Short is the new tall

Coffee, that is. That’s right, people. There’s a Starbucks-like coffee shop in Kigali. Only here, a tall is a medium. Even for those of us schooled in the vocabulary of ventis, it’s less confusing than if it were in Kinyarwanda, I suppose. English is the language of money…

Cafe Bourbon, named after the country’s most famous bean, is in this new mall, which has taken over the hillside behind my trusty internet cafe… I wondered why the shelves at the grocery I went to two years ago seemed so empty; there’s a veritable Wal-Mart here, practically. Complete with the things All Children Need: Big, plastic, white dolls for the girls (I wonder if the kids who get them yell “Mzungu, mzungu” at the dolls the way they do at us pasty folks passing on the road), and tanks and soldiers and guns for the boys. In a country where war still has a real legacy, this latter choice seems particularly strange. Then again, cheap Chinese goods are cheap Chinese goods… I can even replace the Nalgene I lost en route, with one that has the Cafe Bourbon name and logo stamped right on front.

Oh, the bliss.

I can’t put my finger on it yet–rest assured you’ll hear more about this–but there’s an air of optimism, a thin and somehow untrustworthy optimism, in this Western-style strip mall. Is it that such investment suggests to Rwandans the promise of a different future? Or maybe Horkheimer and Adorno were right after all—that this whole crazy thing we call a ‘developed economy’ lets “individuals experience themselves through their needs only as eternal consumers,” offered the bliss of temporary amnesia purchases provide. In that case, per H&A, caveat emptor: “To offer…and to withhold are one in the same.”