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p469
…The first phase was a rapid decolonization, the gaining of independence. It was characterized by a universal optimism, enthusiasm, euphoria. People were convinced that freedom meant a better roof over their heads, a larger bowl of rice, a first pair of shoes. A miracle would take place—the multiplying of loaves, fishes, and wine. Nothing of the sort occurred. On the contrary. There was a sudden increase in the population, for which there was not enough food, schools, or jobs. Optimism quickly turned to disenchantment and pessimism. The people’s bitterness, fury, hatred was now directed against their own elites, who were rapidly and greedily stuffing their pockets. In a country without a well-developed private sector, where plantations belonged to foreigners and the banks to foreign capital, the political career was the only road to riches.
…Everything is eaten, down to the last crumb. No one has any supplies, for even if someone did have extra food, he wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it, no place to shut it. You live in the immediate, current moment; each day is an obstacle difficult to surmount, and the imagination does not reach beyond the present, does not concoct plans, does not dream.
Bars contain one thing for sale - a beer: …The beers can be various—banana, corn, pineapple, palm. Generally, each of these women specializes in one kind. A glass of such a beverage has three merits: (a) it contains alcohol, (b) being a liquid, it quenches thirst, and (c) because the solution at the bottom of the glass is thick and dense, it constitutes for the hungry an ersatz nourishment. Therefore, if someone has earned only a shilling in the course of a day, he will most probably spend it in a bar…
…Modern civilization has not reached us,” he concludes. “There are no electric lamps here, no telephones, no television. The only aspect of it that has penetratred is automatic weapons.”
…it is true that what strikes you most in a place like Rwanda is its deep provincialism. Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail…
“Hatari?” I ask after a while (some kind of danger?).
The Amba are a highly unusual social group. Like other tribes on the continent, they take seriously the existence of evil and the danger of spells, and thus fear and hate wizards, but contrary to the widely held view that wizards dwell among others, that they act from without, from a distance, the Amba maintain that the wizards are among them, within their families, within their villages, that they form an integral part of their community. This belief has resulted in the gradual disintegration of Amba society, corroded as it has become by hatred, consumed by suspicion, confounded by free-floating fear. Anyone can be a wizard, brother fears brother, son fears father, a mother fears her own children. The Amba rejected the comfortable and comforting view that the enemy is the stranger, the foreigner, the man of a different faith or skin color. No! Possessed by a peculiar kind of masochism, the Amba live in torment and distress; at this very moment, evil can be under my own roof, asleep in my bed, eating from the same dish as I. And there is an additional difficulty: it is impossible to determine what wizards look like. After all, no one has seen one. We know they exist because we see the results of their actions: they caused the drought, as a result of which there is nothing to eat, fires keep igniting, many people are sick, someone is always dying. Plainly, wizards never rest, endlessly occupied as they are with raining misfortunes, defeats, and tragedies down upon our heads.
The war flares up, dies down, then explodes again. Although it has gone on so many years, I have heard of no one trying to write its history. In Europe, there are shelves of books dedicated to every war, archives full of documents, special rooms in museums. Nothing of the kind exists in Africa. Here, even the longest and greatest war is quickly forgotten, falls into oblivion. Its traces vanish by the day after: the dead must be buried immediately, new huts erected on the site of burned ones. Documents? There never were any. There are no written orders, no ordnance maps, cryptographs, leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, letters. The custom of writing memoirs and diaries does not exist (most frequently, there is simply no paper). There is no tradition of writing histories. Most important—who would do this? There are no collectors of memorabilia, curators, archivists, historians, archaeologists. It is actually just as well there are no such people nosing about the battlefields. They would be quickly spotted by the police, imprisoned, and, suspected of spying, shot. History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears. What exactly is it? Why has it chosen us to cast its evil eye upon? It is better not to think about it. Better not to pry.
People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and the bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics. Khartoum restricts the number of flights bringing supplies for the hungry. Many of the planes that reach their destination are robbed by the local chieftains. Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of the soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.
In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell—for six muskets and one trunk of beads—the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors—to Africa. Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population…Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit. Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free.
History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly. In such instances, it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing—more, who do not want to know, who reject the possibility with disgust and anger. We see them hastening toward their own destruction, forging their own fetters, tying the noose, diligently and repeatedly checking whether the fetters and the noose are strong, whether they will hold and be effective.
The increasingly important question in the world is not how to feed all the people—there is plenty of food, and preventing hunger is often only a matter of adequate organization and transport—but what to do with them. What should be done with these countless millions? With their unutilized energy? With the hidden powers they surely possess? What is their place in the family of mankind? That of fully vested members? Wronged brothers? Irritating intruders?
Between the people of the Sahara and the sedentary tribes of the Sahel and the green savannah there had existed for centuries in this part of Africa a form of commerce known as silent trading. The inhabitants of the Sahel traded salt and received gold in return. This salt, a highly coveted and priceless commodity, especially in the tropics, was carried from the interior of the Sahara on the heads of the black slaves of the Tuareg and the Arabs, probably to the River Niger, where the transaction took place. “When the Negroes reach the river, they proceed as follows,” tells a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto. “Each of them forms a little hillock out of the salt he brought, and marks it. Leaving the salty piles arranged in one straight line, they retreat a half day’s travel time in the direction from whence they came. Then, people from another Negro tribe arrive. They come on large boats, probably from nearby islands, disembark, and place next to each mound of salt a certain amount of gold. Then they, too, withdraw, leaving behind the gold and the salt. When they are gone, those who brought the salt return, and if they deem the amount of gold to be sufficient, they take it, leaving the salt; if not, they take neither the gold nor the salt, and go away once again. Then the other ones come back and take those piles of salt that have no gold next to them; next to the others they place more gold, if they consider it appropriate, or leave the salt. In this manner they conduct their commerce, never seeing one another and never speaking. This practice has gone on for a very long time already, and although the whole business sounds improbable, I assure you that it is true.”
The African market is a great repository of everything and anything. A veritable mine of the cheap and the shoddy. A mountain of rubbish, gimcrack, and kitsch. There is nothing of any value to a Westerner here, nothing to catch your attention, arouse your admiration, tempt you to possess it. At one end are stacks of identical red and yellow buckets and bowls; at the other, billowing piles of thousands of identical undershirts and sneakers; someplace else still, pyramids of multicolored calicos and glittering rows of nylon dresses and men’s jackets. Only in such a place can one fully appreciate the extent to which the world is swamped with material tenth-rateness, how it is drowning in an ocean of camp, knockoffs, the tasteless and the worthless.
One of the differences between African and European societies is the latter’s division of labor: specialization, strictly defined expertise, professionalism. These principles are only marginally in effect in Africa. Here, especially these days, one must try one’s hand at dozens of occupations and do many things, most frequently not for long and—alas!—not too thoroughly. In any event, it is difficult to find anyone who has not had a brush with Africa’s prime life force and passion: the exchange of goods.
Noticing that inter-cultural contact is usually initiated by conquistadors: …intercultural exchange was monopolized by a class of ignoramuses. As one consequence, interpersonal contacts were informed from the outset by the most primitive criterion: skin color. Thus racism became an ideology according to which people defined their place in the world.
Interesting commentary/history concerning:
-Idi Amin
-Hutu/Tutsi conflict ~1960-90
-Dinka/Nuer conflict
-Monrovia and the ascension to power of former American slaves (Liberia)
-Tuareg/Bantu conflict