Now and then there was trouble, someone transfixed by a spear, drunken brawls, or political violence - goon squads wearing the ruling party T-shirt and raising hell, But in general the Africa I knew was sunlit and lovely, a soft green emptiness of low flat-topped trees and dense bush, bird-squawks, giggling kids, red roads, cracked and crusty brown cliffs that looked newly baked, blue remembered hills, striped and spotted animals, and ones with yellow fur and fangs, and every hue of human being, from pink-faced planters in knee socks and shorts to brown Indians and Africans with black gleaming faces and at the far end of the spectrum some people so dark they were purple. That was taken for the natural order in Africa: frolicking children, laboring women, idle men. They were hopeful, and so was I, a schoolteacher living near a settlement of mud huts among dusty trees and parched fields: children shrieking at play and women bent double - most with infants slung on their backs - hoeing the corn and beans and the men sitting in the shade stupefying themselves on chibuku, the local beer, or kachasu, the local gin. They had a new national flag to replace the Union Jack, they had just gotten the vote, some had bikes, many talked about buying their first pair of shoes. Such a paragraph needs some explanation - at least a book this book perhaps.Īs I was saying, in those old undramatic days of my school teaching in the bundu, folks lived their lives on bush paths at the end of unpaved roads of red clay, in villages of grass-roofed huts. I got sick, I got stranded but I was never bored: in fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate, they begged, they pleaded, they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement. To be an African leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people’s innocence and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied-to people on earth - manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts, befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. Exasperated white farmers said, ‘It all went tits up!’ Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it - hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the politicians from the witch-doctors. No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. I was mistaken in so much - delayed, shot at, howled at, and robbed. To skip ahead, I am writing this a year later, just back from Africa, having taken my long safari. There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years ago, in the heart of the greenest continent.
Feeling that the place was so large it contained many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too - feeling that there was more to Africa than misery and terror - I aimed to reinsert myself in the bundu, as we used to call the bush, and to wander the antique hinterland. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. What avuncular cloud-man beamier than spears? Wallace Stevens, ‘The Greenest Continent’Īll news out of Africa is bad. For my mother, Anne Dittami Theroux on her ninety-first birthday
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