I once asked Dennis Hills, a British writer who had been imprisoned by Idi Amin, how he had felt when he discovered bodies floating in rivers in the interior of Uganda. Hills said he had not been shocked: He knew such cruelties were common in human history. But in Africa they are shockingly common, as the Washington Post’s Hong Kong bureau chief Keith Richburg recounts in Out of America. Three years ago, while chief of the Post’s Africa bureau, Richburg himself stood on the Tanzania-Rwanda border and counted hundreds of bodies floating downstream from the latest massacre in the Rwandan civil war. Such philosophical detachment as Hills expressed proved unavailable to Richburg. What went through Richburg’s mind was not any meditation about the persistence of human cruelty but the thought that he, too, could have been one of those bodies, if not for the accident of the African slave trade.
For Richburg is a black American writer — and one who does not think much of the continent of his ancestors. He is not the first black American to have strayed from the party line on Africa: Eddy Harris recounted his travels across the continent in Native Stranger (1993), and was excoriated by fellow black intellectuals for reporting unpleasant truths. But that doesn’t mean that Richburg has not had to be very brave in writing this book.
If Richburg’s anger clouds his judgment at times, it is hard not to forgive him. His tour in Africa (1991-94) made him witness to two of the worst African horrors of our times: the Somali clan wars and the Rwandan genocide. Wandering among trigger-happy militias in Mogadishu, Richburg wound up fearing for his life, as he was often taken for a Somali. An American army truck driver even passed him when he was hitchhiking. At a rally for the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed, a red-eyed militiaman, also assuming Richburg was a Somali, knocked him down with a Kalashnikov. Even in Rwanda, where Richburg traveled before the genocidal Hutu government was forced to flee Zaire, his primary concern was to prove to the bullies in sunglasses working the roadblocks that he was not a Tutsi but a black American.
Richburg says he often felt Africans were suspicious of him because he did not belong to a tribe, and that many expected him to take sides in the tribal disputes. This may be true, but Richburg should have noted that lack of tribe can play in one’s favor. Belonging to a tribe is a condition many educated Africans find embarrassing. To them, Richburg’s tribe-free status would be ideal; after all, here was a man who could claim the whole continent as his home. A black American is the perfect Pan-Africanist.
In fact, it is common for urban Kenyans, Zambians, and Nigerians, in trying to look fashionable, to pretend they are American blacks. This ” Americanization” of Africa’s cities is something Richburg fails to take sufficient note of, even though he himself was occasionally mistaken for an African pretending to be an American.
Africans have always expected visiting American blacks to wax lyrical about the continent. That Americans generally fulfill expectations is not surprising: Many arrive as dignitaries, and are received by the ruling elites with much fanfare. Richburg recounts a conference of African-American leaders and African politicians in Gabon, where Douglas Wilder, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Louis Farrakhan broke into applause when the 27year-old Sierra Leonean dictator Valentine Strasser strutted into the room, decked out in military fatigues and Ray-Bans.
“These black Americans” writes Richburg, “were obviously more impressed with the macho military image Strasser cut than with the fact that he represents all that is wrong with Africa — military thugs who take power and thwart the continent’s fledgling efforts to move toward democracy.”
As Richburg delves into the forces stirring the ethnic hatreds in Rwanda, he draws parallels with the Detroit of his childhood, where light-skinned blacks looked down on darker ones. Here Richburg strikes a rare false note. Snobbery in Detroit is hardly comparable to ethnic rivalry in Africa. Although dark-skinned blacks in Detroit might envy their light-skinned neighbors, it is hardly imaginable that they would one day pick up machetes made in China to hack off their legs.
Richburg naturally asks why Africa continues to lag behind, while certain Asian countries, just as deeply mired in Third World poverty only decades ago, lurch forward. It cannot be mere colonialism, which both regions experienced. It cannot be only ethnic strife, for prosperous Indonesia has that, too. The most direct answer Richburg gets comes from Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who asserts that Africans lack self-discipline. But Richburg notes, too, the nature of African corruption. A corrupt Asian given money to construct a highway may insist on a cut once it is completed; a corrupt African leader will forget about the road altogether and deposit all the money in a private account in Europe.
There is also the nature of African violence. Richburg bewails the passivity of the African masses and wonders why, in the face of such brutal regimes, ordinary Africans do not rise against their governments. The answer is held in the observations Richburg makes on almost every page: African authorities are not in the habit of counting bodies.
After witnessing carnage and despair all over the continent, Richburg fetches up on Goree Island in Senegal, the main African slave port of the 18th century. There he begins to feel he is lucky that his ancestors were transported off the wretched continent:
And why should I feel anything more? Because my skin is black? Because some ancestor of mine, four centuries ago, was wrenched from this place and sent to America, and because I now look like those others whose ancestors were left behind? Does that make me still a part of this place? Should their suffering now somehow still be mine? Maybe I would care more if I had never come here, and never seen what Africa is today. But I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it.
I must admit I can imagine a white racist living in Africa chuckling with glee at this passage. But I can imagine considerably more black Africans who will applaud Richburg’s courage and candor.
Sousa Jamba is an Angolan novelist living in London.
