Somehow I don’t think that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a Black boyfriend…
The BBC is more than welcoming to the “moving stories” of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, MP for the Liberal Party in the Netherlands. She’s like David Bowie’s next wife—and that’s a happy ending for one who suffered so much African suffering. Just read the article, “Moving stories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” and you would never imagine that Europe did anything to Africa other than sell a few pillows and dolls. To be blunt: Ayaan’s world view as represented by the BBC is not balanced. It is impossible for this astute politician to ‘accidentally’ permit her white public to assume that Europe is a safe harbor from Africa—because there is something fundamentally wrong with Africa that has nothing to do with Europe.
This is not saying that what happened to her is invalid over here in my cute little “theoretical” African world. On the contrary, let me help Ayaan and the aesthetes of the BBC: what you need is a historical analysis that shows without a doubt that “female genital mutilation” dates back even to ancient Egypt. Get Alice Walker on this one… We’re going to need a new film, free from murder threats—and actual murder. And you must successfully remove any real possibility for me to sanely assume that these anti-women practices has something to do with Arabic/Indo-European influences on African societies for the last thousand years. Get Mary Lefkowitz on this one… She can call it “Not out of Arabia.” Additionally, when you somehow find these practices embedded deep into traditional, Non-Islamic African peoples, you have to eliminate the possibility that the inheritors of this practice are not performing this ritual exactly the way it was done before Europeans arrived. Africans did not have broken Coke bottles and steel knives to cut up young girls 700 years ago. This may seem like a lot of work in “a time of war” so I’m willing to wait…
In the mean time, we have this veritable Cleopatra in exile in Europe—and she can provide the happy ending for Aida the polloi in the Netherlands might be voting for… We have a Barack Obama thing in ebon female form—sleek European-refined curves (some people call lies). We’ve got a kinder and more graceful Condoleezza without the bullet proof vest. We’ve got yet another African orphan in attractive adult situations…