Love Africa Page 2

  As I felt the heat from the soldiers’ eyes on us—it didn’t seem like they were just doing a job, they seemed enraged at us, as if this were personal, as if we all don’t just have roles to play—the words that kept echoing in my mind were from Courtenay’s dad, from the evening we had left for Africa. It’s a clear memory but it seems to belong to someone else now. We were standing on the curb at JFK, her dad’s voice husky with sorrow. He too had been searching for the right last words, until he finally said: “Take care of my girl.”

  I was doing a bang-up job.

  “Excuse me,” I asked the Ethiopian soldiers. I swallowed hard. The truck’s floor was hot. “Where are you taking us?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “I want to call the US embassy.”

  One of the soldiers whipped around, clenching his weapon.

  “Shut up.”

  Courtenay seemed far less scared than I felt. Her wide-set eyes were focused; her forehead was unfurrowed. I felt deeply torn that she was even here. I knew the government soldiers would stop at nothing, that they didn’t flinch parting flesh. At the same time, I’d be a liar to say I wanted to be alone. Courtenay was the one with good ideas, the one I had always clung to, the one who could figure a way out of this. Even though we were at a very fragile point, even though for years I had pitted my two loves, Courtenay and Africa, against each other for reasons I struggled to understand, I had finally accepted a truth that now guided me: If you’re with the one you love, the rest should be logistics.

  I took one more look at her. She quickly looked back. I saw a dart of fear in her eyes. The doors were locked, the rifles hadn’t moved an inch, blinding light poured down from the sky. We both sensed it would be easier if we didn’t look at each other anymore. Or say anything.

  Epigraph

  Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

  Healthy, free, the world before me,

  The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

  Camerado, I give you my hand!

  I give you my love more precious than money,

  I give you myself before preaching or law;

  Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

  Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

  —Walt Whitman, the beginning and end of Song of the Open Road

  One

  Ithaca, 1990

  Every day, after my 3:35 class ended, I hurried back to the frat house to check my mailbox. Many of the letters started the same: “My beloved friend . . .”

  Some asked for a camera, others for clothes. Most asked for nothing, just sharing the news from rural Tanzania or backroads Malawi, the two agrarian countries where I had been five months earlier. One boy, Macfereson Banda, from Karonga, Malawi, wrote to see how our soccer ball was doing. “When I played with it,” he said, “I was really feeling as if I am on top of the mountain.” I won’t lie. We had met thousands of kids driving from Nairobi to southern Malawi on a homemade mission to bring aid to refugees. I didn’t remember who Macfereson Banda was. But I remembered that spirit, that drive to get close and stay close.

  The letters from East Africa came in slender, tissue-thin envelopes trimmed in red and blue. The envelope was the letter, so I was careful slipping the blade of a knife under the seam. As I sat at a long wooden table in our dining room, happily rereading the week’s Africa mail, Michael Laudermilk sauntered in, wearing a Lakers tank top and thumping a basketball.

  “Gettlemern”—mern was our word for nerd—“what you doing?”

  Laudermilk—Milk—was my same year. He stooped above me. The ball stopped bouncing.

  “Those airmail?”

  “Yup.”

  He bent closer, glancing at the stamps.

  “Africa, huh? You were there over the summer, right? What’s Africa fucking like?”

  I looked up at him. His handsome face was framed by glossy black hair. Milk was a star safety on the varsity football team, built like a gladiator, unjustly athletic. We weren’t close, and for the first time he seemed genuinely interested in something I had to say.

  “It’s like . . .” My mind started to race. “Like . . .” I looked out the window, off into the naked Ithaca trees. I hated that question.

  How much did Milk really want to know? What was I supposed to say? That question still trips me up, and back then I definitely didn’t have the poise to hop over it. My first Africa trip had been like a lucid dream—and I was possessive of this dream, because dreams lose their power if you start sharing them around. It began the moment I’d landed and stood eagerly in the aisle, peering out the windows, waiting for the stewardess to wrench open the door. When that dry canned airplane air rushed out and Nairobi’s fresh cool night air rushed in, rich and loamy, like a million wet leaves, it was an immediate intoxication. That’s how that whole summer went, our truck chugging down the road, one thing morphing into the next, things just seeming to happen, leaving behind this sweet, heavy, mysterious emotional aftertaste.

  It felt like every day we discovered something; of course that was an illusion, but the illusion was rarely broken. Our summer was a road trip, we covered a thousand miles over four weeks across eastern and southern Africa, we did see a lot. The afternoon we rolled into Salima Bay, on Lake Malawi, was no more or less eventful than dozens of other long sunny lazy days we shared, but it remains deeply etched. Lake Malawi was an inland sea; you couldn’t see across it. The water was coppery, the sand by the shore burning.

  We stripped off our shirts and ran in, pushing the water away with our thighs. It seemed to get thicker each step. Immediately we were surrounded by dozens of kids thrashing toward us, belting out “Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!”—the equivalent of gringo. We couldn’t communicate, but that didn’t stop us from playing with the slippery little kids and throwing them into the water and wrestling on the beach with the bigger ones. They cheered at just about everything we did, and after I toweled off and dressed—in front of a crowd of about ninety-five—scraps of paper were thrust into my hands. Where from! What district! What village! The children wanted to be pen pals, and I scribbled out my address as fast as I could. They tugged us toward their huts, and I peered into one, a little round house, roof black from smoke. There was nothing inside, no toys, no balls, no books, no mattresses even, just blankets bunched up on a clean dirt floor. Malawi was one of the poorest countries on earth; I had never seen anything like this. I felt something on my leg. I looked down. A little boy, about four, was rubbing my shin. People here don’t have hairy legs. His warm little fingers tickled like a spider. As I was standing in the doorway of his house, checking things out, he continued to move his fingers up and down the ridge of my shin extremely lightly, feeling my hairs. It was one of the most intense moments of mutual curiosity I’ve ever experienced.

  This was a different world. Personal space didn’t exist. Grown men walked down the beach holding hands, and once when I was standing in the middle of a pack of fishermen, I felt a set of rough calloused fingers interlace in mine. I liked that. I squeezed back. It made me think that maybe out here, you didn’t have to move through life hopelessly alone.

  Our guide to this new world was just a year older. His name was Dan Eldon and I’d never met anyone like Dan Eldon. He’d blaze into a restaurant, snap a stiff salute to the waiters, flick them a cassette, and the next thing I’d know, there would be one white face in the middle of a circle of waiters, everyone grooving together and singing out loud in one voice with several different accents: “Fight the power! We got to fight the powers that be!”

  The first time I saw Dan was in Mombasa, swimming in an ocean that was a shade of bright blue that didn’t look like any water I’d ever seen before; it was the color of Windex. Dan was paddling just beyond the waves. When someone pointed him out, I was surprised by how young and delicate he looked, after all I had heard. He was clean-cut, with a long face, dark eyebrows, and a square jaw, but still, there was something fragile about him. We had met through a fluke. I have a childhood friend named Roko, who was friends with this guy Chris, who came on the trip to film it and knew a guy named Lengai, who had grown up in Nairobi with Dan. Dan had organized a mission to help Mozambican refugees, and he invited a dozen students to drive from Nairobi to the border of Malawi and Mozambique, where he planned to donate a car and several thousand dollars to the refugee camps.

  Before we left for Africa, I held that same vague patchwork of images in my head that many people hold, of suffering, disease, deprivation, and poverty. That part of Africa is real—but it’s only that, part of the picture. Even though we were constantly aware that we had so much more than the people around us—our Nikes, our flashlights, our Walkmans, money—even though we were surrounded by people who were clearly struggling, I rarely sensed any resentment, any bitterness. Curiosity, yes; we were oddities. When we walked through the towns, things would suddenly stop; people around us would turn and stare, shoe-shiners would be suspended in mid-stroke, and I’d hear them whisper to each other, “Something-something-mzungu.” It felt like we were being worshiped, which felt wonderful—and disconcerting. It didn’t seem right to be regarded as representatives of some alien civilization that had just descended for a quick visit.

  I soon learned that the playing, the wrestling, the endless grip-shifting handshaking, helped lower those barriers. My guard began to drop, inch by inch. I realized there was so much less to fear than I had originally thought. When we camped in the middle of the savanna in Mikumi National Park, animals all around us, big ones, so close we could smell their pungent musk, somehow it didn’t feel reckless. It felt as if they had their space, we had ours.

  “You guys ever wonder what to do with a landscape like this?” Dan asked after we all sat do
wn by a campfire. “It’s, like, beautiful food you can eat; a beautiful woman you can kiss; but what are you going to do with a landscape this beautiful?” Eager for Dan’s approval, we gazed out at the acacia trees silhouetted by the moon and the chest-high elephant grass rolling away for miles, wondering if there was any possible way to answer a question so profound.

  * * *

  I heard a thumping on the wooden floor, jarring me back to my senses. Milk. Bouncing his ball again. I had nearly forgotten he was still standing there.

  “Interesting, Gettlemern, very fucking interesting.”

  I don’t even know what cow-eyed sentences I’d uttered.

  “I’ll see you tonight. And don’t forget the garbage bags.”

  That night we called a meeting.

  “Get in close, fucking weenies!”—that’s what we called the eager young men who wanted to join our house, fucking weenies. “You know the rule of this house! We always stay close!”

  We shoved the weenies into a corner of the living room and began ripping apart Hefty bags and taping them to the windows so nobody could see in. Sam, another one of my brothers, struggled to crawl up on a table, slow as a grizzly, and then he reared up like one. Sam gazed down at the weenies and then opened his mouth and vomited on them. I was at a safe distance, but one weenie—Derek, from Baltimore—reached up, face distraught, and slowly felt the gooey chunks in his hair. We all pointed at him and howled. That’s how it went in our house. True humiliation was how we expressed our false love.

  Maybe, looking back, I’m giving myself too much credit. But I think it was around this time that I began to suspect that I was on a collision course with myself. I knew I couldn’t keep this up. My fraternity was such a radical reduction of what there was on campus, let alone what I had tasted on that summer trip, let alone what I suspected lay out there in the even wider world. I was nineteen, a sophomore at Cornell University, and like any other teenager, desperate to fit in—and desperate to stand out. I’d allowed myself to be puked on and worse to get into that frat, and for no good reason; frats were simply what I thought you did at Cornell.

  So I created my own alternate world: Africa. It was perfect. No one knew much about it, especially me. Of its fifty-some nations, I had briefly visited four: Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa. But I kept staring at the pictures in my scrapbook, rereading the Africa mail, writing to my buddy Dan, stoking my appetite.

  It was a cold morning when I walked purposefully up our driveway, my worn-out Nike trainers, the same ones that had been such a fascination in Malawi’s sun-blasted villages, squeaking in the snow. I climbed the hill to Uris Hall, past icicles hanging in the gorge, a dark trickle running between the banks of ice. Up ahead loomed a nineteenth-century clock tower wearing a toupee of fresh snowflakes. Its hands showed ten o’clock, which felt like the crack of dawn to me. I was headed to the study abroad office. If I had one mission at this point, it was to break free of the confines I had so ardently put around myself.

  “There are some excellent programs at Oxford and Cambridge,” a counselor suggested when I told her I didn’t speak any foreign language but wanted to go to Africa.

  When I stared back, she asked: “What about an archaeology program in Crete?”

  I trudged home in disbelief that there wasn’t a single program south of the Sahara. I was beginning to see that this wouldn’t be easy, that I was nurturing an inconvenient passion. So I hatched my own plan. It turned on four classes a week in a room that smelled of chalk dust and mold, located in a small building at the farthest end of campus: the Africana Study Center. The instant I walked into that little classroom, where I had signed up for Swahili, I was back in a world of light, soapy cumulus clouds somewhere on the horizon.

  Mwalimu Nanji, our teacher from Tanzania, was short and quiet, with tired eyes and a gray Afro that he combed into a rectangular shape. He never volunteered how he had come from sunny Dar Es Salaam to snowbound Ithaca. I never pried. I desperately wanted him to like me. He was my only link.

  “Bwana Jeff, habari yako?” How are you?

  “Mzuri,” I’d eagerly answer—Good—forming my whole mouth around the word, like he had taught us: “Mooo-zur-ree.”

  Swahili is a visceral language. You don’t say “I am hungry,” you say “I hear hunger.” You don’t smoke a cigarette, you pull it. There’s no fancy or plain way to say “you,” no masculine or feminine words; it’s communication stripped down to its essence, just how it felt out there.

  I finally learned the origin of mzungu, that word a hundred little children had shouted at me on city streets and country roadsides. It comes from the verb kuzunguka, to go around and around, and is probably derived from observations of the first honkies in the region, the explorers. Roughly translated, it means “the dude who walks in circles.”

  Swahili started long before any white men came to walk in circles. About a thousand years ago, when the first Arabs landed on the East African coast in crescent-sailed dhows, hungry for ivory, spices, fragrant woods, and slaves, they needed a way to communicate with the African merchants. A language evolved, part Arab, mostly African, with bits of Hindi, Portuguese, Persian, English, and German eventually sprinkled in. It was an Esperanto that people actually spoke—today, more than a hundred million speak it.

  As the months passed, my interest in Swahili provided endless amusement for the guys in the frat. One night the following October, we were all gussied up for a sorority formal at the Waterfront, a club in downtown Ithaca. I was wearing a tie, a wide floral one that I had bought on the streets of Manhattan from a homeless man for a dollar. I had even spritzed some Calvin Klein Obsession on my neck. I looked—and smelled—the part.

  There were a bunch of us sticking to the bar as usual, drinking the usual. Colored lights flashed across the wood-paneled room, which had big windows looking out on a smooth, black Lake Cayuga. The windows were partly fogged up, and the techno music was blasting so loud that if you held your cup real gently, you could feel the plastic sides vibrating to the bass. Boosh, boosh, boosh, boosh.

  “Gettlemern,” O’Hare shouted. “Tell me again why you’re taking Swa freaking Hili?”

  Our backs were to the bar, elbows on it. O’Hare was a redheaded kid from a town on Long Island that everyone seemed to have heard of but me, Port Something or Other. He was a bit of a ringleader. We didn’t like each other.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The teacher’s pretty cool. It’s an easy A.”

  “Gentlemen.” Milk leaned in—and people tended to listen to Milk. “He likes it, he’s been to Africa. What’s the b.f.d.?”

  “Seems weird to me,” O’Hare went on. “Why don’t you say something? Say something in Swahili.”

  “Just shut ’em up,” Milk said. “Say something. It doesn’t have to be long.”

  Everybody looked at me. The last thing I wanted was to perform like a circus bear. College was constantly creating these predicaments: in the morning, you’re an interested, earnest student trying to understand John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, in the evening you’re a dumb-ass five beers deep and peeing on the hood of Carl Sagan’s Volkswagen Rabbit. Youth knows no contradictions. I took a swig of my Sex on the Beach, a sweet pink drink with the viscosity and charm of cough syrup.

  “I don’t know, man,” I said. “What do you want me to say? Jambo means ‘hello.’”

  For some reason, that set off a burst of wild cackles, and I seized the opportunity to get the hell out of there. I walked across the club to near the dance floor. I felt much better standing by myself, sipping my drink, watching the swirl of colored lights and people moving back and forth.

  As my eye traveled across the faces, I kept coming back to the same one. It belonged to a girl with high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, heavy eyelids and dark hair; her features looked Eurasian, maybe even Eskimo. She was wearing a red dress that showed off her back; she was lithe and freckly. As she danced, the blacks of her eyes shone. There was something in them that I had seen before. She seemed deeply, freely happy, like those kids on Lake Malawi. I could tell she really dug dancing. I was terrified to approach her directly, so I chose a moment when a girl I knew was talking to her, went up to them both, and lamely shook her hand.