It’s hard to summarize my last week in Kigali. It was wrought with the typical ups and downs of any departure, transition, change—the space between “getting back to my life” and realizing I’ve actually been living my life. I had some really wonderful moments with my colleagues and new friends; I detached from a lovely man and parted ways without drama or trauma; I soaked up my remaining moto rides, walks through the city, encounters with kindly strangers and children. Thanksgiving was spent poolside with a friend (albeit a rainy poolside at that), drinking one too many overpriced draft beers at Kigali’s swankiest hotel and talking about Africa and life and careers and love. It was harder than I expected to say my goodbyes at the Tulane office, making me realize how close I had become to my colleagues and what a supportive and fun working environment it was. So again, in many senses, it was hard to leave, but much of me is ready to return to my home, to my New Orleans, to visit my family on the East coast and revel in the time with my nieces, my parents, and my sister and her husband. I haven’t had that much time at home in years. It will be a welcomed treat and rest.
I’m not sure what else I can truly say about Kigali, beautiful Rwanda, and the continent that is Africa. I’ve been trying to finish Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux on the plane ride home. It seems many of the excerpts best explain why the continent is so intoxicating, complicated, endearing in its dysfunctional way, so I figured I’d share some of my favorite passages in an effort to pass along some of the imagery and life that is this dark continent. The book raised questions, enhanced history lessons, and challenged preconceived notions. It also perfectly depicted why the continent of Africa continues to fill space in my soul. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did…
“Travelling makes one modest –you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
“The criterion is how you treat the weak. The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”
“I was the classic traveler, arriving bewildered and alone in a remote place, trying to be hopeful, but thinking, What now?”
“After that, having unburdened himself with this story, having heard nothing from me of my life, he said that he felt he knew me well, and it was as though we had known each other for a long time. I could see that the meant it and was moved by this feeling. I told him what I felt about time exposing the truth-that time did not heal wounds, but that the passing years gave us a vantage point from which to see the reality of things.”
“Some trips mean so much to us that we rehearse them over and over in our heads, not to prepare ourselves but in anticipation, for the delicious foretaste. I had been imagining this return trip down the narrow track to Soche Hill for many years. In Africa for the first time, I got a glimpse of the pattern my life would take—that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk, and already in my early twenties I tasted those ambiguous pleasures. I had learned what many others had discovered before me—that Africa, for all its perils, represented wilderness and possibility. Not only did I have the freedom to write in Africa, I had something new to write about.”
“Not much, because all aid is political. When this country became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn’t have many. The donors aren’t contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. They tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and contributes to underdevelopment. It’s not social or cultural and it certainly isn’t economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.”
“I sketched out my theory that some governments in Africa depended on underdevelopment to survive—bad schools, poor communications, a feeble press, and ragged people. The leaders needed poverty to obtain foreign aid, needed an uneducated and passive populace to keep themselves in office for decades. A great education system in an open society would produce rivals, competitors, and an effective opposition to people who wanted only to cling to power.”
“I was passionate about the cause. But I had had an epiphany: though my children would be enriched by the experience of working in Africa, nothing at all would change as a result of their being here.”
“You visit a place and peer at it closely and then move on, making a virtue of disconnection.”
“Humanity is a product of Africa. We are what we are today because we’ve been shaped by our environment—and it was the African environment that hosted almost every major evolutionary change we’ve experienced on our journey towards being human.”
“First contact was a vivid and recurrent event for everyone—bumping into a stranger on the subway, finding yourself with a fellow rider in an elevator, knocking elbows with your seatmate on a plane—at a bus stop, at a checkout counter, on a beach, in a church or a movie theater, wherever we were thrown together and had to deal with it. As a traveler, first contact was the story of my life, and was a motif of my African trip…”
“That had been in the world news, as African disasters always were—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, massacres, famines, columns of refugees. And these are the lucky ones. Images of inundated fields, people clinging to treetops, and helicopter rescues had appeared on TV for a week before becoming old news. The trouble with such disasters what their unchanging imagery—viewers got bored with them for their having no silver lining and no variation. For a catastrophe to have legs, it needed to be an unfolding story, like a script with plot points, and preferably a happy ending. The ending of the Mozambique floods came with the news of cholera and poisoned water, of thousands of people who had been made homeless, and hundreds who had drowned like rats.”
“Africans praying for a disaster so that they would be noticed seemed to me a sorry consequence of the way charities had concentrated people’s minds on misfortune. But without vivid misfortune Africans were invisible to aid donors.”
“In even the whitest town on the veldt there was a reminder of less fortunate Africa—a ragged man walking on a path, an old man riding a bike, a woman balancing a bulging bale on her head, an amazing bird on a post, African huts, barefoot kids, tin privies, squalor, corn fields.”
“The train was almost heartbreaking for being so pleasant, for offering this view of South Africa, the same misery, the same splendor. But my work was done, my safari finished. This trip was just a dying fall; I was clinging to Africa because I had not wanted it to end.”
“Travel had changed him. You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back. Like Rimbaud, you think, I is someone else.”
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