Following last week’s two perspectives on the Ghanaian television and web series, An African City, we hear this week from Brigid Warnke in New York, who compares An African City to its U.S. counterpart, Sex and the City. Warnke highlights in particular the presence – or absence – of issues of inequality, poverty, and class difference in portraying the lives of privileged women in each series.
by Brigid Warnke
“An African City” has been marketed as Ghana’s answer to “Sex and the City,” and that comparison is certainly an apt one. Both shows present groups of single, young, wealthy women as they navigate relationships in a bustling metropolis. In “Sex and the City,” our four main characters- Carrie, the narrator, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha- bluntly explore sex and relationships for six seasons and two movies (much as I would like to pretend that second movie never happened). Both series show these women navigating their cities as they struggle in their search for companionship, sex, and the hottest restaurant in town.
However, one major point of difference between the two is in the characters’ relationship to their setting. While “An African City” does show the viewer the glamorous, upper-crust side of life in Accra, Ghana, the women also complain about the ways that their city is further behind the cities of Europe and America, where they each lived previously. They worry about the possibility of living without electricity, or having to ship Pepto Bismol from the UK because it simply “cannot be trusted” in Accra. Even though we are transported to their worlds of luxury, we are still reminded during the program itself of the poverty and potential government corruption that exists just beneath the surface. In the New York Sex and the City, however, the women have a much more positive relationship with the City. New York is portrayed as a place of unending possibilities and wealth. The women all live on the Upper East Side, West Side, or trendy Meatpacking district, offering them endless possibilities for expensive shoes, fancy restaurants, and city-based financiers to date. No mention is made of what life is like outside of these pockets of wealth.
The reality is that New York City may offer endless possibilities to these upwardly-mobile, single women, but it presents significant barriers to those of a lower socioeconomic status, and “Sex and the City” rarely even mentioned these gross inequalities. At one point, Miranda jokes to Carrie about how Rudy Giuliani (former mayor and current Trump advisor) got rid of all the homeless people, a quip, not a critique, of his policy of sweeping through streets and public parks, arresting all those who slept there in an attempt not to help the homeless find shelter but simply to remove them from sight. No other mention of city politics is ever made. Class difference is only brought up through Miranda’s relationship with Steve, a bartender, when she wants to buy a suit for him but agonizes over whether he will feel emasculated when confronted with the fact that she makes more money than he. The result of this ignorance of New York’s sharp class divisions is a portrayal of a city that is all glitz and glam with no systemic inequalities. It is escapism at its finest; viewers need not even be reminded that the other New York exists.
The producers of “An African City” did not have the luxury of separating themselves so completely from issues of inequality, poverty, and corruption. The question is, why? While the producers may have set out to portray a vastly different side of Africa than the one usually consumed by Western audiences, they still had to acknowledge the “other” Africa, the one Western audiences have come to accept as fact. In both shows, the women seem to float above the real problems facing their city, but the tropes facing “An African City” necessitated the acknowledgement that those problems exist. Meanwhile, the women of “Sex and the City,” unburdened by viewers’ assumptions, can live in the upper crust of Manhattan, only once or twice dipping their toes into unpleasant realities for the purposes of a punch line before returning to the comfortable land of Cosmos cocktails and $900 Manolo Blahnik shoes.
Brigid Warnke is a Theatre and Music Teacher in New York. She is currently working towards a Master’s degree in Educational Theatre at the City College of New York. She is a huge fan of both trashy television and post colonial theory, so this article is pretty much the best of both worlds.