Last week, travel writer Monisha Rajesh tweeted a side-by-side comparison of the copy she’d filed to a British publication and what later appeared in print. Her factual reference to Darjeeling’s history—as the summer retreat for the violent British Raj—had been edited out; which took her subsequent observation (about Indian families drinking tea and shopping there) out of context. And, context isn't expendable. Without it, stories become revisionist. In this case, the historical context was important to show that Darjeeling has become accessible and available to Indian travellers too, not just Brits cooing over its ‘faded colonial elegance’ (please don’t ever….) and sipping G&Ts. It puts them back on an even keel. But how did that editorial ‘oversight’ happen?

In order to justify slavery or colonialism, humans had to create divides, to make such practices seem more palatable. After all, there was no notion of race until the mid-1400s, when Gomes de Zurara, a Portuguese writer, was commissioned by his slave-trading leaders to write a puff piece, and quite literally invented ‘blackness’ (and therefore ‘whiteness’) as a construct. The offshoots of this might all seem shocking now—particularly when we look at how ‘Africans’ have been painted as savages and given animalistic qualities (offshoots of which still linger today) to justify denigrating other human beings and locking them in cages. But an ingrained sense of shame (no matter how bonkers that seems, given none of us were there) is exactly how this stuff happens. The shame we should feel is for our complicity in propping up pervasive structures that were created for us—and that often happens through a lack of context.

Take the skin-lightening industry as another example. Sure, it’s a billion-dollar problem in India and other former European colonies, but where did that desire for whiter skin come from? Why do we assume those citizens aren’t lobbying for change at the highest level? We still write about ‘underdeveloped’ countries anthropologically, through a Christopher Columbus lens, whereby we ‘discover’ a foreign land and enforce certain ideals of society on them… only to realise actually, it’s full of people who had been living there for years.

It’s become second nature to categorise and compare different cultures with our own, rather than take them for what they are. And we’ve been conditioned to use Western society as a benchmark for civilisation, even though it doesn’t always deserve to be. Have we considered what it looks like for a ‘developed’ country to decide that underprivileged children should go without food over Christmas, leaving it to a 22-year-old footballer to hold an entire government to account?

Many writers tend to avoid historical context—perhaps because it’s ‘complicated’ or because an unconscious sense of shame might take away from the ‘paint palette’ of the piece. But if we’re going to tell stories, we should tell the fullest one possible, putting any shame, faux or real (and for an event in which a writer presumably played no part), to one side, in the interests of ethical journalism.

It’s hard—this stuff is ingrained. Age-old propaganda has created deep-rooted divisions of alienness and otherness and, of course—for the travel hacks among us—our line of work was originally created to facilitate colonization and the slave trade (there were just so many lands and people to ‘discover’...) The perception of alienness, which the African continent has come to represent for Europe, has manifested itself once again with Western coverage of the ‘End SARS’ protests, which have led to calls for UK sanctions to be imposed on the Nigerian government.

So again, context is critical. West Africa was the transportation hub that fuelled the transatlantic slave trade, followed by a period of rampaging British Imperialism across the globe. Nigeria has a long history of dictatorships and corrupt military rule which is entangled with this history; leaving out the ‘why’ and ‘how’ when we write about it or call for action won’t help anyone understand the landscape—or why years of hurt and anger are coming out.

Equally, we could fast-forward to events of the last four years when Donald Trump sent in the US military to attack peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. Was there similar coverage encouraging the imposition of sanctions on the US or calling for a halt in trading? One thing the pandemic has shown is that the ‘developed’ model we’ve been fed doesn’t work quite as well as we thought. And the cracks are showing.

We have a responsibility to provide context, and give an honest depiction of a place, a group of people or a culture. That starts by treating them with respect, by honouring their stories, and learning to separate fact from the sense of shame associated with uncomfortable periods of history. It’s a fundamental part of understanding how we came to be where we are. 

Shivani and Meera
@shivaniashoka
@no_fixed_plans

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