“cr azy white men” 255“friend” one another, and start a conversation, which would turn the mu-
sician’s page into a hub for cosmopolitan connections. However, until
further proof, this remains a possibility only.
DIFFERENT SHADES OF COSMOPOLITANISMAt the heart of the cosmopolitan ventures of the three musicians, we
find what Mica Nava (2007) calls “domestic cosmopolitanism.” Unlike
other theorists of the cosmopolitan who have focused on travel and stay-
ing abroad, Nava proposes to take into account that “a good deal of inclu-
sive thinking and feeling... takes place in the micro territories of the local:
at school, in the gym and the café, at home” (135). W hile, today, the three
musicians are also leading cosmopolitan lives in a conventional sense,
epitomized by their frequent travels between the continents, the roots
of their cosmopolitan thinking and feeling are situated in the domestic
sphere of their African home countries, Namibia, Nigeria, and Tanza-
nia. Significantly, all of them revert to the inclusive experiences of their
childhood and schooling days when accounting for the origins of their
cosmopolitan attitudes. In our interviews, Eric Sell and Espen Sørensen
also mentioned their families and thus another of Nava’s “micro territories
of the local.” Using her own family history as an example, Nava argues for
acknowledging the importance of family to understand how individuals
develop a disposition toward cultural difference. I wish to combine this
idea with another, which I borrow from Peter van der Veer (2002), who
argues for the necessity of taking the enabling conditions of engagement
with the other into account when studying cosmopolitan orientations.
In other words, we not only need to think of family histories but also of
past and present power relations that, as enabling conditions, shape the
form domestic cosmopolitanism and “conviviality” (Gilroy 2004) take
in a given society. This helps us better understand the different shades of
cosmopolitanism the three musicians have developed.
Eric Sell is fifth generation German-Namibian. During the late nine-
teenth century, his ancestors arrived in the German colony Deutsch-
Südwestafrika, as Namibia was called back then. Sell entered school in
1990, the year Namibia achieved independence from South Africa, and