The fact that the University of Virginia’s student newspaper would use the words “African magic” in a description of an op-ed should give you a few signs as to its quality (to say nothing of the op-ed itself):
“June Bug,” our rented Toyota Spark, took us everywhere we wanted to go. We started out in Constantia — one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Cape Town, South Africa — and drove out of the city into the wilderness of Stellenbosch wine country. Taking the N2 road, which stretched to the west of Cape Town, we saw Cape Town’s apparent “first world development” deteriorate into settlement townships. These townships, which are urban shanty towns created during the Apartheid era for non-whites, are now destinations for tourists to witness South Africa’s great poverty and racial inequality. But even though we were momentarily aware of the real South Africa, we easily forgot it as we arrived in Speir.
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Actually, I was just a girl in gladiator sandals with an extremely large purse full of my essentials — a camera, ChapStick, sunblock and a credit card. Hence the paradox of tourism and Cape Town. Cape Town is in Africa — and yet it is Europeanized. There are cheetahs but they are in cages. There is vast beauty and wilderness but they are urbanized, too. There is wealth but it is right next to poverty. I was feeling confused by the dualistic nature of our visit. It seemed as though we were contributing to a certain type of unnameable exploitation. But if we did not visit and help boost the economy by tourism, would not the country suffer more?
Not only is this funny and easily mocked, but it points to some of the more troubling aspects of undergraduate “service” culture. At least at my alma mater, one of the more popular Spring Break choices is a program called “Alternative Spring Break,” in which a fairly large group of students travel to developing countries in order to complete a week-long service project. The problem with this model, as a lot of folks will tell you, is that there is little to no continuity between trips. Yes, missions will revisit the same communities, but the passage of a time and the lack of continuity (there is often a year between trips) makes this a moot point. In turn, this contributes to a sense that these trips are little more than glorified “poverty tourism” for young, guilty — and clueless — white liberals.
Of course, that’s not to say that the whole program is irredeemable; I know good people who have done good work on these trips. But that doesn’t change the fact that the program is contributing to a service culture that focuses on short-term projects and bandaids, with little thought to the broader, systemic issues at hand.