– Pliny the Elder
I have been sitting at my desk in my darkened study looking through the several hundred photographic images I took when my wife and I traveled across South Africa last spring. I had long planned to post several travel essays during the course of our month-long visit, and I did manage to complete and post a couple along the way. Yet as they often say, all good things come to those who wait. I have let my recollections simmer over the interceding months and I feel it is time to share them here.
I am reminded of something Jonathan Raban wrote in the Washington Post many years ago which I jotted down in my journal and which seems most applicable here. "Traveling (and one might as well say living) turns us into creatures of hap and contingency. We are forever navigating in fog, where the sensations of the moment are intense, and both our point of departure and our intended destination are lost to view in our concentration on the overwhelming here and now." Well, that is exactly what happened to me during my travels in Africa. "Things are constantly happening," Raban continue; "but we’re in no position to judge their meaning and significance." So true. Thankfully I maintained a very detailed travel journal during our trip and now, as I look back through all of these images, I can more properly reflect on what I wrote while we were there, and consider it all carefully and place it in its proper context.
My interest in Africa goes way back. I grew up with the story that one of my distant English ancestors was an intimate confidant of David Livingstone, the Scottish medical missionary and explorer, and I read everything I could find by and about him and his exploration of East and Southern Africa, hoping without success that I might find some reference to this friendship. On my first visit to London, in early 1972, I visited Livingstone’s final resting place at Westminster Abbey (sans heart which is buried in the heart of Africa). Something might turn up one of these days.
In high school in the late 1960s, as much of Africa was beginning to cast aside the yoke of its colonial past, I seriously considered a career in African history and politics. I had teachers who encouraged me in that vein and gave me books to read. "There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa," Beryl Markham wrote in her 1942 memoir West With the Night. "And as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime." I discovered how correct she was. And more and more books were published every year. It would be a daunting task.
In early 1969, during my senior year, one of these teachers took me with her to a meeting of African historians at a downtown Chicago hotel where they discussed the international ramifications of the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970) and the resultant genocide of the Igbo (also Ibo) people in the breakaway Republic of Biafra. It was during my first trip to Europe the previous summer that I saw photographs in various newspapers of starving Biafran children and I first came to understand the meaning of "genocide." At that Chicago meeting I could not understand how the United States could remain neutral in light of these horrendous events; it was more interested in access to Nigerian oil than the people who lived where it came from. How ironic, that it was President Nixon, upon his inauguration in January 1969, who recognized the Biafran genocide for what it was and criticized the Nigerian central government. And although I chose a career in European history, who would have guessed that thirty years later I would be involved in the pursuit of perpetrators of another African genocide, this time in Rwanda, during my career as a historian with the US Department of Justice.
One of my colleagues at the Justice Department spent time in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps and he introduced me to that country’s history, culture, and its very fine cuisine during our visits to one or another wonderful Ethiopian restaurants found in the metropolitan Washington, DC area which hosts the largest Ethiopian diaspora community outside of Africa. I discovered more books to read, most recently The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengestu. It tells the story of a young Ethiopian man who comes to DC to live and work and his interaction with American life. And I continue to enjoy Ethiopian cuisine every chance I get.
For me Africa has always been a place of mystery and transition and who knows where my life and career would have taken me had I followed this planned course of study. As it was, I pursued the study of German history, culture and literature although I have always remained interested in Africa and always knew deep down that I would visit there one day.
Almost fifty years later I finally arrived . . . ironically in South Africa which was for many years a pariah state and for which I held little or no lasting interest. All that changed once Nelson Mandela was freed from his imprisonment on Robben Island. He and the African National Congress ushered his country into the world community. Now it is a popular destination with its vibrant cities, its beautifully rugged landscape, its lovely beaches, its world-class wines, not to mention its numerous game preserves which was my primary reason for going there in the first place. Not to hunt animals, but to enjoy watching then roam about in their natural habitats. "Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia," Beryl Markham wrote in her 1942 memoir West Into the Night. "It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one." I would finally find out for myself whether Markham was correct. "Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice."
This is the first part of a six-part series.
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