Sarie Kos, seperate but equal?

My sister-in-law and her husband went to South Africa for their honeymoon and brought me back a food magazine in Afrikaans, the language of a part of white South Africa. I love recipes and food magazines, but apparantly I love diversity more. They brought me the magazine Sarie Kos, a sister publication of the women's magazine Sarie. It only has white people in it. Not just white people, but the kind of white people Hitler would swoon over, you know, a bit like Ken and Barbie. There's a spread in it on New York food with photographs of New York and apparantly New York is a white place too. This magazine not only has only white people in it, the recipes are also very white, they're European recipes with a bit of Australia tossed in the white 'mix'.

Now I was looking forward to getting the magazine when my sister-in-law told me she had brought it with her because I love recipes and I wasn't suspicious from the start. I started to browse enthusiastically and then got that odd feeling that something wasn't right. I had had this feeling before when we were on vacation in the Loire region in France: a lack of diversity in the people around us. No people of any other color than white.

My mom tried to raise me as color blind, but she has failed in that because I notice the absence of color more than I had ever expected to. There's something unnatural about a lack of diversity in color that just doesn't feel right and when I was in that particular region in France and when I was reading Sarie Kos it even felt a bit scary. This is strange because I don't live in a particulary ethnic diverse part of the world, but then again, it's not just about the color of people but also about cultural diversity. I take cultural diversity as a very broad phenomenon, as thousands of little subcultures that people are made out. It's the way I can identify with people around the world who share one or more of the same tiny subcultures that make up me as a person. It's because of that that I can identify with the king of Marocco more than I can identify myself with Geert Wilders (Dutch politician, known for his hardcore Islamophobia). Mohammed VI organizes theatre and music festivals, reads the books that I read and has an academic background that reflects my own academic interests. Yet he and I are very different as indviduals because we also carry other subcultures in us.

The people in Sarie Kos all look completely interchangeable, they wear the same kind of clothes, have the same hairstyle and carry the same expression on their faces. They do not look like individuals at all. And you could never tell from just looking at them that they were living in a country with a lot of ethnic and cultural diversity. It just hasn't rubbed off on them. They won't allow it to rub off on them, they don't want to see it in their magazines, they don't want to taste it in their dinner. They want to be seperate but equal (and some would probably like to be more equal than others as George Orwell would say).