Under African Skies

I’VE JUST come back from Africa and I hope I’ll never say “wog” again, not even in a fit of what we famously, self-regardingly term “black humour”. It might very well be the case that I’ve been more ignorant than most white people and never paid proper attention to what informed Westerners have been saying about Africa, but nothing I’ve ever heard prepared me for the nature of the people who live there.

Mali, where I mostly travelled, is the fifth poorest country in the world. You cannot think of poverty without thinking of the dangers associated with moving and living in its milieu – resentment, anger, aggression – and you cannot think of the question of colour without reference to the dangers associated with racism. Put on the most simple and crude level, a white person who finds herself totally alone among millions of poor, black people, should take care.

I was never once in danger. That is an enormous statement of fact. There were times when one paid slightly more than due regard to representatives of officialdom – customs officers, police officers, pen pushers, bureaucrats and taxi-drivers – but once the rules of the game were observed, which was not at all difficult, I can say that I was never in a country, or on a continent, where I felt safer.

I would go further than that – I cannot think where I have met a people so easy and courtly in their skins. They were everywhere affable, cheerful, easy-going, amiable and dignified. Whatever it is that has made such a human nature, it should be bottled and sold, preferably government-subsidised, and drunk daily.

This writer is in a state of shock. There is an entire alphabet between the A to Z of African culture, on which I was reared, about which I knew nothing at all. It is as though one moved from Tarzan films to contemporary television documentaries on famine and dictatorship without ever being told anything else about that country; as if one was shown a photograph of Nelson Mandela in his tribal clothing of animal skin and then shown a photo of him in a suit as President of his country without any explanation as to how that came about, the inference being that the white man waved a wand over him – and the understanding being that it’s all right for white people to wear animal skin providing it has been tailored to Western standards – leather soles on shoes, crocodile-skin wallets, coats of fur, leather jackets cut on the bias.

Sick, Stung and SweatY

The young man who arranged the two-day boat trip down a broad and pleasant river explained the difference between us and them by reference to the family structure. The whites operate in a triangle of husband, wife and child, he said. The blacks move in a circle of grandparents, parents, children, uncles, aunts, cousins five times removed, and relatives through marriage who live thousands of miles away into whose homes you can drop without notice, fully expecting to be given a bed and a meal for the night, or for the rest of your life if that is your desire – it is their moral duty to make room for you. It is a natural way of life.

Africa was hard – I was sick, and stung and sweaty and shitting in a hole in the ground became a way of life. The most despairing moment came when I put a coin in the hand of a leper, and saw it roll off her palm because she had no fingers.

Afterwards – much later – I laughed at the gaucheness of the scene. At the time, I was struck by the mannerly way she smiled, waved the incident away, and poked the child who was with her in the back, indicating to the child that she should search under the fruit-stall for the missing coin.

Then I questioned my laughter.

I”m sure the black humour will return – where would we be without it? – and I smile a lot thinking of all I saw and learned, but for the moment, I will make no jokes about Africa. “Bobby Sands, slimmer of the year”, certainly, that is acceptable now that we’re on the way to peace, but no jokes about Africa until I’ve learned all of its alphabet and found a way of translating it into Western language – we will be the better for learning how to talk with them of love, life and liberty.