“I went to yoga for the second time last night, it was much easier than before” I wrote to my friend yesterday.
“Such a first world thing to do in Africa. Who is your instructor? Some carefree white girl trying to improve the world.”
My instructor, in fact, is a Ugandan man named Alex. He was born here, educated here, and learned yoga here. He teaches yoga here to classes of both Westerners and Ugandans alike. And he is hardly the only one.
I know I’ve touched on this issue before, but it seems it can’t be reiterated enough: Africans can, and do, have nice things too. They can be experts at things: finance, biochemistry, and yes…yoga.
It is not first world to stretch or exercise. And while most Westerners find themselves fantastically liberal believing that yoga is some bourgeois nonsense, many seem to forget that they appropriated it from the developing world to begin with.
These things, these finer things in life, do not belong to the West. You neither invented them or have some sort of patent on doing them correctly.
So yes, yoga happens here. So does salsa dancing, zumba, spinning, golf and tennis. And, quelle surprise, Ugandans participate in all of them. Even go so far as to teach them. I know, right? Crazy. Africa, yo. It’s like…not all huts.
Finally someone said it.
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Ugh. Enough.
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