24 October 2020

The African Women

Those who are not from Africa can generally be divided into two groups: those who have never been there and those who have lived there, at least for a while. The former can only have prejudices, and in principle, this is inevitable, for we can only build partial representations of that with which we have no direct experience. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as they are temporary and do not act as a filter, or worse as a wall, to the experiencing of the other. Regarding Africa, stereotypes abound and oscillate on one hand between fascination with the body and places there, while on the other, repulsion of the other whose otherness, which occurs upon first sight, is experienced as threatening. This otherness makes it clear to us that our “universality” is often nothing more than a masked ethnocentrism.

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