It is somewhere between African Queen and National Geographic;
This is the Africa where I have lived and worked.
It is an abundant yet tired land teeming with struggling and tired people; it is a place of plenty for the few and poverty for the many. It is a people who sold their own into slavery and by doing so perhaps lost the ability to resist empire building by the powers of Europe. It is a land rich in minerals, from the copper and tin of the Congo Basin to the gold and diamonds of southern Africa to the flawlessly purplish-blue gems we call Tanzanite from the savannahs of the Sub Saharran. All these and countless others, scratched-out by Africans from mines and rocks and for but a fraction of their market value.
So often, the wealth leaves Africa as it always has, be it from the slave trade of the past or the minerals of today.
The plantations of Mississippi have not metaphorically vanished with the wind as in Margaret Mitchell’s annals; indeed they have been re-born in lands whose names we barely know: Botswana and Swaziland, Zambia and Malawi; Namibia and Mozambique.
Names may have changed from colonial days: found only in history books are the Rhodesias; the Gold, Ivory and Grain Coasts; Dahomey and Nyassaland; Togoland and Upper Volta, but name changing does not transform reality; sadly it too often replaces foreign colonialism with domestic corruption.
The coast of East Africa where I called home has witnessed the flags of many nations from Arab to German to British and finally Uhuru – Freedom! Tanganyika’s freedom arose from its dusty roads and savannahs and from its jungles and rivers; it swam ashore from lakes named Victoria and Albert and Nyassa; it descended from the snow-capped rim of the volcano we call Kilimanjaro. It fused its future with the Arabic dominated spice island of Zanzibar and the land called Tanzania took its place in the family of nations. It did so freely and without violence.
Problems were myriad and so they remain. Draft animals that turned the European and North American plains and the vast steppes of Asia into arable farm land are not to be found here: they fall to the tsetse fly. Malaria killed millions; it still does. Cholera and typhoid and yellow fever and so many other maladies that we eradicated elsewhere live-on here, testimony on the one hand to human perseverance but yet on the other to the shame of those whose chose not to do here what they did so easily elsewhere.
Whatever you do for the least of my brothers……
Slavery – Utumwah – that chronicler of squalor and havoc; it speaks in the language of Kiswahili, the East African dialect whose sentences are interspaced with Arabic words, a reminder of those who purchased the millions of slaves, dragged from the rain-forested interior by their brothers to be transported to the hellish world of Arabia to toil there till death brought them their only freedom.
I don't know but perhaps there is a blurred but sadly logical bond between Utumwah and Uhuru: cause and effect; quid pro quo? Or perhaps the ying and yang of the latest trespasser.
My Africa is found in the grass hut villages of Mtwara and Massasi; found in the toil of women whose one and only purpose is to bring water back to the village, water carried on their heads from miles away. It is found in the young girls fetching firewood, training for the day that they will replace their mothers as an African Gungha Din. It is found where there is no electricity; where the rainfalls are welcomed with the fervor of religion. It is found in the simple happiness of children and in the utter bleakness that only hopelessness begets.
Because of why I was there, I am in the present tense compelled to see the people of Africa in other ways: the people of leprosy and tuberculosis; of schistosomiasis and river blindness; of dysentery and parasites; of pneumonia and measles; of women dying giving birth and the despondency of skin-and-bone children.
And then there is HIV………but that story must wait for another day………
For now it is sunset in Dar; soon the moon will rise; seemingly born from the very nadir of the Indian Ocean. Africa will bid adieu to another day and welcome again the hours of its darkness, the darkness of Conrad shrouding the mystery of its heart.
Remember this land; pray for its people. Remember as I do.
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