Whether she was mending conflict with Nicki Minaj or accepting the MTV Video Music Award for video of the year, the 25-year-old pop phenom has come a long way since being heckled off the VMAs stage by Kanye West in 2009. But amid all the hubbub, Swift also debuted the music video for her single "Wildest Dreams" — a midcentury fantasy set on the plains of an unspecified African country:
The video's narrative of white people finding romance in the hinterlands of a land wracked by colonial violence is not only obliviously ahistorical, but also exhibits tropes that people across the African diaspora have been trying to dispel for years.
First, the truth: The African continent endured unspeakable brutality under European colonial rule.
Millions of people were enslaved, tortured or killed under violent systems of European law enforcement, forced labor and segregationist policies, fueled by a ravenous export economy that plundered much of the continent's natural resources and left many African nations indebted to — and often financially dependent on — their white former enslavers.
The image of Africa as a frontier playground is on full display in Swift's video. Not a single black African person is present, let alone one of specified national origin from among the continent's 54 countries.
It's hard to decipher what the creators intended with this video. But considering the dark history in which its African tropes are rooted — not to mention Swift's own recent brushes with racial controversy, and widespread criticism of the public outrage around Cecil the lion's death compared to that over black lives taken by law enforcement in the United States — it seems remarkable that the insidious nature of the African colonial fantasy is so seamlessly glossed over.
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