Product Placement
Dec 19th Khartoum, Sudan 7:17p local time
Khartoum is where I spent my formative years (junior high and high school) and, for a place that I didn't really spend that much time in, I am tied to it very strongly. The city, and the country, have changed considerably even in the two years I've been away. After my last trip I had lamented the rampant consumerism that had suddenly engulfed the country, and on my return I find it even more pronounced than before, yet also more refined. To go back to my note about marketing abroad, I notice how different print advertising is here than it is in Abu Dhabi. Most new print advertising is very Sudanese in character, showing Sudanese families or individuals engaged in whatever behavior the phone company or the producers of toothpaste want them to.There is a tinge of humor (and good humor) to these billboards, which one does not find in Gulf advertising, and to my mind has a lot to do with the national character.
That national character appears to be changing, of course, as everything inevitably does. I accompanied my cousin, Gift of Gab, and his wife to one of the new garden style cafes that have sprung up around the capital. There under a large neem tree (what is the English name of those?), and various large, fancy new umbrellas were arrayed around a lot of clean, glass-topped tables. Here in the land of cold Pepsi and somewhat cool water, was a menu with ice mocha frappacinos, Slush Puppies, and so on. This may not seem like much to the casual foreign observer, but growing up, there were only a few options: water, Pepsi (not Coke), fruit juice (of whatever kind happens to be in season), or tea (only hot, only black). The embarrassment of riches that these new choices represent is mind-blowing in light of this fact. The clientele of this cafe was not composed primarily of foreigners (and Westerners in particular), but mainly of Sudanese from a wide variety of age groups. The young folks were dressed in incongruously conservative clothes, which somehow managed to also be revealing and fashionable (this schizophrenic fashion is something I notice but am ill-equipped to discuss - you can look up a wide variety of articles on youth culture in Iran to get a feel for what I am talking about). The open flirting between tables of high school aged boys and girls is, again, not something remarkable to foreign sensibilities but quite surprising to those of us who have seen this change. While there is no where on earth where young people do not make goo-goo eyes at each other (and I mean nowhere), the openness or subtlety with which they do it marks out the inhabited boundaries of the culture (beyond which, of course, only dragons lay).
The second thing I noticed was the condescension of the young folks congregated at this cafe directed towards those who didn't belong there - including myself. With everyone dressed to the nines to see and be seen, my own much more casual style of dress marked me out, not as an expatriate but a lower-class pretender sullying the sanctum of their much more sophisticated world. Perhaps the small class warrior that unaccountably lives within me saw more than was actually there, but it seemed to me to be a sad commentary: that the gap between the haves and have-nots in the Sudan had widened so much, and that there was some perceived shame to being "poor" in a country that is composed primarily of poor folks.