I had never heard of Tiffany Haddish before my attention was called to her TikTok video recorded in Harare Zimbabwe, where she professes astonishment that there’s a really nice grocery store there, and acts as if this is a secret that has been concealed from the world in order to reproduce false images of Africa and Africans as poor and rural.
I confess that I think less of a public figure, celebrity or actor when they’re described as also being “an influencer”. That is probably unfair as an indiscriminate reaction, but I can’t really think of someone fitting that label that I like and approve of. I think Haddish seems in her social media presence to be in that general category.
If I had to say why I feel that way, other than a generalized bias, I guess it would be because “influencers” and their close kin, “explainers” and “thought leaders” all seem to experience the world as a stage where they are the first to see, recognize, and react to ideas, facts, and realities. They are the first to go somewhere. The first to see something. The first to reveal an amazing truth. The first to think an important thought. They are sharing this voyage of discovery with their followers, and through their followers the whole wide world.
Explainers and thought leaders sometimes make vague gestures towards reference or citation, because in many cases the authority they want to confer upon themselves simply can’t be a result of an entirely novel and unique-to-them process of dedicated inquiry or research. But reference is just a trace element in most of their affect: they still present themselves as the first person to explain to the world what has been up till now an esoteric secret known only to a few scholars, or as the first person to put it all together so that we can be led to new insights or policies. The Lego pieces were in the bucket, sure, but the thought leader assembled them into something no one has ever fully seen.
Influencers and celebrities who are influencer-adjacent, though, often present instead as a kind of solipsistic transcript. If it’s new to them, then they assume that it is new to their followers, and thus to the world (because non-followers don’t really exist as such). Most of them would never dream of pausing before sharing to ask “am I right about this? has anyone written about this? what do other people think about this? am I seeing this right?”
Academics have a completely opposite sensibility, maybe excessively so at times. I have a vague sympathy for Haddish in the sense that even though I had a “book knowledge” that sub-Saharan African cities looked much like other global cities, my first year-long residence in Harare with side trips to South Africa and Zambia still had me thinking occasionally “man, Americans really have the wrong preconceptions about the materiality of life in contemporary Africa”, a feeling that wasn’t just about my impression of cities but also trips to rural areas. Haddish is not wrong that there are persistent American stereotypes about material life in Africa. It doesn’t require a trip, you can just watch Nigerian films on Netflix if you want to fix that.
The problem is Haddish’s profound incuriosity and lack of self-awareness. That moment when she says, “I just like demystifying shit” is the abyss that influencers and explainers and thought-leaders fall into, the anointing of themselves as the first people to discover the truth. It’s a kind of perverse inversion of a Victorian-era explorer saying “I’m the first person to discover this place” while surrounded by his local guides and within a ten-minute walk of a village that’s been there for generations. If you want the exact opposite of the way this comes off but that is still a social media-centered project of documenting personal experience, Chris Arnade’s walks through cities all over the world are terrifically thoughtful, reflective, and usefully self-doubting—and they still function as “demystifying” in many interesting ways.
I don’t expect Haddish to open up my book and read the chapter that discussed the history of supermarkets in Harare or to read Bianca Murillo’s Market Encounters before she records a TikTok, but I think it’s fair that I would expect her to stop for a second and ask other people around her, “Hey, how long has this store been here?” (I think she’s in the Avondale Bon Marche because of the green in the interior colors, but maybe it’s the Pick n’ Pay.) The answer would be in either case, “A really long time”. And then maybe she’d ask, “Hey, is this place typical?” The answer would be “no, not really”. I’d expect her to say, “maybe I’m the one who didn’t know all this, not my followers.” Which might, might, might lead to a bit more curiosity, a bit more perspective and a bit more legwork before hitting the “send” button. (I could at least have saved her a bit of grief in her comment threads about the brand of petroleum jelly next to the Vaseline.)
She’s in a residential area of the city where a mix of upper middle-class professionals, wealthier businesspeople, some government officials, and many resident foreigners (embassy personnel, researchers, etc.) live. Both times I’ve lived in Harare I’ve found a flat not too far from Avondale—once in the Avenues, to the south, once just north of the shopping center that I think she’s in. Further out in Harare, there are wealthier suburbs—the Bon Marche out in Westgate is swankier than the one in Avondale or Belgravia. So I’ve actually shopped where she’s shopping, for the first time about thirty years ago. (Though I couldn’t really afford the Bon Marche, and that was before hyperinflation.)
If Haddish were an influencer from somewhere else who’d never come to the U.S. and thought that “The Wire”, “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Yellowstone” were pretty much the way the country was everywhere and the first place she went to shop was the big Whole Foods near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia and she marvelled at how wrong her impression of America had been because look at this big modern supermarket full of expensive and exotic food right next to great museums, a huge municipal library and big apartment buildings? Well, that’s pretty much her video from Harare, and it’s gotten the same reaction that the imaginary influencer in the US would probably get.
There are supermarkets on the southern side of the Harare CBD but they look really different, and then there are smaller markets and shops in the big townships all the way out to Chitungwiza, and they’re just as interesting and in many ways serviceable. But she’d certainly have a more complicated picture of material life if she took a short trip out to Chikwana Vegetable Market. She might even have a more nuanced understanding if she shopped at Ok Market on Fife Avenue, which is still in the Avenues on the north side of the CBD. It’s a nice enough market—basically the Giant to Bon Marche’s Whole Foods—but you can see some differences that make a difference.
She does grasp that the relative price of a lot of what she sees is really high even relative to her income so that might have made her a bit more cautious. I’m not sure she has much grasp of economic life for most Zimbabweans, which really does suggest a pretty sheltered outlook. (She’s demonstrated that before, in her 2018 trip to Eritrea. Maybe the problem with influencers is just that they’re too easily influenced.)
I think that’s not much to ask of anybody who decides to turn on their phone and post their experiences to social media as they’re having those experiences to just think for a minute, to ask “Did everybody else know this? Am I having the same experience as thousands before me? How does this look to people who aren’t me? How does it look to the people I’m with right now? If I’m demystifying, is it possible that I’m the last person to find out something that a lot of other people know?” Too much of that is a burden, but just a small amount of it might help everybody.
"Academics have a completely opposite sensibility, maybe excessively so at times." I think that contrast is worth drawing out. When reading academics, I often wish they would do less acknowledging and describing the shoulders they're standing on, and more looking around and talking about what they see.