I Remember Africa

In Dreams From My Father, Obama talks about his first time in Africa. Reading it, of course, made me think about my own first...and only...journey to Africa.

It was about fifteen years ago. I'm not sure of the year. I have lost that passport, so I can't look at the stamp. I have only one picture from the trip. It is of me, and 3 friends, smiling in front of a wall. It doesn't tell me anything. If I wrote about my adventures, I misplaced those pages long ago.

I went to South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland with a friend, Laurie, whom I have since lost touch with. I heard she got married to a man from another country. I heard she had a baby, or two, or even three. When I think of her, I picture her on a large boat, looking over the railing with a child in her arms. They are circling the Galapagos islands and watching the birds. I can't call her on that boat and ask her if her recollections match up snug with mine. I have no photo album to refer to for details about our days. I have no journal where I can read about the feelings I had during that strange time. I can't tell you whether all my memories are true. But, this is what they are.




I remember a cab ride in Johannasburg. Our driver was a brusque, butch woman of Eastern European, or perhaps Middle Eastern descent. From her seat in front of us, she broadcast descriptions of the city as we passed through it. She was a charming tour guide, irreverent, generous and funny.

Pointing down one crowded, shabby street she told us, "That way is more direct, but I won't take you there. It's a bad neighborhood. Lots of criminals."

As she rounded a different corner, Laurie and I gazed out amazed at the display of wealth and taste. We saw plot after green plot of immaculate lawn. We saw crystaline fountains, carefully shaped fruit trees and flowering bushes. We saw lazy spreading mini-mansions built of something that looked like white marble. We did not see one single living person. "This is a good neighborhood, " our driver explained. The she laughed and winked at us in the mirror, "Lot's of criminals!"



I remember the street markets in Mozabique's capital city. Women sat eyeing us from folding chairs behind folding tables while their children played underneath. Between us and them were carefully arranged fresh papayas, colorfully printed cloth, and plastic bags of cashews. These things were not piled up in chaotic abundance, but rhythmically spaced-out, even and spare.


Mostly, Laurie and I went out together, but one day I went out by myself. I went farther down the street, and around the corner to a market I hadn’t been to before. There were fabrics and food, like the market in front of our hotel, but there were some other things too. Jewelery. Wooden boxes. Small statues.

Standing there. Looking at all these things, and at the women selling them, I didn’t notice the boy walk up to me. When I looked up from the table, he was already there, looking at me. Waiting for me to notice him, maybe. He was as tall as me, but very thin. He looked like a child, despite his height. He opened his jacket and took out a very small gun. His hand moved towards me with the gun in it. Suddenly, my body felt like an empty elevator shaft.

Before I saw the gun, my internal, invisible elevator had been on the top floor, full of happy people, ready to walk around and explore the view from up there. But when I saw that black metal moving toward me in that young man’s hand, the cable snapped. That elevator went rushing down to the ground floor. Far far away I felt the rushing weight of it falling inside me. The empty space it left behind swelled and shrank with the rattle and boom of the car speeding through it, the power of gravity pulling it effortlessly down down down. I was hollow. Cored. The parts of me that mattered were at once rushing and sunk.

I don’t know how long we stood there together. Me with my pale pink mouth open. He with his brown eyes questioning. The gun poking towards me in his long fingered hand. Finally I understood. He meant me no harm. He would sell me the gun, if I wanted it. He would give me a good price. I shook my head, told him I was sorry. I walked back to the hotel, dizzy with relief, wondering if I was in danger.

I was safe that day. It wasn't until years later, back home in the United States, that someone would pull a gun on me and mean it.



I remember my first high tea, complete with crumpets and clotted cream. Though we had just spent a week in London, I didn't experience this British ritual until we'd been in Maputo for many days. This was the only day we set foot into the fancy hotel where Europeans stayed when they were visiting the city.

I don't remember were we usually got our meals. From street vendors? From small, poorly lit restaurants?

Almost all my memories from Africa are about being outside. Most of the indoor places, except for this hotel and later, the hospital, seemed cramped and dim. I do know that, wherever it is we were eating every day, it made us feel poor and frustrated. We felt like we didn't have many options and had to settle for whatever reasonable meal we could find. This may have been because we could not read or speak Portuguese. I know also we were tired of worrying about whether or not the food we were eating was going to make us sick.

Maybe we went out for high tea the day after we ate an entire Papaya. "Papayas are safe," we told each other, "if you buy it uncut, because the thick skin protects the fruit." We bought one from the market in front of our hotel. Right there on the side walk split one in half with my pocket knife. We happily ate the whole thing between the two of us. We didn’t get sick. It seemed to be true, you can eat fresh fruit, in foreign places with questionable sanitation, if it’s got a thick skin. We ate that whole papaya and we didn’t get botulism or salmonella or whatever it is that makes US people chant "don't drink the water!" But, we spent a lot of time in the bathroom anyway. Papaya, we found out quickly, is a mild laxative. You don’t notice it so much if you just eat a few pieces. But, papaya is a large fruit, about the size of a butternut squash. Eating half of one in a sitting, you can’t help but feel the effect.

Yes, it must have been the day after the papaya incident that we went to the expensive hotel that none of the local people could afford. We wouldn't have eaten without the excuse of being exhausted and physically ill. We would have felt too guilty. None of the black people we saw on the streets could afford to stay there, or even to eat there. We were college-age kids, traveling on a tight budget, we couldn’t really afford it either. But there is a difference between the way the Africans couldn’t afford to eat there and the way we couldn't afford to eat there. For us, it was poor judgement and might mean we had to skip some meals later in the trip. We might have less cash for buying souveniers. For them, it was simply out of the question, undoable. Honestly, I don't even know if they would have been allowed in the door. Though the food was delicious, it was a strange, sad thing, sitting down like this for a bite to eat in a city, a nation, a continent, of dark skinned people. All I could see where white faces, white faces like mine. It seemed to me like we were all pale with shame, pink with embarrasment. It seemed to me like we were bleached of our humanity, and very much alone.