South Africa aren’t starving to death like they do in some of these Godforsaken countries. Don’t envy them, mind you,
but compared to some poor bugger in Ethiopia-”
A stewardess came down the aisle with headphones for rent, and the young man pulled out his wallet. “’Course, I try
and stay out of politics, you know. Figure it’s none of my business. Same thing back home-everybody on the dole, the
old men in Parliament talking the same old rubbish. Best thing to do is mind your own little corner of the world, that’s
what I say.” He found the outlet for the headphones and slipped them over his ears.
“Wake me up when they bring the food, will you,” he said before reclining his seat for a nap.
I pulled out a book from my carry-on bag and tried to read. It was a portrait of several African countries written by a
Western journalist who’d spent a decade in Africa; an old Africa hand, he would be called, someone who apparently
prided himself on the balanced assessment. The book’s first few chapters discussed the history of colonialism at some
length: the manipulation of tribal hatreds and the caprice of colonial boundaries, the displacements, the detentions, the
indignities large and small. The early heroism of independence figures like Kenyatta and Nkrumah was duly noted,
their later drift toward despotism attributed at least in part to various Cold War machinations.
But by the book’s third chapter, images from the present had begun to outstrip the past. Famine, disease, the coups
and countercoups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks-if Africa had a history, the writer
seemed to say, the scale of current suffering had rendered such history meaningless.
Poor buggers. Godforsaken countries.
I set the book down, feeling a familiar anger flush through me, an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear
target. Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now, his glasses askew on his fin-shaped nose. Was I angry at him?
I wondered. Was it his fault that, for all my education, all the theories in my possession, I had had no ready answers to
the questions he’d posed? How much could I blame him for wanting to better his lot? Maybe I was just angry because
of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a black American, might naturally share in
his dim view of Africa; an assumption that in his world at least marked a progress of sorts, but that for me only
underscored my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full
of strangers.
I’d been feeling this way all through my stay in Europe-edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers. I hadn’t planned it
that way. I had thought of the layover there as nothing more than a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I
had never been before. For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus
and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the
chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and
sparrows swirling across cobalt skies; and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear,
listening to the wind and its whispers of mortality.
And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful;
everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the
incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect
that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old
Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine-stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become so
barré
(Barré)
#1