vol #37: killing the neocolonialist, weaponising your adhd & singeli
sent from rashini & jack's iphone with love
rashini & jack
Jambo! Or Mambo, if you’re a local.
We’re Rashini & Jack, two insufferably cute members of a couple never not drinking its own Kool-Aid. We’re on holidays rn (wow we’re sure you really can’t wait to hear about yet more people skirting the line between snap happy & aestheti-posting), & in between drinks have been doing loads of doing, thinking & saying both IRL & URL.
If we’re yet to have had the pleasure:
Rashini is almost topping the charts for “cutest parasocial friend on your grid”, working as a digital spy for a climate organisation & never not doomscrolling with a purpose.
Jack is a chaotic “creative” (god that word sucks) type, having just recently deshackled himself from “the machine”, running events under various names & now running away from his responsibilities.
Life is very good for us both.
We've found ourselves in East Africa, hoping to merge a romantic getaway with holding ourselves accountable for the impact our money has on the world around us. Sexy, no?
From living out our (Jack’s) Pokémon Snap fantasies on safari, to half-built hotels, tourist traps & some S-tier people watching, our holiday thus far has had no shortage of things to giggle & hoot over.
Big thanks to everyone’s favourite foxy moron for asking us to contribute a few tidbits for your reading pleasure. God knows we didn’t need another outlet to gas ourselves up but hey, this is social media.
the sweetest!
this is the online bit
Singeli
We’ve found ourselves in the home of many things, but perhaps the most unshakeably obvious one is shaking ass.
From traditional dance performances to chaotically constructed clubs, ass shaking has for us very quickly replaced the usually filmic “I am the protagonist” soundtracks of most people’s two week trips to the EU. See: any FHUO mix*.
*forreal through this one is great.
Singeli is perhaps the sweetest busiest music we’ve ever heard, sitting comfortably between 200 & 300 BPM (shoutout DJs [most people reading this]). Blasting out the side of a 25 seater mini bus with some guy’s girlfriend’s face plastered on it alongside the tagline “GOD IS ON MY SIDE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE”, is but one of the places to find it.
Every cab, every club, every boat & every portable speaker in Tanzania had it on rotation & we can see why.
Hyperpop eat your heart out. Here’s one of our faves.
Dropout TV
Dropout lets nerds get in front of the camera - & while that might sound like Big Bang Theory’s bio or a gateway to Ben Shapiro, that’s thankfully way way off mark.
Dropout spun out as the bigger, better sister of College Humour as a streaming platform that actually pays their staff and makes being “nerdy” a style rather than a punchline.
From 45-minute improvised musicals to Jeopardy for geeks, & your fav drag queens playing entire D&D campaigns, it’s a far cry from almost every panel or game show to be found anywhere else.
Project Makeover (Games so crappy you can’t help but play them)
We’ve all seen them. Ads for mobile games that look so bad, you can’t help but wonder what they’d be like to play.
Clearly we couldn’t help ourselves. Heads up, don’t make the mistake we did.
Aside from a very cunty soundtrack, we’ve clearly been given a Queer Eye styled bait & switch. Far from actually doing any makeovers, we’ve been grinding for coins & currencies specific to certain items, unlocks & whatever else can be hidden behind a virtual paywall.
Clearly we were foolish to think mobile gaming had moved on. Is it really so much to ask to cake someone in moisturiser, take a razor to them & get invested in their transformation from the comfort of our palms?
Apparently so.
this is the irl bit
Killing the neocolonialist inside you
Rashini won’t go to Europe unless she’s paid to (real), but there’s nowhere you can go without being slapped across the face by European civilisation and its consequences.
Kenya & Tanzania fucked off the Brits in the 60’s, but in our time here we’ve encountered a filthy amount of people consciously and subconsciously living out their colonial fantasies - filming voyeuristic videos of hotel staff carrying their bags or bringing them drinks, filling Hinge profiles with photos of local children (straight to jail) to literally reminiscing on days when “we ran things” (The Hague!!!!).
Beyond the interpersonal nightmare of rubbing shoulders with racists is the haunting reality that safari is a colonial invention, running today on neocolonialism. It’s estimated that up to 70% of money generated from tourism in Africa is destined for foreign pockets. Anyone with half an eye open can picture how this works - locals don’t have capital to compete with international tourism tycoons, who in turn finesse their operations to keep overheads and taxes back home.
So, hot tip.
Do your research, support locally-owned businesses (our longest ever yea boi/highest ever recommendation for Long Way Expeditions), tip well and don’t try to haggle people out of a living.
Underrated animals
“The Big Five” is a term for some of Africa’s most sought after animal sightings. Elephants, Lions, Buffalo, Leopards & Rhinos. Originally coined as a hunting term for animals “most difficult to hunt on foot” (ew), the big five is now a checklist for tourists desperate to mount digital heads on the walls of their social profiles, as proof that they got their money’s worth.
After seven days spent up close & personal with them all, we found three animals in particular are sorely underrated:
They are:
Hippopotamus: They might be called “the deadliest land animal on the planet”, but can you blame them? Really though, all we saw them do was fall asleep underwater, occasionally stirring to wake up, breathe, fart & shit. Now that’s living.
Warthog: Sure, everybody loves Pumba, but that’s setting an unrealistic standard for warthogs. In reality they’re much more proud looking, stomping & snorting around with a real Ghibli-esque swagger that we couldn’t get enough of.
Hyena: Okay, hear us out. Cue people saying hyenas are ugly, that they’re parasitic animals, & yes, both of those things are true. What we saw in the hyena though was cute beyond edginess. Hyenas are just doing their best, what’s not to love about that.
underrated cuties!
Weaponising your adhd (for fun!)
Rashini has been taking an occasional psych-mandated break from the other love of her life: Ritalin 30mg long-acting. While mostly it sucks, there’s no such thing as an awkward or comfortable silence when your brain won’t stop pinging with perfect road trip/pool bar questions.
From “what’s the worst thing a fruit has ever done to you?” to “what animal would Annandale be?” to “where would you never get a tattoo?”, they’re nothing if not varied & slightly confusing.
Perhaps our favourite of these has come from Jack imitating Rashini’s ADHD quizzing, & asking: Fuck, Marry, Kill: virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology.
thank you for reading i hope today is perfect