifled, and competitiveness destroyed. Is this business practice in

Theoreticism: Cultural Studies Critiqued

We discuss two articles during our morning seminars. One is by Gareth

Beating About the (Bush) Text

does not fall foul of accusations of conceptual imperialism. Being a method

Reverse Cultural Studies

Meantime, back at the Lodge. We discuss Chamberlins attack on cultural

Manthia Diawaras video on Jean Rouch, Rouch in Reverse (Harrow, 1999).

struggles related to their own vicious patriarchal circumstances in the province

Ngwatle: Being There

Ngwatle is a community of perhaps 100 displaced people, located in a con-

rather than of South African imperialism. Some media political economists I

The community identified themselves as !Kung and their language as

Its a Male Thing

Our visits seem to primarily occur within a masculinist discourse. A bumper

Reversing the Learning

Belinda had given a seminar in the English Department, arguing implicitly

I suppose it is inevitable to create or recreate a myth in terms of your attitude,

These rights extend to issues of representation, the Western gaze at Africa,

Reversing Information Flow

Filmmakers such as Waldron and Foster see themselves as cultural interme-

Up to early 2000, the community lived on hunting, gathering, and state

Periphery and Center: Reversing the Relationship

Off-Roading: Its All in the Image

Theoreticism and Essentialism: Being Un-African

On finally reaching Ngwatle, we realize that massive changes have occurred

One Week in Jwaneng

in our experience? I remind myself that I am an African in Africa studying

Remodelling the Cultural Studies 4 4

attempt to recover democracy through critical engagement of articulations of

Keyan G Tomaselli is a professor and director of the Graduate Programme in

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