No country in the world has mastered the art of public relations quite like the United States of America. As children growing up in SA, we were bombarded with American culture. We listened to American music, watched American television and films, ate American food, wore American clothes and had our education shaped by epistemologies of America and the broader global North.

From a continent away, we fantasised about the American Dream – a dream made real by the many stories that we read about, of immigrants who left “Third World” countries and made a success of their lives upon arrival in “the land of the free and the home of the great”...