Imagining Africa: Representing the Other

The theme title for this week suggests already the epistemological ground: Africa seen from the outside, Africa envisioned by non-African. I am not an African in any usual sense of the term, although my mitochondria record a connection to that place through my foremothers, so I look at Africa inevitably as an outsider. I am a sympathetic outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.

In the 1960s I was a child fascinated by the natural world, and to me Africa meant mainly “the place of the game animals”. The notion of Africa as “jungle” was really foreign to me; I never held it. I knew that in “The Congo” (to me a region rather than a sovereign state) the forests were often tangled with undergrowth. Of the people in Africa I had somewhat conflicting knowledge. On the one hand were men known only by their last names: Nkruma, Nyerere, Fanon, Nassar, and on the other were the “aborigines”: peoples like the !Kung, BaMbuti, and Masai. The men were seen as individuals, at podiums, attended by staff, in uniforms or clean, conservative clothing. My parents and grandparents were very interested in them, and were active in encouraging Americans to learn about Africa and to contribute in some way to “improvement of life” there. As a child I did not question the underlying assumption (supported by news footage of famine and warfare in Africa) that Africans required “improvement of life”. Yet the “aborigines” presented by National Geographic and UNICEF materials seemed to have a relatively happy existence, and from my perspective they had a far more aesthetically attractive way of life than we had in suburban Pennsylvania.

The first film I saw as a child – on television – was Zulu, and I was profoundly influenced by it, and by what I could gather about the Zulu people from the few sources available to me, including Lord Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, in which he expresses deep admiration for Zulu courage and endurance (while also laughing at his ability to “outdance” them). I had several sets of plastic figures of Zulu men, some drumming, others armed with spears and distinctive lens-shaped shields. Notably, many Zulus at the battle depicted in the movie Zulu were armed with rifles, and so the plastic figures might be said to be expressing a “primitivizing”, rather than a realistic, vision. I certainly perceived the Zulu as “noble savages”.

My childhood interests in natural history, primatology, paleontology, and anthropology were reinforced by studies in high school and college. In high school we studied the outlines of African history. I always found the information about the pre-colonial kingdoms the most interesting: Benin and Mali I found particularly interesting. We also read The Heart of Darkness and an interpretive work Conrad and the Congo In college, I began listening to African music, in part because so many of the European and American musicians my friends and I enjoyed were listening to and borrowing from African music. King Sunny Ade was my favorite in part because of his ensemble's use of talking drums. I have played drums since I was three, and African drumming (perhaps it does not need mention) sets a high standard.

I was especially stimulated by a course in African oral and written literature, for which I read a dozen novels by African authors, including Laarbi Laayachi's A Life Full of Holes, Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. My political views tended to the left, and I was not surprised to read many variations on colonial oppression. The instructor of the course did not assume that we students were familiar with Africa geography and history, and made us practice identification of the national boundaries and capitals until we all had them memorized.

My circumstances kept bringing me into contact with Africans, especially, curiously enough, Zulus. I worked in a summer camp one year with a woman named Ntombizanele Sithebe. I was disgusted to find that no-one else on staff would even attempt to pronounce her name correctly. Instead, she became at first “Tommy” and then, when she protested that she was certainly not going to tolerate “Tommy”, but if Ntombizanele was too difficult, we could call her “Ntodozi” meaning “Cherie”, she became instead “Dozy”. Having an interest in etymology and having just studied linguistics (and being naturally sympathetic to people with long names), I had no particular difficulty in pronouncing her name, which means “No More Boys”. Her mother, apparently, wanted a daughter after something like eight sons. That was about all I ever learned about her.

One of my anthropology-major friends spent half a year in Kenya with traditional Kikuyus. She said that she thought that I would “make a good Kikuyu” on the grounds that at any rate the pastoralists she lived with were in harmony with their surroundings. To get me started on the right track she insisted that I model a cotton kikoi kilt, which caused a bit of a sensation on campus when I wore it to class. I think it may have been the hiking boots that clashed. And in fairness, a dhoti or a Scottish kilt probably would have raised eyebrows, too. Americans just are not ready for men in skirts.

After college, I spent a year as a professional musician and then entered Lancaster Theological Seminary. There, I met a fellow musician, Ned Banda from South Africa, who was also of Zulu ancestry on his father's side. For the better part of a year we were very close. He had been permanently crippled by poor medical care in infancy, resulting from his birth “in Township”, so that he had to wear a clumsy brace on his leg. However, he was a determined and good-humored fellow, a great conversationalist and excellent musician, who was also elected class president his freshman year at F&M. I lost contact with Ned when I moved to Chicago to continue graduate studies in religion. But in Chicago, Africa was still inescapable.

In the dormitory at Chicago Theological Seminary, my room happened to be immediately next to the main entrance, and I generally kept my window open, so that people locked out of the building often called for me to come and let them in. One day, an unfamiliar man appeared at the window, his remarkably round face marked with chevron-shaped scars on the cheeks. He needed to speak with the building supervisor, but the supervisor wasn't home at the moment, so I invited the new fellow in for a meal. He looked around my small room and laughed when he saw one of the books on my shelf: D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Demons in Wole Soyinke's translation. “We had to read that in primary school!” he said. He was surprised that I knew of it.

He had been born Folorunsho Ogundele (“Servant of God” was how he explained the name), and he had at one time been a candidate for kingship in Nigeria, which explained the distinctive patterns of scars on his cheeks, but his parents converted to Islam when he was a pre-teen, at which point his father and he were disqualified. He was an ardent Muslim until he was around fourteen, at which point he converted to Christianity, changed his name to Cornelius, and was cast out of his parents' home. He then lived in various missions for years before coming to the States. Notably, despite his long separation from his Ife Yoruba roots, when a man from a rival ethnic group, the Hausa, if memory serves me, came to seminary the following year, the two were very cool to each other although obviously struggling to maintain the proper “Christian fellowship”.

When I returned to Lancaster County from seminary, I became involved with environmental activism and through several organizations I met a woman from Zimbabwe whose (white) family were displaced by the Zimbabwean government during reapportionment. Although her family had been scattered, she returned to Zimbabwe for many years as a director and later an assistant at a women's shelter, from about 1995 she had been exiled from the country of her birth. She was one of four or five white Africans I have known, all but one of whom have left Africa permanently.

Over the past two or three years I have expanded my experiences of African art, especially bronze sculpture and architecture, and music. It is almost impossible to view contemporary African music videos and not experience close and heartfelt expressions of political opinion, sometimes discernible even without translation. I try to interest my children in these videos, but they tire of my deconstruction: “Look, that's a traditional dance form, but they are all wearing European costumes, riding in a BMW, and dancing in a courtyard that could be in Miami. What do you think that says about the influence of the international bourgeoisie?”

My partner's mother is a Boer South African. She has an extensive collection of “primitive” African art, mostly from the central west coast. She also has an extensive collection of strong opinions about African blacks and “colored” people in general. She is, of course, my “mother-in-law”, but I find that I am not the only person who finds her hard to stomach. Yet had I been separated from my moorings so completely as she has been, I think I also might be bitter and biased.

My experience of Africa has been limited, and is definitely “arm-chair”. I sometimes feel morally wrong for taking such pleasure in African literature, dance, sculpture, and music, as though I am “stealing” something. But then, I take similar pleasure in the arts of Asia, of Europe, of Australia, of the Americas. And, as I hope this essay illustrates, much of my experience has been acquaintance or friendship with Africans, and friendship is not quid-pro-quo. Such experiences as these make it difficult for me to imagine Africa and Africans in a simple way, but I do believe while my understanding may be more nuanced than many Americans, I still experience Africa as The Other.