Climbing Kilimanjaro - An Unhappy American Woman's Search For An African Lover

'I'm not going for that', Amanda said to her girlfriends on the day before her trip to Africa, the veldt, the Serengeti, and Mt Kilimanjaro; 'that' referring to the sexual adventure they had always fantasized, a tall, muscular black African man taking them on the floor of the jungle to the calls of tropical birds and the howls of monkeys. 

 

Amanda Fellows was single...still single as her married friends chided her...but not unhappily so.  She had had her share of adventures.  After all, Washington was a power town, and there was something heady about an affair with a man whom millions knew; but each and every one of them, regardless of its excitement and release lacked potency.  Her lovers were absent, diffident, and indifferent, their eyes on some other prize. 

There was always something dutiful about their lovemaking as though they missed a turn and instead of Pennsylvania Avenue ended up in her bed; and most of them were married, although that seemed to be completely incidental in a town more ambitious than confessional. Nor did she mind, for she was after some vague notion of Lawrentian sexual epiphany, a Connie Chatterley-Mellors affair that might only be in passing but had a powerful psycho-emotional potential. 

Stella Raphael, the main character in Patrick McGrath's Asylum is a deeply frustrated woman, married to a sexually indifferent doctor, living on the grounds of a mental hospital for the criminally insane.  She meets and is irrepressibly drawn to Edgar Stark, a patient who beheaded and eviscerated his wife for presumed infidelity. Despite this horrific history, or perhaps because of it, she has sex with him - the unbridled, unhinged sex she had only imagined.  Stark's hungry, unstoppable sexual desire was irresistible.  She is drawn to a sexual power made all the more so because of its innate, always present violence.  He murdered his wife because of his irreducible sexual potency.  

There was some of this primitive sexuality in Amanda as well.  Sex was - or should be - something on the higher order of Lady Chatterley, Emma Bovary, or Stella Raphael.  It could not possibly be only the imagination of writers - male writers at that - and there had to be something to it. 

Her girlfriends were sure that she was going to Africa only for sexual adventure.  Despite that all were good, traditional, conscientious liberals who avoided the slightest suggestion of racial stereotyping, there remained, as it had remained since the first slave ships disembarked their human cargo on American shores, the image of male African potency.  

Amanda could not deny her interest, but insisted that it was less because of the well-known, highly charged sexual seriality of the African, but because of some innate, prehistoric, native, primal urge.  There was a certain nobility and royalty to the forest African, the closest any modern human being was to 'Lucy', the first of a human species to evolve out of Africa. 

While it was hard to square this admittedly romantic image with the virulent slums of Lagos, the tribal backwardness of the inner reaches of the Congo, and the persistent poverty, underdevelopment, and endemic corruption of the entire continent, she felt she had the fortitude and the vision to at least pursue her conviction. 

Paul Theroux, a well-known American novelist who spent many years of his youth in Africa, retained for much of his life a sentiment similar to that of Amanda.  As a traveler to West Africa in the early Sixties, he was charmed by the sexual complaisance of the women, the complete and utter innocence and guiltless enjoyment of sex.  This sexual generosity was not an expression of backwardness, but innate spirituality.  The bush African was indeed closer to God's intentions than anyone else. 

Theroux wrote The Lower River, a novel about a late middle aged man who returns to the village where he lived as a young man.  His memories of those days had always remained clear and bright - the communal, sharing ethos of the village, the sensuality, the intimacy with the forest, the friendship. His village would always be an example of African nobility. 

 

He returns to find that everything has changed.  The village is destitute and unlivable, a place of unconscionable violence, jealousy, greed, and suspicion.  He is not so much dismayed at the hellish conditions of the village, nor the craven opportunism of its residents, but by his ignorance.  How could he have been so innocent and so naive? 

Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness writes of Kurtz, a man at first taken by African primitivism. The cannibalistic tribes among which he lived were not so much savage, but attuned to the most essential, fundamental elements of human nature. 

At the end of the story, however, he comes to the realization that not only is such tribalism indeed savage, but its expression exposed the very essence of human nature. 'The horror....the horror', are his last words as a final, conclusive vision of life's inescapable primitivism comes before his eyes. 

Cormac McCarthy in his Border Trilogy, is another writer fascinated with human savagery and innate primitivism; but unlike Conrad accommodates it easily within the human condition.  Facing savagery, neither embracing it nor rejecting it, is the more important key to understanding our nature. 

It was not surprising, therefore, that a sensitive, inquisitive, passionate woman like Amanda Fellows set off for Africa in the hopes of finding some universal truth in primitivism.  After all, Africa was humanity's mother lode, and regardless of how distorted and dismal it might have become, some sentiment, some scintilla of that primitive being must still be there. 

There is no playbook for such a game, no algorithm, no elaborate scenario; and so it was that Amanda set off expectant, sanguine, but not unreasonable.  Finding a suitable partner at the National Gallery, the Phillips, the Zoo, or at any one of a hundred singles bars on 17th Street was hard enough, but landing in an unknown continent, a disordered, often pestilential one at that; and seeking anything but a comfortable bed and a decent meal was another story altogether. 

Of course as an unattached white woman, she was constantly approached and propositioned by men for whom a blonde white woman was as appealing as a virile black man was for Amanda.  Both racial sets had their prejudices and their fantasies. 

Climbing Kilimanjaro, the intended high point of her tour, was a miserable, crowded, interminable affair.  Surrounded by touts, porters, small boys, and palm readers, the trip was as bad as any to the pyramids - beggars, importuning guides, dogs, and noise. 

There was no Hemingway here, no epiphanic moment

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

 

Amanda switched coasts - away from animals and plains and to the real Africa, the setting off place for the diaspora, familiar territory, fertile ground for her ambition - but found there only the most abysmal conditions - crime, unsinkable poverty, hostility, chaos, and an atmosphere of dangerous brutality.  If there was nobility there, it would take someone else to find it. 

Thousands have tried to find the real Africa without success.  Everyone from the earliest explorers, Mungo Park and Rene du Chaillu, and later Burton and Speke, to legions of adventurers, ethnologists, development consultants, and poets have tried their luck, only to have been turned back disappointed. 

Imagine then, a young woman looking for sexual epiphany! 

Amanda returned to Washington chastened, tired, and dispirited; but at least the great desire was over.  The settled, K Street life, as grey and watery as it had seemed a few weeks ago, was now embraced.  What had she been thinking?