Africa is not a romantic motherland for black Americans, but a cruel despotic continent, writes Keith Richburg
I WATCHED the dead float down a river in Tanzania. It’s one of those apocryphal stories you always hear coming out of Africa, meant to demonstrate the savagery of “the natives”. Babies being pulled off their mothers’ backs and tossed onto spears. Pregnant women being disembowelled. Bodies being tossed into the river and floating downstream. You heard them all, but never really believed.
And yet there I was, drenched with sweat under the blistering sun, standing at the Rusumo Falls bridge, watching the bodies float past me. Sometimes they came one by one. Sometimes two or three together. They were bloated now, horribly discoloured. Most were naked, or stripped down to their underpants. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together. Some were clearly missing some limbs. And as they went over the falls, a few got stuck together on a little crag, and stayed there flapping against the current, as though they were trying to break free. I couldn’t take my eyes off one of them, the body of a little baby.
We timed them: a body or two every minute. And the Tanzanian border guards told us it had been like that for a couple of days now. These were the victims of the ethnic genocide going on across the border in Rwanda. The killers were working too fast to allow for proper burials. It was easier to dump the corpses into the Kagera River, to let them float downstream into Tanzania, eventually into Lake Victoria, out of sight, and I suppose out of mind. Or maybe there was some mythic proportion to it as well. These victims were from the Tutsi tribe, descendants, they say, of the Nile, and more resembling the Nilotic peoples of North Africa with their narrower noses, more angular features. The Hutu, the ones conducting this final solution, were Bantu people, shorter, darker, and tired of being lorded over by the Tutsi. Maybe tossing the bodies into the river was the Hutus’ way of sending them back to the Nile.
Sounds crazy, I guess. And I suppose you, the reader, find this image disgusting – the bloated, discoloured bodies floating down a river and over a waterfall. If I’m disgusting you, good, because that’s my point. Because it was that image, and countless more like it, that I had to live with, and go to sleep with, for the three long years I spent covering Africa as a reporter for the Washington Post. Three years of watching pretty much the worst that human beings can do to one another. And three years of watching bodies, if not floating down the river in Tanzania, then stacked up like firewood in the refugee camps of Zaire, waiting to be dumped into a mass pit. But sometimes the ground would be too hard and there wouldn’t be any equipment around to dig a hole, so the bodies would just pile up higher and higher, rotting and stinking in the scorching African sun until I’d have to walk around wearing a surgical mask over my face.
Is this depressing you, all this talk of death and dead bodies? Do you want to put the book down now? No, please, press on. I have more to say, and I want to put it all right out here, right in your face. I want you to walk with me, hold my hand as we step over the rotting corpses together, stand beside me as we gaze into the eyes of a starving child. Then maybe you’ll understand a little better what it is I am trying to say.
Maybe now you’re asking yourself: How does he deal with it? How does he cope with seeing those horrific images every day? Does he think about it? Does he have nightmares? What on earth must go through his mind?
I’ll tell you, if you’ll let me describe it. Revulsion. Sorrow. Pity at the monumental waste of human life. They all come close, but don’t quite capture what I really feel. It’s a sentiment that began nagging me soon after I first set foot in Africa in late 1991. And it’s a gnawing feeling that kept coming back to me as the bodies kept piling up, as the insanity of Africa deepened. It’s a feeling that I was really unable to express out loud until the end, as I was packing my bags to leave. It was a feeling that pained me to admit, a sentiment that, when uttered aloud, might come across as callous, self-obsessed, even racist.
And yet I know exactly this feeling that haunts me; I’ve just been too embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I know how: There but for the grace of God go I.
You see, I was seeing this horror a bit differently because of the colour of my skin. I am an American, but a black man, a descendant of slaves brought from Africa. When I see these nameless, anonymous bodies washing over a waterfall or piled up on the back of trucks, what I see most is that they look like me.
Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.
Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean. Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.
And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist – a mere spectator – watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that’s when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them – or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.
Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep this emotion buried so deep for so long, and why it pains me so now to put these words in print, for all the world to see. But I’m writing this so you will understand better what I’m trying to say.
It might have been easier for me to just keep all of these emotions bottled up inside. Maybe I should have just written a standard book on Africa that would have talked broadly about the politics, possibilities, prospects for change.
But I’m tired of lying. And I’m tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people who’ve never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid the corpses. Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of the rotting flesh.
But first, let me put one thing plainly so that I’m not misunderstood: I am not making a defence of slavery. It was an evil institution that heaped the greatest indignity on my race, and it was a crime that must never be repeated. But condemning slavery should not inhibit us from recognising mankind’s ability to make something good arise often in the aftermath of the most horrible evil. It does not offer any apologies or excuses for the holocaust to say that in the aftermath of Hitler’s evil, the state of Israel was created. One can deplore the loss of life of World War II, and the death and destruction of the atomic bombs on Japan, and still say that from the debris of conflict emerged a more stable world order, a process of decolonisation, and a Japan and Germany firmly anchored in the democratic camp.
Maybe it is because of the current condition of blacks in America that you instinctively recoil at what I’m trying to say. Blacks form the core of America’s urban underclass. One-third of all black men in their twenties are in prison or on parole. Drugs are ravaging the black community. We are told by some of our supposedly enlightened, so-called black leaders that America owes us something because they brought our ancestors over as slaves. And Africa – Mother Africa – is often held up as some kind of black Valhalla, where the descendants of slaves would be welcomed back and where black men and women can walk in dignity.
Sorry, but I’ve been there. I’ve had an AK- 47 rammed up my nose, I’ve talked to machete-wielding Hutu militiamen with the blood of their latest victims splattered across their T-shirts. I’ve seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire, a famine in Somalia, a civil war in Liberia. I’ve seen cities bombed to near rubble, and other cities reduced to rubble, because their leaders let them rot and decay while they spirited away billions of dollars – yes, billions – into overseas bank accounts.
I’ve also seen heroism, honour, and dignity in Africa, particularly in the stories of ordinary people – brave Africans battling insurmountable odds to publish an independent newspaper, to organise a political party, to teach kids in some bush school, and usually just to survive. But even with all the good I’ve found here, my perceptions have been hopelessly skewed by the bad. My tour in Africa coincided with two of the world’s worst tragedies – Somalia and Rwanda. I’ve had friends and colleagues shot, stabbed, beaten by mobs, left to bleed to death on a Mogadishu street – one of them beaten so badly in the face that his friends could recognise him only by his hair and his clothes.
So excuse me if I sound cynical, jaded. I’m beaten down, and I’ll admit it. And it’s Africa that has made me this way. I feel for her suffering, I empathise with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.
In short, thank God that I am an American.
Out of America will be available in South African bookstores from June