Caren Kaplan argues in “A World without Boundaries” that “the Safari ads, generated throughout the early ‘90s, are visually staged to evoke several different ‘imperial’ locations… playing on familiar cinematic and literary representations of wealthy white women in East Africa before formal decolonization” (2). Marie Claire’s safari ads, Jennifer Lynn Stoever suggests “are reminiscent of early anthropological photos and colonial travel shots from the British Empire, intended to illustrate racial superiority and extreme cultural difference” (3) and with them Marie Claire “actually reinscribes the oppressive colonialist mentality” portraying the colonial matriarch “under the guise of modern feminism” (4). Consider then the model Alek Wek, dark skinned, distinctly African, and appearing in the same issues of Marie Claire as these safari ads, but “not allowed to travel in her photo sequences” (5). Wek has only the “global” self the magazine has “constructed for her… fixed in place and marked with the cultural baggage that the West layers upon the Third World” (6). As Jennifer Lynn Stoever suggests in “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” while these other, white, women are objects for fantasy for the women reading Marie Claire, allowing them to imagine they are these worldly women, travelling the globe, experiencing these far off places and far off cultures, Wek remains outside this fantasy. So, one must wonder why Marie Claire includes her at all, perhaps simply as a deliberate counterpoint. Marie Claire’s refusal to allow Wek to be photographed on safari is indicative of neocolonial ideals, specifically, the notion that Africa is still subject to the Western core and the notion that Wek represents some Modernizationist success, brought up from the Third World to be a part of the First.
Backing up, let’s take a look at who Alek Wek is and from whence she came. Alek was born a member of the Dinka tribe in the southern Sudan town of Wau, where, when Alek was still a young girl, civil war broke out. Under British colonialism, Sudan had been divided prior to 1946; the south, with oil and more fertile farmland, was similar to other east African countries (Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda) while the north was more like the Arabic-speaking Egypt. The south was dominated by Catholics and northern Arabs were kept out of positions of power and trade between the two regions was discouraged. In her memoir, Wek says her country “has always been split between the Islamic Arab north and animist and Christian south. They don’t ever seem to mix that well and the north has always seemed to dominate the south” (7). But, in 1946, this changed, when the two areas were merged and Arabic was made the official language, even in the south. The British justified this policy, claiming the south was not ready for exposure to the modern world. They closed the region to the world and a few Arabs who controlled the regions commerce and bureaucracy. The elite in the south, trained in English, were now the ones kept out of power, and those in the south had no control over their own resources but instead were subject to the north. Absent British rule, the northerners were supposed to adopt a federal system but did not, and in 1955 fighting broke out. For the next 17 years there would be much strife and division in Sudan, until finally, in 1972, the Addis Ababa Accord was signed. Ten years later, there would be violence again. Wek says it was “shocking to hear army trucks rumbling through the streets of my little town and to see men in green uniforms… Wau was not my simple home any longer; it was a military zone, with rebels on the outskirts, soldiers in town, and the lawless militias wreaking havoc everywhere” (8). Still, her mother would take the cows out to pasture—her mother, despite globalization, still was fulfilling her role, being productive, not displaced yet from a productive role in society, “rendered disposable” (9). There was also water to bring home from the pump. One day, Alek and her younger sister, Athieng, went with plastic water jugs on their heads went to fetch water. They were delayed, playing with some other children, and had to hurt home as the sun set, “the darkness always [making] the militias hungry for stealing and shooting” (10). After running past army trucks full of soldiers, Alek and Athieng made it home to the welcome sight of their mother’s cows and vegetables. Their parents were hunched over the radio listening to the illegal rebel station. “The announcer was saying that the conflict had spread to Wau” (11). It was war, again, after President Gaafar Nimeiry announced that the whole country would become an Arab Muslim land. Rebel leader John Garang formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to fight off northern troops. Hello Magazine describes the situation as it was for Alek Wek and her family in the end: “Along with millions of other Sudanese, her life was turned upside down by the outbreak of civil war in 1982. After their house came under fire from an unknown group, the Wek family fled. When they returned a month later, they found the village ravaged and its inhabitants living in the local school, without amenities or food” (12). The family fled by plane to London, where Alek’s older sister was living, having already applied for refugee status. Alek and Athieng went first, “but it was two years before they were joined by their mother and two more of their nine siblings. The remaining family members were finally given refuge by Australia and Canada” (13). In London, Alek was made fun of at school “for having such long legs, for having such dark skin and a round, African face and short, reddish hair” (14). She “lived the life of a refugee, struggling to make ends meet, cleaning toilets, and sweeping floors and learning a foreign language. She also struggled with psoriasis, a sometimes devastating skin disease that causes the skin to flake, bump or peel. At times, her mother was forced to use a sharp knife to cut flaking bits from her head to her toes” (15). She was discovered by a modeling talent scout at a street fair. She was wary of the talent scout (16) but thought, “I have all of these part-time jobs here and there. Why not get another part-time job that could turn out to be something that could finance my education and pay my rent?” (17). And, so it began. Alek entered the world of modeling, women, or images of them anyway, “commodities to be bought and sold, traded and consumed” (18). Early success was in music videos for Tina Turner and Janet Jackson, but “it was a 1997 Elle cover shoot that made the modeling world appreciate her uniqueness” (19).
That uniqueness is what separates Wek from the other Marie Claire models, a symbol set apart from the other models (20). Stoever describes how the same issues of Marie Claire that contain these safari ads also treat readers to “dozens of horrific accounts of baby rape, infant genocide, genital surgeries, rape, executions, forced prostitution, starvation, torture, domestic abuse, murder, and sex slavery, all taking place in Third World locations” (21). While “poverty itself is never addressed directly” but instead “used only to set the stage for the more treatable issues” (22), this negative portrayal of the Third World is not necessarily modernizationist; as Isbister says it, “the picture of traditional life painted by the modernizationists is not a negative one… however, it is a poor, subsistence life, a life that has no hope of accumulation, income, or wealth” (23). More befitting modernizationism, these same locations, contrary to this purported reality, seem much less dangerous in the ads. One ad in particular is worth noting: “Good Morning Ms. Anderson” from the “Wild at Heart” photo spread in the March 2003 issue of Marie Claire (24). Stoever describes this photo well, as a “fashionable blonde superwoman graciously taking time away from her safari to enlighten the young African children who gather excitedly at her feet” (25). Stoever suggests that this image and others like it “work to construct and consolidate the authority of the First World woman” (26), neocolonial positioning at work in a seemingly innocent fashion. Africa, despite its rapes and torture and executions is, in this photo, a place we have to go to teach the children, to raise them up out of their squalor, and in another photo, it’s a tourist destination, Ms. Anderson on safari, African natives around her but “never shown meeting the woman’s stare or gazing at her body” (27). These men are props just as the children are. They are Third World natives in need of our help, a thoroughly modernizationist notion; they are “placed in service roles that depict them as socially inferior to the white models” and these images “highlight their economic dependence on Western tourism” (28).
And, it is because of this modernizationist angle that Marie Claire takes that a model like Alek Wek cannot be photographed on these safaris. She represents the proof of the modernizationist view; she is the success story that proves just how much in need of our intervention these Africans are. Because of horrible events recounted in other parts of the magazine, these advertisements come across at first as horribly dishonest, but then the deliberateness becomes evident. When one looks at these two portrayals of Africa from the point of view of a modernizationist, then the two somewhat different views fall in line with one another. Africa is this horrible, backward place, where babies are raped and killed, where genocide and genital mutilation are everyday occurrences and girls like Alek Wek are just waiting to escape. In her recently published memoir, Wek describes her homeland like this: “Based on the stories my parents and grandparents told, it seems that Sudan has always been a violent land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave traders came through this territory, capturing Dinkas and others and taking them north to be sold in Arab Countries” (29). Notice: the suggestion of violence goes hand in hand with the invasion of Westerners and the slave trade, something that Imperialism and Colonialism brought in. And, when girls like Alek do escape, they need (supposedly) the modernizationists of the First World to pluck them further out of adversity to walk the runways of fashion, at least in Wek’s case, where “her distinctive looks, so different from the usual catwalk fare, caused a stir in the world of fashion, and garnered a raft of awards” (30). And, she cannot go back there, at least not as a model. She cannot be in Africa, taking cows out to pasture like her mother, or fetching water like she used to do with her sister. Outside of modeling, Wek recently returned to her hometown, along with her mother, and she implies in her interview with Ebony Magazine that this return was a big inspiration or writing her recent memoir. But, as a model, it is necessary that she be portrayed as a part of the First World now, a success story to demonstrate the rightness of the Modernizationist view. If she is back on safari, or back in Africa helping the Africans—never mind that, in her life outside of modeling, Wek is dealing in humanitarian efforts (31)—then the romanticism is gone, the sureness that we in the West are doing things right and Africa is backward and in need of our assistance is gone. Marie Claire needs to keep Wek out of the safari ads, and needs to keep the white women in them, or the balance of the world—since they rarely connect “the struggle of poor women around the world… to larger global economic processes and never [link them] to the politics and consumptive practices of the First World” (32)—as they present it in their activist-oriented pieces would lose much of their fuel. It needs things this way to encourage “women to consider themselves feminists and activists without noticing how closely their fantasies resemble colonial exploitation” (33).
(1) This is what Alek Wek’s success in the industry comes from, according to Askmen.com. It also gets more specific: “These are characterized by her long, lean legs, her very dark skin, radiant smile, and closely cropped hair,” but points out that counter to much of the content of this paper, “At the peak of her modeling years, she refused assignments that specifically requested dark models, all in an effort to satisfy her wish to be treated equally and not differently.” Of course, this was after she was well known and could be more picky.
(2) Caren Kaplan, “A World without Boundaries,” With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, Lisa Bloom, ed. Minneapolis: U of MP, 1999. 140. This quotation specifically refers to Ralph Lauren’s advertisements for Safari perfume but I am deliberately misusing “safari” here because the Marie Claire ads discussed in Stoever are very much the same as those Ralph Lauren ads.
(3) Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, Amalia L. Cabezas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, eds. Boulder: Paradigm, 2007. 50.
(4) Ibid, 41.
(5) Ibid, 48.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Alek Wek, Alek: My Life from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, New York: Amistad, 2007, 7.
(8) Wek, 25.
(9) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 130.
(10) Ibid, 26.
(11) Ibid, 27.
(12) Hello Magazine, “Alek Wek” Profile, http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/alek-wek/.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Wek, 134.
(15) Lynette R. Holloway, “Alek Wek from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel,” Ebony (September 2007), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_11_62/ai_n19480182/.
(16) This brings to mind Vandana Shiva’s suggestion that “the sex industry” (not to necessarily equate the sex industry with modeling, of course) “is often the only survival option left to women who are economic refugees in the globalized economy” (130).
(17) Holloway.
(18) Shiva, 130.
(19) Askmen.com, emphasis mine.
(20) This brings to mind Aimé Césaire’s assessment of colonization (or my use of colonialization instead) as being equal to “thingification” (42), or here vice versa, this objectification of Alek Wek as distinctly colonial in nature.
(21) Stoever, 51.
(22) Ibid, 45.
(23) John Isbister, Promises Not Kept, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 33.
(24) This photo can be seen on page 50 of Stoever’s chapter.
(25) Stoever, 48.
(26) Ibid, 50.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid, 47.
(29) Wek, 7.
(30) Hello Magazine.
(31) Wek’s profile on fashionmodeldirectory.com says she “has done a variety of work for charitable causes including World Vision (for which she is the spokesperson), the U.S. Committee for Refugees, Fashion Targets Breast Cancer campaign, New York City Special Olympics, Sudanese relief through UNICEF, London Refugee Week, Roots (in Brooklyn) and DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS).” http://www.fashionmodeldirectory.com/models/Alek_Wek/
(32) Stoever, 45.
(33) Ibid, 53.
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