The Miasma Of The Dark Continent - An African American Family Returns To Africa And Turns Right Back

Italians return to Italy, Irish return to Ireland - traditional pilgrimages back to the home country to see the lands they left for America. Ireland up to a few years ago was still as poor as it ever had been, so most Irish Americans, once having had their fill of Guinness and rowdy drunkenness were very glad their ancestors left.  Few every got as far as Beckett, Yeats, Synge, or Joyce, and those that had, wondered what all the fuss was about.

 

On the other hand, Italian Americans wondered why their forbears had ever left.  The Coliseum, the Renaissance, Michelangelo, Ancient Rome, the Vatican; style, elegance, and the greatest empire the world has ever known made Italian Americans weep with pride.  Of course most of the returning visitors were from the boot, the heel, and Sicily - desperately poor, dry, miserable places in the late 19th century - and the glories of the Etruscans, the Romans, and the Medicis were far removed from Puglia and Vico Equense; but none of that mattered.  One step into imperial Rome, and the tough Italian neighborhoods of New York, New Haven, and New Jersey were folded like magic into Italia!

 

So when Pharoah and LaShonda Washington and their two children set out for Africa, they hoped for the same historical relevance.  After all, the Gao, Ghanaian, and Hausa empires were imposing features of African history, and any white man pointing to the Acropolis, the Pantheon, or the court of Versailles was just racist and deliberately ignorant of the glories of the African past. 

'We will travel upriver', said Pharoah, 'and retrace the steps of our enslaved ancestors who came from the interior to the waiting Portuguese slave ships'; but they had not read Mungo Park, an 18th century English explorer who ventured to central Africa to determine the source of the Niger River but was robbed, beaten, captured and sold to one tribe after another; or Conrad's Heart of Darkness the story of a white ivory trader deep in the jungle who took on the primitive savagery of the tribes around him and finally understood savagery and the horror within all of us. 

 

As the Washington family travelled upriver from Kinshasa to Kisangani, they saw nothing of the former empires and great civilizations they had expected.  In fact the mud and wattle villages they saw through the dense riverbank vegetation had not changed in a thousand years or in ten thousand years; and were just as primitive as ever.  No imperial, civilizing influence had touched them; and worse, they were the sources, the motherlode of slavery. Tribal chieftains whose people had already taken slaves and bartered them for relatively little, saw fortune in the European slave trade, and routinely rounded up their captives and sold them for a good price on the coast. 

After long, hot, mosquito-filled days and nights on the Congo and Niger Rivers, the Washingtons had had enough.  Not only were they tired, worn, and sick from the journeys, they were discouraged and beaten.  Africa was no place to be proud of, and they knew only the half of it.  Pharoah on return to Accra read up on the recent political history of Africa after independence, a downward spiral of poverty, corruption, and despair and was disconsolate.  

 

It was bad enough to have been sold into slavery by his own people, but to see the backwardness and irredeemable misery of a continent that had not only not kept up with its European and Asian counterparts, but had fallen into a far worse state than ever before. 

The family enjoyed Accra and the generous welcome they received.  They dressed in African clothes, ate African food, and went dancing in the neighborhoods.  The happy infectiousness of the best of African culture gave them some hope at least, but the bitter taste of the rest of their trip stayed long after their return home. 

Economists, cultural anthropologists, historians, and international development workers have all wondered about all this - the endemic corruption, lack of enterprise, the persistence of tribal primitivism, the historical lack of any traces of civilization - Gao, Ghana and Hausa left nothing behind and are alive only in myth and legend- and came up with nothing. 

Colonialism, the old saw and progressive excuse fails muster - while it may have contributed to a certain sense of dependency, it has been over sixty years since independence and in that same time, China went from a similarly backward rural society oppressed and murdered by one of history's worst dictators to a world superpower.  Geography, climate, environment?  India has some of the world's harshest climates with devastating heat and drought but has overcome it, and like China became a world power.  Impenetrable jungle? Brazil has penetrated, tamed, and profitably used the resources of the Amazon. 

In Ghana there was a heady pride being in an entirely black nation.  Although the Washingtons had spent most of their life in the Anacostia slums of the Nation's Capital and had only recently moved to the neighboring suburb of Prince George's County and for their entire lives lived exclusively among black people, this was different.  These were Africans! 

In a willing suspension of disbelief the Washington's overlooked their miserable history and the perennial backwardness of Africa and felt good about the place.  They were no different after all from the Italian Americans who basked on the Riviera, ate in cafes on the Piazza Novona, or waited for the Pope in St. Peter's square.  Theirs was simply a more modest experience.

Yet the overwhelming feeling was shame and disappointment.  Outside of some high-life and dashikis what was there, really, to be proud of, to feel good about?

When they got back home there was only desultory interest on the part of friends and neighbors.  Most black people wanted to forget where they came from, put it as far behind them as possible, and make do with what they had, as little as that might be, in America. No one needed remind them of where they came from and how they got here, let alone go back to the enslaving quarters of the Dark Continent. 

Now that USAID has been dismantled, few American development workers will be going to Africa; and now that the long-overdue pulling the plug on the corrupt regimes the US government had been supporting for so long was a reality, most were privately very happy.  They had gone to Africa to do good, but found that their money had been wasted, squandered, diverted to offshore bank accounts, and there was nothing to show for decades of compassionate attention. 

Oh, there were those romantic nights with Fulani lovers in the Teranga, the fabulous French meals in Dakar, and dancing in the quartiers, but for the rest?  Over and done with, and glad of it.