some things to make you go hmmmm....

why don't more black americans travel to africa?

[caution: may be offensive to some viewers; moderate to strong racial views included.]

that's an interesting question. i actually have a whole lot of my own theories on this, many of which i've described in the comments on this particular topic posed by greg gross. Or rather, i *thought* i might have left comments there, but apparently, i can't find them. hmph.

anyway, what i normally say is that, well, black americans generally don't have the kind of jobs that can pay for the ridiculous airfare that it normally takes to get to most places in africa, and even if they do, they normally don't have the type of vacation time which would involve being able to make a two-day flight to various parts of africa.

that said, i'm acquainted with a few people online who disprove those particular theories, to a degree. [i've actually met fly-brother, most recently when i was on my way back to south africa from brazil.]

now the reason i'm writing this post is because of an encounter i had with a mutual fan of both myself and fly-brother. he's a fan of fly-brother because he's really into travel, and a fan of mine because he reads a lot of my political commentary on various websites, most notably thought leader.

i ran into this guy in a club last nite. it was strange -- he came up to me and says "did you ever have red hair?" i currently shave my head clean, since i sport the sherman helmsley look when i don't. i say to the guy, "yes, i did, a long time ago." so then this guy goes, "so you write a blog called kwerekwere is barbaros, not xenos?"

me: guilty as charged.
him: has anyone ever called you a nerd? you really split hairs on your etymology in your blog title. that's what's attracted me to your writing.
me: lots of times. [chuckle] thanks.
him: can i ask you a serious question?
me: sure.
him: how many african countries have you visited or lived in?
me: [thinks]... somewhere between 15 and 20. i'd have to sit down and think about it. [actual answer: 17, so i was in the ballpark.]
him: do you think it's because you look more african than most american black people? i can tell from your page that you have an american passport.
me: [not sure where he was going with this. also not sure if i should throw my drink on him or just ask for clarification. ultimately, i decide on the latter.] pardon?
him: i mean, you're dark. i've lived in and traveled in almost as many places as you have, and i have noticed that most of the black americans who are traveling are lighter-skinned, as if they would be called mixed-race in europe.
me: that's deep.
him: there's this one black american guy who i think follows fly-brother's page that is a facebook friend of a personal friend of mine. when i am with my friend, i read the guy's updates and i often think, "he spends so much time in europe, south america, and asia -- why does he never go to africa?"

a chill goes through my spine at this point. he can't be talking about who i think he's talking about.

me: what's this guy's name?
him: [exactly the person who i could not possibly believe he could be referencing]

i dropped my drink. damn this world is small. small in that i actually knew of the person he was discussing, and small in that i wasn't the only one to have this exact same thought. after i bought another drink, he goes on --

him: maybe he mainly is seeking validation from europeans or other lighter-skinned peoples than africans?

i start to grumble. i'm having a serious deja vu moment from the book our kind of people where lawrence graham, upon arriving in washington to do an internship, is told about the colorist bullshit that goes on in washington dc... by someone white.

me: if you read my writings, you know you're going to have to start explaining yourself very quickly before i get upset and curse you out.
him: yes, of course. what i am meaning is that maybe there is a subconscious in black people in america where while they might not particularly like the fact that they have white ancestors in there, given the chance, they will spend a lot of time with white people while abroad.
me: maybe i'll let you slide, just this once. anything else?
him: i mean, i know it's expensive to travel to africa, but iberia is always having a sale to many african countries. and at the very least, some airlines are flying from the usa to dakar, which is closer to most american cities than, say, berlin, athens or rome.

i swear this guy has hacked into my computer. i was pointing this out to fly-brother just last week.

me: oh, man. not iberia. it's a crap airline, and you know it.
him: yes, it is, but it's not too different than flying domestically on most US carriers, so it should not be a problem for them.
me: you might be right on that one. i've never really flown domestically in the US. when i have, it's mainly been on crop dusters. and i flew on southwest once when my brother got married.
him: i know. and you're not missing anything.

at this point, his friend rocks up.

him: look, we have here mundundu from thought leader.
friend: i've always wanted to meet you. i see what you write on thought leader. you're very well travelled. were your parents diplomats?
me: no
friend: military?
me: no
friend: were you adopted by germans as a small child maybe, and this is why sometimes you say the things about white people that you do?
me: [nearly dropping another drink] no -- and that's a new one. why do you ask that?
friend: well, you are always saying that you are in these out of the way places and there are always germans there.
me: well, there are.
friend: yes. this is why i am asking. maybe you are raised by german people to travel like this.
me: wow, i think i might have to blog about this tomorrow. this is too much.

i felt the booze starting to really hit me, so i left. fortunately i live in the city centre, 800m from said club, so it was no big deal to get home. [even tho i did happen to, um, party on the way home. but that's for another blog. :) ]

i stupidly did not get either of these guys' names. and yet, if the one follows people i know on facebook, they know mine, which i try to keep off of here for the time being. maybe they'll drop me a message.

but this did actually get me back to a post that i had been writing before, but had mothballed because the opinions contained therein were some pretty hot shit. basically, it's far easier to be a light-skinned black american travelling through europe or latin america [ie to look like the americans i referenced in this post] than to look like me. you can identify as black all you want, but the societal treatment is where it's at [vos no lo sos o no pareces]. i've had enough racist bullshit happen to me in europe, north america and south america for it to be a major reason for me to be living in south africa right now. the "being followed around the store because people think i'm nigerian" is so much easier to deal with than the very real shit that i've had to deal with on those other three continents.

many people would look at this one guy i know and basically be, "well, one parent is from somewhere else, but the other one is probably local" and he'd get much better treatment than i would. there is still a sense of "he is one of us, despite being mixed with foreigner" that works out to his advantage. i've mentioned having to go nuclear in the uk, and don't get me started about france. i purposely no longer speak french in france, because every time i do, i'm an african who must be deported [or at the very least, whose papers must be closely examined] as opposed to everybody's black friend when i'm speaking english. the thing is, i don't particularly like to speak english, which is one of the reasons i can get by in ten or so other languages.

but i know that i'm different. maybe not unique-snowflake different [who am i kidding, unique snowflake would indeed be appropriate here], but eish, man. i really hate having to give off "american" in order to avoid drama. when i'm in my most comfortable accent, people think that i'm a west african who lived in the states for a while, and i do nothing to discourage this. when i was living in senegal, a few people thought i was from togo or benin or cameroon -- my french was too good for me to be nigerian or american -- and those people who did know i was american often asked me if i was peace corps because of a) the level of my french and b) the facility with which i was picking up wolof. my boyfriend's family and i had a sham going that i was from bissau because a) i spoke portuguese and b) my wolof was nowhere near good enough to be senegalese or gambian. but never, ever american.

the reason? it can be found, among other places, on pages 40-41 of black gold of the sun: searching for home in england and africa by ekow eshun. the black americans that *do* go to africa, and anglophone africa in particular, have a really bad rap. i've heard basically the same opinion from ghanaians who i've met here in cape town. and many of the black americans that i've met here in cape town are almost, to a person, that bad. i purposely try to avoid them at all costs, to be honest. local south africans who i know that have attended the black american church in johannesburg have given me the same, "you're not like them" stick that i've gotten from white people about black people in the usa.

in eshun's book, he tries to defend black america by telling the tour guide that not all black americans are like that. i can further that a bit in saying that it's a social class assaholic thing rather than a race thing. but if that's all you encounter, it tends to form an opinion and stereotypes.

in that vein, i often tell black americans who are making plans to come to africa to start with west africa first. or, to be honest, any sub-saharan country other than namibia or south africa. the social engineering of the 1950s and 60s makes it harder to perceptualize that one is in africa instead of latin america. it's not that the "real africa" [whatever that means] doesn't exist; one of south africa's tourism mottoes is "a world in one country" -- it's that since mass transit pretty much stops at nightfall, it can be problematic if you take mass transit to various parts of town and get stuck. and hiring a metered cab comes with its own set of difficulties: many cab drivers won't even go to the townships under any circumstance. many cab drivers aren't south african, and collectively speaking, south africans, at all races and socioeconomic levels, don't like foreigners very much -- things that led to the very title of this blog.

wow. this has been a lot. i could write a lot more, and probably will during the week. but it's midnite and a few bars are calling my name, not to mention my phone has been ringing all night from brothers who want to hang.

only in america

so my friend fly-brother has, in his 9/11 post, written about the growth of the passive nationalism that he has been feeling since moving to colombia.

in his post, he lists the best things about america. i can see some of them, and others... i'm a bit nonplussed. i'm almost certain that it's almost entirely due to having been raised differently than him. [this isn't any kind of value judgment, but we come from very different places and have much different experiences -- some of which, of course, could only have happened in america.]

i think, however, my parents, in particular my father, (and to a lesser extent the guy my mother *should* have married afterwards, but didn't) would have more in common with what he wrote than i would. i don't know. what i do know is that there are some things that i'm just not feeling that he's really into. southern culture is at the top of the list. i love grits, but that's about as southern as i get, and am completely unapologetic about it. people who know my paternal family history might find this really strange, as henry harris -- the first black basketball player at both auburn and the sec -- is related to me via my father's side. my american bits are *really* yankee, or more correctly, midwest. [i'm one of those people who put the midwest as starting at the susquehanna river and not the ohio state line.] i spoke dutchified english long before i spoke afrikaans on a regular basis. in fact, having dutchified english as, essentially, a language of instruction high school made afrikaans so easy to learn. [but then again, i did go to a dutch-speaking crèche and école maternelle as well.]

but, again, his post. let me think about all of this.

i don't even know what my top 10 things i appreciate about the states would be... that would require some more thought. but let's see how i fare with his top ten:

10) we're in agreement. but i've lived in europe, so i've gotten used to all of these things. that said, while living there, it's hard to find black magazines with a long lifespan, and they are more plentiful in britain than in france. everywhere else in europe [and most of latin america] they're conspicuously absent.

9) healthy lifestyle trumps healthy foods any day of the week, which a big reason why the dutch are taller than the americans. it's not the diet, that's for damn sure. it's also a reason that south africans are so short; collectively speaking, they don't eat healthily nor do they live healthily. if i'm the paragon of health in my community, something is really, really wrong.

8) see, again. london. paris. amsterdam. been there, done that. i'm really jaded about a lot of cultural stuff because, well, i've seen it everywhere. it's like working two blocks away from the white house for five years and only going to have lunch in the park outside of it when your parents are in town. [guilty of that, too.]

7) i'll concede this point, even though they do not have enough of the kinds of movies i like. love jones [points for mentioning it, ernest], the best man, brown sugar, waiting to exhale, soul food.... i was raised force-fed the "american" [read: whitewashed movies with mainly white casts that really don't speak to me] movie lines. and you know, they are generally well made. but give me movies that speak to a black boy from a established and accomplished family. [disclaimer: i didn't get to know my father's people until fairly late in life due to a really messy split up. generally, in my blog, when i say "my family" i mean my mother's people unless i explicitly state otherwise] but it's true -- rarely have i seen a movie with accomplished black people not doing some tragic mess that was not made in america. the "not-tragic mess" rules out nollywood. i know nollywood so well that all i need to do is see the director's name, and i know exactly how the movie is going to go, without even having read a review. sometimes it'll be english. other very rarely from either france or francophone africa. south africa is starting to step up to the plate, but like i say, i'll concede this point.

6) to have all of this in one country, yes, i'll concede this as well. but brazil does it as well, and for many of the same reasons. south africa is a world in one country and much of what i have seen is just awe-inspiring. but america gets the nudge because of its sheer enormity and for no other reason.

5) this is where i lose because, well, while there's some southern culture that i've done, most of which relates to food -- i'll take my knockwurst/boerewors/mofongo eatin ass... elsewhere. throughout much of my adolescence, i was constantly mocked for not being an "american" black, but i love my multi-culti caribbean/african/european upbringing that just *happened* to occur somewhere in pennsylvania. that said, these are still my people -- but for reasons beyond my control, and which i'll name later, i didn't have those experiences. unlike many black americans who weren't raised "black" because they had assimilationist parents, i don't feel that i've missed that much. [of course, it's because my parents were not assimilationist. they were pro-black in places where being pro-black was just Not Done, and that is a different kettle of fish.]

4) this really is splitting hairs, as only two countries have more people than the united states [that would be china and india]. put the european union [or even schengenland] together as whole, and you have a landmass of roughly the same size with the same number of "truly international cities" ditto for the not-amazon parts of south america. i gotta only give him 5 marks out of ten on that one.

3) this is where we agree 100%. but that success is up and down and just eww. my family tree got burned down in a few spots because of people's jealousy, which can best be summed up like this [apologies to those who have heard this one before]. i'm a dark-skinned, fourth-generation unversity graduate. worldwide, this is definitely an only in america thing. in america, it's really pretty rare, especially since my neither generations two nor three needed the g.i. bill for their university educations [which was good, because the federal government generally refused to let eligible veterans go to school on the g.i. bill. but even in "black america" this is... astounding. look at the halls of "black" unversities before the 1960s, and people who look like me are the exception, not the rule. it's no accident that the first "black" people at the flagship southern universities were uniformly dark. [or they passed, and therefore don't count.]

something ernest also touches on is just the sad state of black folks in latin america. ugh. i mean, it's depressing. there is no way in hell i could raise children there. just... none. i've had more than my share of trouble being in neighborhoods and schools throughout latin america which matched my wallet, but not my skin color.

that said, one of the main reason that i'm as multi-culti as i am is because the period from 1850 to 1950 was really hard for my family not just from white folks, but from people who are, in semi-polite conversation, referred to as "light-skinndedededed". hell, even longer than 1950, but going into it would shine an unsavory light into the reputations of more than a few shiny organizations which glorify "black" america. [psst, links members out there: when you're debating offering membership to someone, make sure the maid can't hear you. maids tend to talk amongst each other, you know?]

the white man had more than a little bit of help of running various ancestors of mine out of a certain major northern city as well as a few minor southern ones. and i'll leave it at that.

but the underlying characteristic is that they were able to do all of this in the first place and that's pretty much an only in america thing. so there you go.

2) agreed. but it's rapidly depending on where you are that you can have blatantly anti-american sentiment. if there's anything saying "osama rocks" along with the "buck fush" then you're going to cuba. and i don't mean for a leisurely stroll along the malecon.

1) i'm of two minds about this. i grew up in a stubbornly non-anglophone household, which were non-anglophone for the very reason why you have english at the top of the list. [my parents went to university in the states. they spoke english.] it was either univision or tv5 or radio-canada in the house, all the time, because the outside world was all english, in many of the places we lived; most of my education was, in fact, in english.

but when your favorite person in the world doesn't speak the language and is proud of you but doesn't really understand the big words on the fancy paper... it tends not to matter. titi's happiest 100th birthday present was a videotape of a fat, pimply, 13 year old boy with big glasses getting 6th place in the regional spelling bee [i'm not mad at having gotten sixth place, since our regional winner won the national spelling bee that year], she was so happy that her betinho was on television that she watched it over, and over and over again before she died -- even though she barely understood any of it.

but this is also the very reason i'm keeping the boy that i'll soon be raising again in afrikaans-language schools. so that his grandmother will be able to read and see, and most importantly, UNDERSTAND all of his achievements. one of the reasons that my afrikaans is as good as it is is because i want to be able to talk to her. i want to be able to let her know from my own mouth that i'm looking after him as if he was my own, just as her husband did for her daughter [the boy's mother].

but the very fact i ended up growing up so multi-culti was the shit that happened to us during jim crow.

and the particular shit, and the level of shit... could only happen in america.

i guess i need to just shut up and concede this point, too. i mean, for the past 20 years, just the way shit just keeps happening to me, people keep saying i could write a book. if i wanted the main character to be black, and have a life close to mine, what would be the most credible language to do it in? i mean, even though i grew up speaking french and spanish and portuguese [and one of the turning moments in the life of not only me, but of 20 other black boys and girls happened in a school in puerto rico, not the united states] -- it would only make sense if the following sentence started the whole thing:

"tropical storm agnes not only brought flooding throughout much of the eastern seaboard; it was also the stork that helped usher in the arrival of a bouncing baby boy."

[that said, i think my novel might have him being born during camille. we wouldn't want it *too* autobiographical, would we?]