fetishize

There are websites and social media accounts that fetishise cleansing as well as multistep routines to wash, scrub and exfoliate the face until it gleams.

To invoke that kind of suffering - other people's suffering - and fetishise it as something to which to aspire, is deeply offensive and shockingly flawed.

This is the same man Tinubu now attempts to fetishise as an enemy.

"I don't want to fetishise it, because it's really dull and it's really dangerous," he explained.

Nor is the answer to uncritically fetishise technology as a good, as this ignores our unconscious anxieties with our technological existence.

Twenty20 might be recuperated by cricket's purist accountants, who can slice, dice and fetishise its statistics, but for most of those who consume it, it is all about the affective, mediated moment.

On the one hand those who cursorily dismiss lifestyle politics are admonished for failing to have '[a]n understanding that practices may fulfil different goals to different degrees' (p 49), but there is also a warning against the temptation to 'fetishise anti-consumption as a tactic, [and] not to conflate its satisfaction of personal fulfilment with its fulfilment of the promise of social change ...' (p 50).

"Having constructed his 'unspoilt' colonial, McEwen proceeded to fetishise it, and would spend the rest of his life defending its 'authenticity' and struggling to provide it with an 'umbrella of protection,'" suggested art historian Olu Oguibe of the University of Connecticut in 2002.

And it doesn't matter that Africans can be just as guilty, as the foreigners I have described, in the way we sometimes fetishise creations we discover on our continent.