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Channeling Out of Africa’: colonial chic and imperial nostalgia in postcolonial worlds

Annemi Conradie

WISER seminar paper, 13 May 2019.

The UK Daily Mail of 11 January 2013 published an article titled, ‘Out of Africa: the sun will never set

on the laid-back classic colonial look’ (Fig 1). The same year saw an Out of Africa fashion shoot for

Harper’s Bazaar Brazil. The January 2018 issue of its Greek edition had an Out of Africa accessory feature

to assist readers in perfecting the ‘safari look’. The same year it commissioned Alexei Lubomirski to do

an Out of Africa shoot for its June/July United States edition. The advertising campaign for the 2017 Las

Vegas Winter décor market reproduced Blixen-glamour in the desert, with pensive model in white and

khaki posing with travelling trunks, a safari helmet and white Borzoi hound. In Kenya, where Blixen

lived for seventeen years, guests of the Angama Mara lodge can have a 1920s picnic on the very spot

where Meryl Streep (playing Blixen) and Robert Redford (as Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch Hatton) were

filmed picnicking. This movie moment was also recreated in a 2010 Louis Vuitton’s promotional film

starring Dree Hemingway, great-grand daughter of Ernest, who travelled and hunted in Africa. Wedding

directory service, Wedding Friends, offers weddings and photo shoots with an ‘Out of Africa-feel’.

Inspired by the film and its contemporary trend-setter, Ralph Lauren’s Safari collections, this ‘feel’ is

created with décor elements such as “an old pair of binoculars, antique books and a pith helmet … to

reinforce the colonial feel, as [do] old-fashioned luxury luggage” (The ‘in love with Africa’ styled shoot.

2018).

Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film of Karen Blixen’s memoir, Out of Africa (1937), launched an enduring fashion

trend and international industry. Whether in the former settler colonies or the metropole, Out of Africa

bolstered the ‘colonial’ as a style trend that suggests glamour, luxury and adventure. This trend, and its

commercial manifestations colonial chic and safari chic, are steeped in nostalgic feelings about a

mythical, imperial age. Colonial nostalgia can be described as a paradigm and industry and it has only

grown in popularity and magnitude since the 1980s. Imperial nostalgia frequently featured in American

and British films, but from the late twentieth century, it steadily infiltrated mass culture, media and

“the stuff of everyday life, linking desire to design, décor, and dress” (William Bissell 2005:216).

Colonial and safari chic invite consumers to indulge in, recreate or relive (if only vicariously) Blixen and

company’s romantic adventures, pictured against the backdrop of colonial Africa. Stepping beyond the

edges of this backdrop and focussing on the histories that this glamorous surface obscures, I interrogate

the trends with the questions: ‘whose colonial’ and ‘whose safaris? The questions are developed

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through my focus on two objects that have become quintessential staples of colonial and safari style:

the vintage travel trunk and the safari helmet. Looking at the stylistic and narrative deployment of

these accessories I examine, on the one hand, the colonial trope of (self-)discovery and adventure, and

on the other, the iconography of excess and servitude.

Out of Africa

The 1980s saw a slew of British and American cinematic adaptations of colonial-era fiction or memoirs

set in the British colonies1. For Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, (2013:72) twentieth century Western films set in

Africa are “no more than a repackaging of images of colonial narratives”, and he regards Out of Africa

as a prime example. Published in 1937 under the pen-name Isak Denisen, Out of Africa is the title of

Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen-Finecke’s memoir of the seventeen years during which she lived and ran

a coffee plantation in the former British East Africa, today’s Kenya. For Annie Gagiano (1995:107),

Blixen’s Africa is a “romantic falsification”, and despite its clarity of style, there is a “prettifying haziness”

that veil harsher details. The same can be said of Pollack’s historic melodrama.

The cinematic adaptation of Blixen’s memoirs was immensely popular and won seven Academy

Awards2. While the film recounts some of her day-to-day joys and tribulations, the focus is Blixen’s

sweetly tragic romances, the first with Africa, and the second with the gentrified hunter. Shot on

location, Africa provides an enchanting, challenging setting for the Baroness’s quest to assert her

independence and liberalism through working the land, hunting game, uplifting the natives and

pursuing an illicit love affair. Africa becomes the site for escape from the constraints of Western

civilisation and the enjoyment of upper-class luxuries, where the feudal class system and aristocratic

privilege are preserved and European gender norms are thwarted. Like numerous written accounts of

colonial adventurers, native Africans are minor characters in the white protagonists’ dramas. In

Pollack’s film the natives are pictured as singing workers, as loyal servants in uniform or as noble

savages, or in tribal dress and in the wild.

Blixen’s house – the envy of many décor bloggers - is furnished with porcelain, crystal, paintings and

rugs brought from Denmark, and presents a feminine, refined counterpart to her tough, more

androgynous outdoor persona. The design feature ‘Channeling Out of Africa’ does not merely show

consumers how to recreate the look of Blixen’s house (Fig 2). It invites them to harness the ‘spirit’ or

essence of the film and the consumerist myth of Blixen’s African adventure. Suggestive of a designer’s

mood board, the feature includes film stills of contemplative leisure and romantic encounters in the

1 These include, among others, Passage to India (1984), King Solomon’s Mines (1937, 1950, 1984, 2004), Alan Quartermain and the lost city of gold (1986), the television serial The Flame trees of Thika (1981), Greystoke: the legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). 2 The film script was based on “Out of Africa and other writings by Isak Denisen” (Pollack 1985)

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African landscape, rather than images of Blixen’s home interior décor. For Wilson (2001:2) colonial

revivals exist in “forms both physical and mental, objects and ideas”. Designer and consumer

‘channeling’ of colonial chic finds expression through consumption of selected products and images

that products that address consumer desires for the nostalgic, adventurous and exotic.

Colonial and safari chic

The term nostalgia is derived from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algia (a painful condition),

and most definitions of the term explain it as the pleasant feeling about a previous time or an object

from the past (Rutherford and Shaw 2011:59). Like retro, which similarly experienced a boom in the

1980s, nostalgia is unconcerned with historical accuracy, the sanctity of tradition or reinforcing social

values (Guffey 2006: 10-11). Unlike retro – which regards the past with irony, humour or sarcasm –

colonial chic is sentimental, wistful and indulgent. The term ‘nostalgia industry’ (Samuel 2012:91) is an

apt moniker for the sentimentalist colonial chic and safari chic. While colonial chic and colonial

nostalgia and are linked through their relationship to imperialism, I differentiate between the two

Colonial nostalgia may describe nostalgic feelings or longing for the days of colonialism as expressed by

formerly colonised people in postcolonial contexts (see Dlamini 2009, Huyssen 2000) 3. Such sentiments

are complex and heterogeneous as it links in ambiguous ways with memory and vicarious nostalgia

about the pre-democratic past4. These feelings of longing circulate in social, political and commercial

terrains where they tie in with the significant work of memory, which is central to constructions of

postcolonial subject positions and are used in subversive, critical purposes ways (Bissell 2005: 217).

Unlike such a reflexive nostalgia, colonial chic (or colonial style as it is sometimes called) is discussed

here as stylistic impulse and trend. Colonial chic and its attendant trend, safari chic, derive from the

mythologised images of the luxurious settler homes, the glamorous tented camps and adventures of

wealthy colonial explorers, writers and hunters. I regard the trends as the aesthetic and commercial

expressions of what Bissell (2005:217) calls “regressive” imperial nostalgia, marked by persistent

orientalist and primitivist impulses. In colonial chic, as I shall argue, the trend’s relationship to

imperialism is repressed through the mythologizing and reification of history5.

3 I am by no means suggesting that postcolonial subjects who feel nostalgic about aspects of colonialism are not consumers or producers of colonial and safari chic. 4 Rosaldo (1989:115) highlights that ‘cultural insiders’ may mourn change brought about by themselves, whether by necessity or choice, through the embrace of ‘progress’, religious conversion, schooling, or the commodification of their cultural heritage (Rosaldo 1989: 115). 5 My critique of colonial chic is by no means a denunciation of nostalgia, or of people’s use, display and attachment to goods or images that evoke the past, memories or feelings of nostalgia. Individuals use nostalgic signifiers for different and important ends, such as remembrance, commemoration or to challenge hegemonic narratives (Rosaldo 1989:116).

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I focus on commercial aesthetic manifestations of colonial and safari chic that suggest Africa and evoke,

replicate or cite Pollock’s Out of Africa. The examples I discuss all date from the last two decades and

were found in décor, fashion, travel and in-flight magazines, websites and blogs, promotional videos

and coffee table books. Another, contemporary, influence on colonial and safari chic were the

advertising campaigns for Ralph Lauren’s Safari home and fashion collections (Fig 3). Launched in the

1980s, Lauren’s much-copied advertisements continue citing Blixen’s African sojourn into the twenty-

first century6. Colonial chic indulges in romanticised notions of colonial privilege, and the wealth and

status it implies was hardly the reality of most whites living in the colonies. The settler middle class was

small and only a minority of patrician families and high-ranking colonial officers would have lived in the

luxury presented in late twentieth and twenty-first century designer images7.

The choreography of colonial adventure and settler pastoral idyll in Out of Africa has become a widely

and easily reproduced ‘look’. Its aesthetic codes of reference are multiply duplicated, echoed and

recirculated in advertisement campaigns and décor features, where only a small number of easily

recognisable, if clichéd signifiers are needed to convey the essence of ‘colonial style’. According to

Swedish décor blog Fixa Stilen (2017) “it’s not hard to achieve the colonial style for your home” and it

gives suggestions for purchases that includes everything from zebra skins and palms to Chinese

porcelain (Fig 4).

Colonial chic is connected to no single nation and or historical epoch, but there are different strands or

styles, characterised through oblique reference to specific geographic areas and imperial nations.

Stylistic variations include ‘British colonial style’, ‘safari style’ and ‘plantation style’8. ‘British colonial’

may refer to British colonies in the Caribbean basin (sometimes called ‘tropical British colonial’ or

‘Caribbean style), in India, South East Asia or East Asia. Overall, it is individual accessories that suggest

specific geographic areas, and the elements used to situate an interior style geographically are copies

of old maps, botanical illustrations, vintage pictures of natural formations, indigenous animals, plants,

the architecture and native material culture9. The objects and images promoted as colonial chic

6 Its contemporary, Banana Republic’s Safari and Travel Clothing collections can also be described as safari chic, but its retro advertisements are more tongue-in-cheek than Lauren’s.

7 Most colonists living on the frontier did not have many material possessions and “lived an unendurably simple life by the standards of sophisticated travellers who encountered them” (Freund 1992: xiv). Most homes would have been quite bare and furniture often handmade from locally available materials 8 Lisa Frederick [s.a.] of Home Portfolio, writes: “In the 1600s and 1700s, a stream of French and English settlers staked their claim to the islands of the West Indies. During their years of colonial rule, they presided over massive sugarcane farms, and this lifestyle – combined with native culture and their own old-world aesthetic – gave rise to the look we now know as ‘plantation’”. 9 This includes: indoor palms, ceiling fans, furniture in dark wood and rattan patio furniture and shuttered windows for the Caribbean or American south; mosquito nets, travelling trunks and folding chairs (campaign

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essentials have, through repetition in the fine arts, in film, advertising and design, become recognisable

as ‘essences’ and as types of the authentic, beautiful, ancient or exotic (Frow 1991:125). This is possible

because the analogy between signifier and signified is rooted in an established lexicon and the familiar

structural oppositions of modernist and colonial discourse: modern/traditional, past/present,

urban/rural, civilised/ primitive (Van Eeden 2009:127). These terms are given temporal foundations,

suggest Bissell (2004:223), and are arranged according to a linear, evolutionist conception of time and

the metanarrative of progress.

The exotic, reminds Deborah Root (1996:34), is a primary trope of primitivism and functions through

the viewer, consumer or designer complex and ambivalent relationship to cultural difference and

her/his valorisation of certain perceived qualities of ‘the primitive’10. For Root (1996: 42) exoticism is

interconnected with recognition, with cultural difference connoted by signs – usually fragments -

recognisable to the cultural outsider because they were part of her or his conceptual framework prior

to the encounter with difference. In tourism, argues Frow (1991: 125), the consumer’s knowledge of

places and objects precedes and informs touristic experiences. The same can be said for the fashion

and décor industry. For ‘tourists’ browsing styles, motifs, objects and images for inspiration and

appropriation, the knowledge of and familiarity with exotic and nostalgic coloniality precedes the

creative and consumer decisions of those who seek out and ‘discover’ its signifying texts as if anew.

John Urry (1990) uses the term ‘hermeneutic circle’ to describe this chain of signification and

recognition. “What the traveller sees is what is already given by the pattern”, he writes (Urry 1990:140).

As a symbolic system, the exotic also functions dialectically, by translating the exotic as both strange

and familiar. In colonial chic, Africa is given charm and glamour through reference to well-known films,

authors and brands. For many contemporary consumers, Africa is the place and time of Blixen/Streep

and Louis Vuitton. The only new, one can argue, is the latest branded product or experience.

As seen in Fixa Stilen, colonial chic is unconcerned with historical accuracy and designers and home-

owners “cobble together a generic past, a moody atmospheric gestalt of what might be called

‘pastness’, a perfectly imaginary representation of the good old days” (Harris 2009:210). The defining

factor, it seems, is old and exotic or, from times and places other than the modern West. Time, space

and culture are thus conflated, and former colonies and its natives are represented as both temporally

and spatially distant from metropolitan citizens, who can ‘return’ to this time through travel and

furniture)s, African sculptures, jewellery or textiles, animal horns or bones, zebra, leopard and Nguni-cattle skins or print for Africa; the ‘colonial style’ linked to India, South East Asia and East Asia resemble that of the Caribbean plantations, with the addition of bamboo furniture, and textiles and objects referencing Indian (the word ‘Raj’ is sometimes used), Chinese, or South East Asian cultures. 10 From earliest contact, foreign desire for culturally Other goods stimulated African production and performance of ‘authentic’ culture (See Steiner 1994).

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consumption (see Fabian 1989:26). Understandings of linear time, metanarrative of progress depends

on concept of the primitive, requires starting point and origin from which to measure its own progress,

be it in self-criticism or self-aggrandisement.

In his foreword to Bibi Jordan’s Safari Chic, photographer Peter Beard (2000) writes, “In East Africa,

back in 1955, I found a way of life that featured an escape into the past, into a seemingly endless,

diverse, unspoiled landscape…realities that bring one back and down to earth.” This nostalgia for a lost

home is characteristic of modernity and plays a major part in the marketing of imperial nostalgia and

colonial chic. Nostalgia is “an incurable condition of modernity, writes Dlamini (2009:16), and like

primitivism, is marked by longing for a romanticised preindustrial past, stable boundaries, steady time-

flow, place-bound cultures living in harmony with nature (Huyssen 2000:34). This home, or Heimat, is

represented simultaneously a place of safe refuge and a lost origin, longed for in a world rendered

increasingly unfamiliar through industrialisation, urbanisation and the rise of capitalist relations (Frow

1991:135)11. This longing marks a state of transcendental homelessness that produces primitivism in

its most acute modern forms, writes Marianna Torgovnick (1990: 11,192), and Africa has long been the

primitive locus of this lost origin. As ‘naturally’ Other to the bourgeois capitalist order, the Africa and

Africans of modernist discourse come to signify the lack that is both mirror of and elixir for an overly-

refined, materialistic western society. In postcolonial consumer culture this notion is endlessly

reproduced.

Whose colonial?

According to Svetlana Boym (2001:135), “one is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the

past the way it could have been”. To supplant the “past as it was” with a romanticised version requires

omitting or masking those memories and historical events that may disrupt the reverie. The nostalgic

colonial chic reconstructs and mythologises colonialism and the heyday of plantation slavery as times

and spaces of luxury. It is clear that terms such as ‘colonial’ and ‘plantation’ and its stylistic props have

become shorthand for privilege, luxury and ‘old-world’ style, and have nothing to do with the sordid,

violent business of colonialism and slavery. While it foregrounds the historical as style, it obscures and

reifies history as commodity and spectacle (Huyssen 2000:28). Colonialism is fetishized, writes Ruth

Mayer (2002:136) and through its nostalgic reconceptualisation, turns into “a huge masquerade of

outfits, styles and gestures”. Through association with high-end fashion houses, the longevity of their

advertising campaigns, and gushing endorsements by style intermediaries, the trend is neutralised as

‘just’ fashion and ‘must-have’ fashion. For Rosaldo (1989) the apparently benign character of most

imperialist nostalgia uses a captivating pose of innocence that distracts and conceals its complicity with

11 The German noun Heimat may be translated to mean ‘home’, ‘home town’ or ‘native country’.

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brutal regimes. It casts the accountable colonial agent as innocent bystander, as benevolent and – in

the case of Blixen – a victim of political circumstance. In postcolonial worlds, this trend exemplifies “a

case of traumatic amnesia and not of forgetting, of the disavowal of time as opposed to

memorialisation” (Mbembe 2004:403).

To disrupt the enchantment of this spectacle, I ask; whose colonial, and whose safaris? According décor

blogger, Samantha Bacon (2016), “British Colonial Style ….is a reminder of a gentler age. [The look]

evokes a bygone era that was genteel and elegant while at the same time appearing relaxed and

comfortable,” Judging from statements like this, it can only be the colonial experience, the house and

the safari of the aristocratic colonial lady, the old-money settlers and the white hunter. It is not the

colonial of colonised subjects.

Part of colonial chic’s seduction is the beautifully styled and illustrated freedom of the owner and

consumer of the style. This is a freedom from material want and productive labour, which relies

historically upon the extraction of wealth and service from colonised people and places through violent

means. Ngũgĩ (2013) stands witness to the brutal realities of colonialism that are suppressed or

romanticised in films like Out of Africa. In its surface realism, Ngũgĩ (2013:72-73) writes, Pollack’s film

endorses the basic lie: “[c]olonialism was not that bad after all”. The natives show no resistance to

colonialism, are happily working the land stolen from them and are eternally loyal to their white masters

and mistresses. Rob Nixon (1986:223-224) highlights that Blixen – the owner of 6000 acres of land, on

which the natives are squatters – was a beneficiary of the systematic dispossession of Africans through

British land grabs, taxes and pass systems, which forced Africans into wage labour and reserves (see

Lorcin 2012: 47). Blixen, writes (Ngũgĩ 1993:135), “was really in effect a spokesperson for the hunter

for gold and the hunter for pleasure”.

Wealth and pleasure, luxury and adventure, are central to colonial and safari chic. The safari helmet

and vintage travelling trunk carry these connotations are frequently recommended as key elements for

re-creating the ‘colonial look’. Examining the objects in historical context may, I suggest, bring to light

the racial capitalist foundations of their postcolonial symbolic and narrative significance.

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The Safari helmet.

During the twentieth century and through the repeated appearance of first pith helmets, and later

safari helmets, in illustrated accounts of colonial military, hunting and travel expeditions, the khaki-

coloured, round-brimmed hat became a primary symbol and index of adventure and the ‘frontier

spirit’12. Strategically positioned in décor, fashion and even wedding shoots, its symbolic value has

clearly displaced its use-value (Fig 5). For stylists, the hats may simply suggest the glamour and romance

of outdoors adventure, but the reasons for this are rooted in the racial and class hierarchies of colonial

economies. As with dress, settler homes and their contents featured prominently in setting

distinguishing moneyed Europeans from natives and the white middle- and working classes. Anthony

Mugo (2018) argues that the helmet historically signified white racial domination and superiority, as it

set whites apart from natives, and blurred the line between white civilians and the colonial police13.

According to (Burns 1998:14) and Jordan (2000: 117-18) expeditions into the wild presented the 1920s

‘Safari set’ with an escape into fantasy and freedom and for some, a “journey inward”. Torgovnick

(1990:26) reads The Odyssey as prototype for modern Western tropes of travel, conquest and discovery

of the self through encounters with new worlds and the Other. She identifies these literary topoi in

Henry Morton Stanley’s writing on his African adventures, and the same are found in numerous auto-

biographic or fictional narratives set in the colonies: the lone hero/heroine on a quest; unpredictable

adventure; mastery of nature and the natives; interest in the geographic, natural and ethnographic

aspects of the ‘discovered’ land (Torgovnick 1990: 26). While Stanley, Blixen or Hemingway’s African

travels might have had clear goals, it is ultimately about their journey of self-discovery and –mastery

through mastery of the wild. Africa and its inhabitants are the stage and props in the drama starring

the white traveller.

For Ngugi (2013:69), Africa provides an esoteric backdrop: “the white adventurer is always at the

centre: light spreads from him into the outer darkness. The African crowds usually merged with the

shadows”. Illustrations of Stanley and Kalulu epitomises the protagonist’s self-definition in relation to

his African servant: the superiority and mastery of the adult in full white dress and with confident gaze

12 The safari hat its origins in British military expeditions in India during in the 1840s, where soldiers wore sun helmets made of pith. Adaptations thereof were recommended as protective dress for whites venturing to the colonies with its harsh sun. Similar helmets were later worn by native policing forces in various colonies. Today it is not uncommon to see doormen and porters at hotels in former colonies wearing this hat as part of their uniform, an interesting shift of the accessory’s symbolism and use. 13 Later designs of the hat emulated elements of the early military design, such as fake seams, ventilation holes

and hatband. With its origins in white protection, it inadvertently also reveals white anxieties and fragility, argues

(Mugo 2018).

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is affirmed through the child-servant’s nakedness, submissive stance and downcast gaze (Fig 6). This

mirroring of white visitors with native Africans re-appear in countless advertisements for lodges, safaris

and leisure activities.

For example, photographs of Angama Mara’s “Maasai style” weddings include Maasai men in

traditional dress. Their inclusion seems wholly determined by their value as picturesque extras, and

authentication of the ethnic theme. The inclusion of Maasai men as picturesque props is pushed to

greater lengths in Jonas Peterson’s pictures of a wildlife photographer’s wedding in Maasai Mara. The

online wedding album (accompanied with Blixen quote) features a white-clad bridal pair and Maasai

men in deep red against a moody grey sky (Fig 7). While the bride professes her friendship with the

locals (see Peterson 2016), their place in the images are that of compositional elements, not guests.

Their traditional garb accentuates the contemporary fashions of the groom and bride, who are always

in the foreground or centre.

In colonial and safari chic, Africans subjects are seldom if ever depicted as consumers: patrons pictured

in the websites and advertisements of Angama Mara and the Singita luxury lodge franchise, are almost

exclusively white. On the lodge premises black Africans are shown almost exclusively as servants and

employees, and in villages or the veld, traditionalists in tribal garb or as beneficiaries of ‘community

engagement’. In each of the settings and in relation to native Africans, the client takes centre-stage as

adventurous, romantic and philanthropic traveller. Travellers who re-enact the Streep/Redford picnic

at Angama Mara are provided with a “Masaai naturalist” as escort and a porter to carry the luxury picnic

paraphernalia up the hill. Photos of the event show guests in safari-style hats, enjoying fine comforts

as they gaze over the African plains (Fig 8). Such settings, writes Jeanne van Eeden (2004: 26), are

designed to create “breathtaking scenes, and romantic pensive spaces, in a location that suggests the

timelessness associated with mythical Africa” (van Eeden 2004: 26). The bodies of the white surveyors

frame the open land, evoking colonial paintings of Africa as both Arcadia and tabula rasa, uninhabited

and uncultivated land, representations that played no small part in disseminating the idea that the land

was not only free for the taking, (Torgovnick 1990:24,27; van Eeden 2004: 25). A Blixen quote, “Here

we are, where we ought to be” (A quiet moment for two 2019) accompanies the montage. Blixen’s

words poetically anchor connotations of home-coming and thus legitimate belonging of the writer, the

pictured visitors and consumers who can identify with them.

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The travelling trunk

The vintage leather travelling trunk with bentwood banding and brass clasps is high on the decorator’s

list of colonial and safari chic must-haves. It suggests travel in the era of steam, and of craftsmanship

prior to mass-production. It also suggests the possession of goods, and the more trunks a traveler has,

the greater her number of possessions and the comforts she can’t live without. The first lines spoken

by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, as the reminiscing Blixen, are “He even took the gramophone on safari.

And three rifles, supplies for a month, and Mozart” (Pollack 1986). The refinement of the two

protagonists is reinforced with scenes of Blixen’s arrival in Kenya when she is repeatedly pictured with

boxes and trunks containing her “crystal and china”. Furthermore, these images of a traveler with an

excess of trunks and boxes spell the owner’s distinction through the conspicuous consumption of

specialized goods and services. Distinction is also signified by the owner’s expenditure on labour needed

to transport the trunks.

The coffee-table books Safari Style (Burns 1998) and Safari Chic (Jordan 2000) are introduced with tales

of the “Golden Age of Safari” (Jordan 2000:32), when Kenya was a British colony. With vicarious

nostalgia the authors recount the extravagant aristocratic and celebrity safaris, and dwell on the large

numbers of porters required to meet their demands for comfort and luxury in the wild. Their

sentimental accounts echo the opening lines of Blixen’s memoir (“I had a farm in Africa”) and suggest

a loss of better, nobler times and a spiritual homeland, inseparable from white racial and class privilege.

This exemplifies colonial nostalgia, feelings associated with loss of the sociocultural standing or colonial

lifestyle of the privileged (Lorcin 2013:87)14. As direct consequence of revolution and decolonisation,

this age has passed. The real focus of imperial nostalgia, “is never so much then as it is now”, writes

Nixon (1986: 227), and it is not surprising that imperial nostalgia’s flourishing coincides with the erosion

of long-established geopolitical hierarchies, spatial and social boundaries (Bissell 2002:216).

“Fortunately”, Jordan (2000:32) assures readers of Safari Chic, the “legacy of the Golden Age” lives on

at the resorts run by the “sons of the great white hunters”. The books present showcases of luxury

safari lodges genealogically tied to, and annotated with quotes by, the original ‘safari set’. Here visitors

can still enjoy the “standards of [safari] luxury” (Burns 1998:17) set in the ‘Golden Age’ (Fig 9).

Scenes of white safaris trailed by a row of porters appear in countless African ‘adventure’ books and

films. What contemporary accounts excise from historic accounts are the poor and dangerous working

14 The concepts and phenomena of colonial and imperial nostalgia have been extensively theorised, with scholars focusing on its manifestations in popular and consumer culture, tourism, literature, and the political discourse, domestic and foreign policy of erstwhile colonies and imperial nations (Rosaldo 1989; Cunningham 2005, Bissell 2005; Lorcin 2013, Gilroy 2009).

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conditions and injuries of toiling, African porters, some of whom suffered gross exploitation and abuse

from their employers or masters. In Jordan and Burns’s ‘Golden Age’, black porters are little more than

beasts of burden.

“Under colonialism, writes Césaire 2000:42, “the native body is ‘thingified’, and the indigenous man

into an instrument of production”. These words stress the primacy of bio-power to the development

of colonial capitalist economies, with native bodies monitored, disciplined, enumerated, constrained

and rendered thing-like to make colonalism viable, and thus maintain the ‘Golden Age’ for a white

minority. According to Jan Neverdeen Pieterse (1992:158-160), commodity racism and imperialism

reproduced the symbolism of an “iconography of servitude” that was the legacy of pre-capitalist chattel

slavery. Images of black servants juxtaposed with their white masters became a visual device connoting

power, privilege and wealth because the wasted labour of slaves or servants evidenced the master’s

pecuniary strength (Pieterse 1992:158-160; Veblen 1912:85). This iconography was entrenched

through Orientalist and Baroque art and globalised through modern brands, logos, décor accessories,

books and films. In emulating Out of Africa and deploying this iconography to ‘maintain’ standards of

luxury and status, colonial and safari chic retain traces of black people’s reification under colonialism

and frequently. These standards - cold champagne, groomed Irish hound, crisp linen and gloved butlers

in the heat of the remote African veld – are historically underpinned by black servitude and exploitation.

In this sense it epitomises “white bourgeois imperialism”(López 2005)15, which remains hegemonic in

fashion, décor, tourism and leisure industries.

At times, attempts to reproduce these ‘standards’ become deeply offensive, racist masquerades, with

white protagonists unable or unwilling to imagine its affect on the black servant-participants.

One such example is the 2011 ‘Colonial Africa-theme’ wedding of a South African couple in

Mpumalanga, South Africa (Fig 10). The venue was decorated with hired “colonial pieces” from a

Pretoria prop house and included pith helmets, old rifles and leather travelling bags. Photographs of

‘Dave and Chantal’s Colonial-Africa Wedding’, taken by We Love Pictures, show white guests waited on

by an all-black staff. The waiters are dressed in white shirts and red fezzes. Connections of the fez with

Africa, servitude and the exotic may derive from generalised associations with North Africa, the

Ottoman presence in Africa, orientalism, and uniforms of the African regiment serving in the First World

War, the latter featured in Out of Africa. The fez also features in the house of Baroness Blixen: her

15 For Alfred López (2005:12), this is a form of hegemony that is historically linked to colonialism and the crimes committed against indigenous people.

12

native cook and houseboy, Kamante, who has to master European cooking and wear white gloves,

wears a red fez.

In Conclusion

While it might be seen as ‘just fashion’ or harmless leisure, (post-)colonial and safari chic are produced

and consumed as indicators of luxury because they reproduce familiar colonial modes of framing

experience, place and people. I suggest that colonial and safari chic and its key signifiers have their

current symbolic value because they are historically predicated on the reification of black bodies as

loyal labour resource and aesthetic objects. The consumption of colonial nostalgia, argues Mayer

(2002:101), is unlikely to dismantle established habits and stereotypes, or trigger self-reflexivity.

Furthermore, fashion’s domestication of colonial histories and the glamorising of colonial agents, may

meet whites’ desire for confirmation of the alibi that ‘it’s all in the past’, that colonialism wasn’t that

bad. These attitudes only foster denialism and obstruct Indigenous efforts to achieve restitution for

colonial crimes.

Fashionable translations of colonialism also obscure the diverse histories, experiences and memories

of colonised people in favour of idealised depictions of the colonisers – whose violence has no part in

these re-figurations. Rosaldo (1989:120-121) stresses the importance of memory to the critique of

imperial nostalgia and its ideological underpinnings as "[i]t is in their inconsistent plenitude that

memories eventually unravel the ideologies they so vividly animate”. It is the recognition of the

incontrollable heterogeneity of memories of all those who experienced, or remember, the object of

reminiscence or nostalgia, which points to different perspectives, experiences and histories that

converge around the historical object or image. These divergent histories and perspectives do,

however, threaten to disrupt the harmony and glamour that colonial and safari chic adherents cherish,

and capitalise upon. To creatively and critically disrupt this aesthetic and its industries is an essential

challenge for postcolonial designers, film-makers and entrepreneurs who were or are witnesses to a

different colonial.

13

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List of figures:

Fig. 1. Lara Sargent, ‘Out of Africa: the sun will never set on the laid-back classic colonial look’, Daily Mail, 2013.

Fig. 2. Channelling Out of Africa, [s.a]. Décor feature, Pinterest.

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Fig. 3. The Ralph Lauren Home Collection: Safari, 1984. Colour advertisement photographed by Bruce Weber

Fig. 4 Jannice Wistrand, Så fixar du den koloniala inredningsstilen (This is how you get the colonial design style), 2017.

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Fig 5.Promotional image, Sabora tented camp at Singita Grumeti reserve. 2019

Fig. 6. ‘Stanley and Kalulu’. Frontispiece, Henry M. Stanley, Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa. 1872.

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Fig. 7. Jonas Peterson, Masai Maara wedding. 2016

Fig 8. Angama Mara, ‘Enjoy a romantic Out of Africa picnic’. 2019.

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Fig 9. Cottar Family Bush Home, featured in Safari Chic. 2000.

Fig 10. Waiters at the ‘Colonial- Africa wedding’, 2011.