Prelude Mexico City, 2014, at my desk on a rainy Sunday morning, wrapped in a comforting lap rug of Chinese bamboo fibers and looking out over the nasturtiums pelted by yesterday’s hailstones. “Do you miss Africa terribly?” I wrote to John, our friend from Perth, Australia, who had shared a few of our Zimbabwe days, most notably the shipwreck. A shipwreck in Zimbabwe, a landlocked country? Ah, but Lake Kariba… “Does a part of your soul still yearn for the scent of the dew-damp grass and the hoarse grunting of the lion before dawn? Do you still hear the shriek of the fish-eagle? Does an elephant cross the path of your dreams in the murkiness before the sun emerges, with the glow of Africa streaking its colors?” Sometimes I wonder how I can possibly go on and perhaps for that reason I wrote this book. I yearn for Africa as I might a close friend or a beloved relative. The longing is almost painful, touched with tenderness, surely a fact, a kind of mourning. There were other places—Greece and Egypt, Spain and Morocco, the Mediterranean world, the Adriatic world, Southeast Asia, China and India, Mongolia and Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Syria, the Middle East, South America but especially Peru. There were Rapa Nui and French Polynesia, my own beloved Mexico, Europe of course, the U.S. obviously, all in the pursuit of the convergence of man’s cultures, but also in the quest for the pieces of myself. And not only the tracing of cultures and their overlapping or mingling or enveloping and entwining; what about simple beauty? The staggering loveliness and sheer wonderment, not so simple at all. Has any of it remained? These cradles of civilizations toppled with the trees of their forests, the minerals in their ground, greed and growth, the expansion of some, the plowing under of others. Wars, investments, arms traders, stock brokers, diamond dealers. Does the world spin on as it always has or is something tangled? I have no patience for the people who discount the Africans as “barely able to beat a drum”, or who decry the continent as backward because it is not European. Or as degraded because it finds no reward in European values, European goals or European standards. It was Europe that created the notions of “backwardness” or “development”, of “corruption” or “the rule of law” and it is Europeans and their offspring who have generally provoked, augmented or supported whichever of these seemed convenient to its larger policy, or consistent with its values. In January of 1906, according to Mary S. Lovells biography, Winston Churchill went to Manchester, in England, to tour the worst slums. Fancy living in these streets, he remarked to a companion, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury and never saying anything clever! This could never happen in Africa, nor in Mexico either, for that matter. There is always something to celebrate, something strange and delicious to eat, a geranium perhaps, blooming brilliantly, indifferently, in an old tin can. It was also Churchill, then an official in the Colonial Office, who made a trip to Britain’s new possessions in East Africa. He disembarked in Mombasa and rode the Uganda Railroad of the British East Africa Railroad Company, which we would in time see for ourselves, on a bench attached to the cowcatcher, perilous but picturesque. At one point he found himself looking across a grassland at a rhinocerous, and he marveled at these wonderful animals, roaming here since prehistory, and then he shot it! Why do men feel compelled to collect trophies? Are they so afraid of forgetting something they think they should remember? Some things are better imagined than remembered. As Heraclitus said, “God, to a goat, takes the form of a goat.” The Africans have never had a problem with this, or with a plurality of convictions. The important thing is to accept things for what they are. Comparisons are fine if they serve to support what is, and is therefore worthy of recognition. But they are ignominious as justifications for a hypothesis either preconceived or taken out of context. The notion of past and future is a problem. There is only today. Somehow I feel that in Africa the world began and here perhaps it might end. This is Eden: breathless, intact, suspended between origin and eternity. Everything has, in the course of evolution, become the by-product of something else, but Africa, the part I saw, the way I saw it, was pure and whole and untouched, despite colonialism and economic dependence and corruption or misery, disease and death, or even tourism.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 18:17:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015