Universities are meant to be festivals of gaucheness
‘Students feel they must now piously denounce the insensitivities of others’
Students have always been gripped by identity politics – because, I suppose, university is where you can forge an adult identity, usually by exaggerating the one you pitched up with. Still, the factional arguments appear to be increasingly fraught, culminating in two universities disaffiliating from the NUS, with the threat of more to come.
Acrimony is everywhere: take this week’s spat over the “Africathemed” dinner at Queens’ College Cambridge: “Hakuna Matata… join us for the first themed formal of this term and discover Africa’s cuisine!” The menu consisted of foods and drinks from Senegal, Morocco, South Africa and Nigeria.
The Queens’ organisers had approached the Cambridge University African Society to co-organise the event, but they fell out over dates and ticketing, culminating in a statement from Halimatou Hima, the African Society’s president: “Given the historical (and ongoing) prejudices that have defined interactions with the African continent and its peoples, I decided as President of ASCU that it would be in our society’s best interest to withdraw.”
Elsewhere, on her blog, a student called Alice Davidson decided that the event was glaring “cultural appropriation”. In a piece entitled “Africa Isn’t Yours To Appropriate”, she criticised the use of the term “Hakuna Matata” (a Swahili phrase popularised by
meaning “no worries”) as reducing Africa to a “Disney animated movie”. The meal, she said, tried to “reduce an entire continent into three courses”.
Not everyone agreed: one member of the African Society, speaking anonymously, defined the response as “a little overdramatic”. I’m inclined to think that is right, and that a bristling sensitivity to “appropriation” damages everyone.
That’s not to say I don’t think a culture-grab matters, ever. There remains a phenomenon whereby companies add perceived exoticism with a sprinkling from a given culture, while sidelining individuals with roots in those very traditions. The fashion designer Valentino’s recent show inspired by “wild, tribal Africa”, for example, featured white models with intricately braided cornrow hairstyles, wearing beading and bone necklaces. But the problem wasn’t the “culturally appropriated” hair on the white girls: it was the fact that only eight of the 87 models in the “Africa” show were black.
Yet the entire history of mankind is one of borrowing and adopting, of cultural crossfertilisation. Indeed, as a Northern Irish woman married to a man of Indian origin, that process has brought my own family much fun. Those who seek to police who “has a right” to certain forms of expression run the risk of seeming meanspirited. Meanwhile, the culture-samplers might indeed seem risibly inauthentic, or they might in fact be creating something great: when the young Van Morrison soaked himself in the music of the American musicians Lead Belly and Jelly Roll Morton, what came roaring back out was a distinctive form of Irish jazz and blues.
Since universities are playgrounds for escapees from the parental home, they are festivals of gaucheness. For the first time, perhaps, students will be living with people from different countries and cultural backgrounds: to some extent, most students get stereotyped.
When I arrived at Oxford with my Belfast accent in the late Eighties, there were plenty of rather wearisome Semtex-and-sectarianism jokes (the starryeyed Hibernophiles reserved their uncomplicated admiration for people from the Republic). On St Patrick’s Day, the pubs were – and still are – full of non-Irish people engaged in riotous acts of cultural appropriation, chucking vats of Guinness down their throats while wearing those joke stovepipe hats.
It isn’t really my thing, and I suppose I could always lecture the St Patrick’s Day revellers on how Ireland is a complicated country steeped in literature and history that shouldn’t be reduced to a drunken caper in a tall hat. Then again, they all seem to be having a good laugh, and it’s not doing anyone much harm.
Nor, I suppose, will the broadbrush “Africa” college dinner, which might seem laughably one-dimensional to a Kenyan law student, for example, but which appears to have originated from a place of admiration.
I know it goes against the campus Zeitgeist – in which students must now piously denounce the insensitivities of others – but there’s a lot to be said for forgiving people their clunky enthusiasms. Most adults come to realise that if others are even a little bit interested in your culture – and they aren’t malign or obtuse – you can either just let them bungle on with it, or teach them how to do it better.