Mickey's African adventure

Abstract

Contemporary culture worldwide has accorded Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters an aura and mystique of timelessness and unchangeability: points of stability and continuity in a world where expendability and planned obsolescence have come to typify consumer culture. Disney has come to signify magic, fantasy and a world out of time. Similarly, the stereotypical western construction of 'Africa' has fabricated the mythology of a continent deserving ‘... to be seen and savoured in ways that defy the passage of ... History – in all its strangeness and glory, miraculously unaffected by its colonial and postcolonial past (Powell 1995:8).