Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. Previous posts are below.
We first set foot in Africa in September of 1974 to begin our contracts with the American School of Kinshasa. We knew pretty much nothing, except that we’d be there two years and we’d like to see as much of Africa as we could.
We saw a lot. By the time we sailed for Europe in November of 1976, we’d been to 25 African countries. We’d traveled by riverboat and by packet boat and by ferries of every description. We’d ridden on planes and trains and in Land Rovers and overpacked buses, atop cases of beer in a truck through the Ituri Forest and in all manner of vehicles hitchhiking throughout South Africa.
Our first Thanksgiving dinner featured Spam with friends camped in a rainforest, the second was beef hearts with priests at their home in the bush. One Christmas we had fried termites with new acquaintances on a train to Zambia, another Christmas we helped slaughter a piglet for porc a l’ananas high in the Ruwenzori Mountains.
We slept in campgrounds in forests and on islands, in huts on mountainsides, under ledges in the desert and in too many missions to count, along with a sprinkling of hotels, government guesthouses and game park lodges — and countless nights in our trusty VW bus, Miles.
We marveled at blue-ice glaciers and turquoise seacoasts and rippling sands and fantastical rock formations, at a bubbling volcano and a crystal-clear swamp, and at the grandeur of wild animal herds on the plains and gorillas in the jungle. The fearsome slave castles, the joyous tribal celebrations, the craftspeople at work in leather or metal or fibers, on masks and carvings; the sound of drums in the jungle and of jazz in smoky nightclubs: Africa gave us all of this.
Also: The warmth of so many people in so many places, from the master Kinshasa carpenter Kidiela who created our wonderful Miles and the intrepid Kitsola who kept us safe from predators in the Okavango Delta, to the nameless man who brought us mint tea and dates on a silver tray one moonlit night in the Moroccan desert and the twinkly-eyed pere francais in Mali who strode toward us with open arms and took us home for a shower, a meal and a good night’s sleep.
It’s tempting to think in categories. The most wondrous sights? The Ruwenzori massif, the Okavango Delta and Tassili in the Sahara. But how about the Congo riverboat trip and the volcano Nyiragongo, Kilimanjaro, the game parks, Victoria Falls, Cape Town, Lamu, Zanzibar, Marrakesh, the Todra Gorge?
What about the richest cultural experiences? The Dogon people in Mali, the floating village of Ganvie in Benin, the festival in Cape Coast, Ghana. But there were also the multitudes of people making masks and carvings and tapestries and fabrics, dancing and singing and drumming and playing music throughout Zaire and West Africa.
A Bakuba mask we bought in Zaire
And then there were the disappointments. We didn’t get to drive across the Sahara, our absentee ballots didn’t make it to Algiers, civil strife kept us out of Uganda and Angola and Mozambique. And the trials and tribulations, many of them mechanical, others natural — mud, heat altitude, mosquitoes and tsetse flies, the water buffalo charging Mike as he sought firewood. Also the infuriating individual experiences — the long hours spent at the whim of border officials, the soldiers with rifles at Kinshasa intersections, the palms held out to be greased, the irregularity and unreliability of schedules.
We kept daily budgets— down to every last cucumber — intent upon stretching the money we’d saved in our two years of teaching (and our summer-school offering). This accounting shows that we spent $64.30 in 11 days in Zaire — $53 of it on “tow charges” (for the men who helped dig us out of mud holes) — compared to $240 over 12 days in Cameroon and Chad — mostly for gas, fresh food and donations to missions that allowed us to park overnight.
Halfway through the drive out, we made a list of rules to help us save money, including “avoid guides, avoid dashes (the word for bribe in Nigeria), avoid beers in hotels.” The big bucks were the $216 to get us and Miles on the train from Bamako to Senegal and the $650 to get us on the boat to Casablanca. By Morocco, we were still keeping our daily expenditure to $21 a day, and our savings would indeed permit us to embark on our travels in Europe with confidence.
So much for the summing up. How did our time in Africa shape us?
It’s easiest to answer one aspect — the professional one. We got married in June 1974, left the country a couple of days later, and ended up spending five years overseas. Mere months earlier, I’d been applying to larger newspapers, hoping to move up from the cub-reporting job that launched me in a career I adored. Unquestionably, this radical move became an obstacle to finding work in journalism; it was too unorthodox a step for prospective employers to see the benefit of. In the end things worked out happily indeed, but it took a while.
More broadly, the impact of those years on my life feels at once immense and unknowable. I think I gained a more critical understanding of what democracy means, the different forms that poverty takes, and how it feels to stand out for looking different, to be very much an “other.” We saw the various ways our fellow human beings feel and express joy and suffering, how they make music and art, the varieties of family and village life, and the different ways people respond to their natural environment.
To this day, I sometimes feel a tiny hit of astonishment that a tap will produce an endless flow of water that I didn’t have to lug from anywhere and needn’t suspect of disease-bearing. And I have never fully shaken off my unsettlement at the scale of our wastefulness; seeing people fight over the (empty but useful) tuna can that you learned to place carefully alongside the road will do that to you.
But back to the trip. At the end of our time in the Sahara, we drove 650 miles from Ghardaia to Tunis, where “we embarked on a nice Italian boat on which we spent a good night and woke up within view of Trapani, Sicily.” We would spend the next 7 months traveling in Europe — still in our faithful Miles (with fewer mechanical problems and better roads) — and the two years after that living in Paris. But that’s another story.
This story — our Africa days — ended on November 17, 1976, with the landing in Sicily.
One evening the previous August, back in Cameroon, I had written in my journal, “I know that when we return to the U.S., this will all seem a dream.”
It does.
