There are more and more passengers, and less and less travel!
Millions of people, especially in the richer part of the world, brag about photos and memories from their summer or winter vacations. all inclusive destinations, convinced that they have "seen the world" and become a part of modern, global, enlightened humanity. Apart from thousands of digital photos and millions of selfies, rarely do our travelers manage to feel and take with them the true experience of a country. Tourism has displaced the adventure of the spirit from travel.
One of the last world travelers I met is Zoran Ćirjaković. A badass character in the most positive sense. As soon as you look at his biography, you realize that he is a multi-layered character who does not have a hair on his tongue. He graduated in electrical engineering and has an analytical physics degree, but he completed his postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences. He was engaged in journalism and was a correspondent for "Newsweek" and "LA Times" in the middle of the worst war hell in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. He wrote for the domestic media about wars in the countries of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, Zoran Ćirjaković is also the harshest critic of the media, both domestic and global.
He worked as a foreign policy commentator for NIN, B92 and Vremena, and as a guest lecturer at universities in Great Britain, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. He was active in the opposition during Milosevic's time, but became a harsh critic of the government after 2000. Often in his texts, he was the first to draw attention to the blind spots of domestic public opinion, and as such he experienced and paid the price of the cock that crows first.
Zoran Ćirjaković has the rare journalistic gift of writing about his country and its events from the distance of a foreign correspondent, unencumbered by the influences of the First or Second Serbia, tycoons or the non-governmental sector. This gave him the right to ask questions that are silenced and the thankless role of Devil's advocate.
GLOBAL AND LOCAL: However, professional courage and analytical mind would not be enough without the third element in Zoran Ćirjaković's professional work - travel. He is a man who visited the most remote parts of the planet, and the consequence of those deeply lived experiences is the wider picture of the world, Europe and Serbia today. No matter how much we believe that we are unique, in the last couple of decades we managed to mentally isolate ourselves from world processes, whose victims we were, whether we wanted it or not. Since we did not show interest in the world, or we called the world only those that were directly concerned with us, we did not understand what was happening to us nor could we determine where we were going.
As a man who deals with alternative modernities and intercultural communications, Zoran Ćirjaković tries to determine what we mean by the terms: liberal economy, modernity, globalization, then what is the relationship between rich and poor, North and South, Europe and Asia, and especially Europe and Africa.
Book Global Africa (Biblioteka Kapital, Archipelago, Belgrade 2013) reexamines all post-colonial phenomena in the social and economic life of the continent, especially the part that was previously called Black, and today bears the neutral geographical designation of Sub-Saharan Africa.
In that poorest part of the world, where all hope that things can get better has disappeared, you can see the hypocrisy of the modern world as if on litmus paper. This is where the dark side of all generally accepted values of Western civilization, primarily Europe and America, is shown. Liberal economy, democracy, state-legal system, universal human rights, education and culture of former colonizers, modernity and primitiveness, and finally the most hypocritical of all – humanitarian charity of the rich.
THE BLACK BALKANS: The rich world wants Africa's resources, but it doesn't want poor Africans at home. You will get confirmation for this thesis every day in the news about drowned desperadoes trying to reach the shores of Fortress Europe.
It takes a strong stomach when you see the misery of Africa and a strong moral reason when you want to not become just another well-fed white man who came there to pity or experience the thrill of safari tourism. There are, of course, even lower human motives for traveling to this part of the planet, so Africa is a great moral question mark for modern humanity. At the very beginning, Ćirjaković set himself the goal of using the acquired experience so that the message from Sub-Saharan Africa reaches the "civilized world" as a warning that "the world is moving in the wrong direction."
Book Global Africa will help you understand those terrible news from Hearts of Darkness, but whether you want it or not, you will recognize the face of the Balkans in many of the phenomena there. The author does not insist on analogies or forcefully construct them, but the relationship between the rich and the poor has universal rules. The most similar impression is injustice, which is presented as an unchangeable fact, and poorer nations are disciplined to accept injustice and live with it.
Although it is difficult to find signs that the people of sub-Saharan Africa will soon be better off, the book is not entirely devoid of hope. On the cover you will see the photo "Eyes" that Ćirjaković took in a poor village in Togo. Apart from curiosity, you see mistrust, humiliation, but also a smile. That magic of Africa that keeps a smile in conditions that have long gone beyond the level of hopelessness restores faith in the strength of human nature. This is where I feel the strongest connection with the Balkans and our culture.
That is why Africa is a place where humanity has been preserved like nowhere else in the world, the forgotten universal wisdom of humanity and the darkness from which the trace of light and purity can be seen most clearly.
