BLANC ET NOIR II

AFRICA, IN MY VIEW

In mentally reviewing the exciting places I visited in South Africa and recalling the faces that served me so well, I realize that all in authority were white, and black faces appeared only in subservient positions. There were only two exceptions. First, in the Holiday Inns, which are of course not in the same class as the other places, the restaurant staffs were all black, but the desk staffs were mixed. The second exception is a glorious one, the Victoria Falls Hotel; but it is in Zimbabwe, not South Africa. There, the only white face I saw belonged to a public relations hostess–my Harrare friend knew her well–who visited restaurant guests to chat about their stay in the hotel.

In all places but these two, the blacks seemed listless, apathetic, almost sullen, and with no apparent interest in any aspect of their work including the return of a simple friendly greeting from a resident. The main exception occurred one noon at the Sandton Holiday when I ordered a special shellfish and a fine local wine to match. I was sufficiently pleased with the food and service to leave a tip somewhat beyond the routine, which I've also been known to do at home on rare occasions. The next two mornings at breakfast this waiter recognized me, came over to greet me, and made certain my table had everything it needed. At the Victoria Falls the staff was exuberantly friendly and almost matched the skill and enthusiasm of the staff in the world's greatest hotel, at least in my limited experience, the Herrera in Santiago, Chile.

On my last afternoon at the Falls I came in from bird watching too late for lunch and much too hot and hungry to wait for dinner. Since neither the tea nor the bar menu was very appealing, I decided to eat in my room; I could see the spray from the Falls, after all. What looked most appealing on the menu was another good old American cheeseburger with fries, perhaps my fourth in seven months. I also ordered a bottle of the same Zimbabwean wine I'd enjoyed in the restaurant the previous night. A little later my phone rang, and it was the head barman. The wine I wanted was now out of stock, but he had another local wine to recommend instead. “Fine, just send it up,” I responded. “No, I want you to taste it first,” he replied. “I'll send a waiter to your room with a bottle.” The waiter soon appeared with the bottle and a glass, opened the wine, and poured me a taste. I assured him it was fine, he left the bottle and returned to the kitchen. The phone rang, and it was the barman again wanting my personal verification that the wine was indeed acceptable; only then was my food prepared and brought to the room on a second visit by the same waiter. That is not only service; that is being sensitive to a client's wishes. To give it shows pride in one's position.

I've enjoyed Nairobi very much during my three or four brief stays there, and it's a decidedly cosmopolitan city, particularly from the second story up. Downtown is filled with modern hotels and tall office buildings, with many more being constructed on all sides, but except for the shops enclosed in their malls, at street level the city looks almost as squalid as Arusha. Petty crime is rampant, and the gangs of teen-aged–or younger–street urchins patrolling downtown streets are a serious threat to the unwary. The suburbs I've seen are high class and contain some marvelous homes; many are or were official residences. Shopping malls are numerous and well supplied. (When a California student mentioned “mall” in his letter, my students were baffled; they are unknown in Tanzania, except for one hodge-podge of shops in downtown Dar that has incorrectly appropriated the name.) In one direction just on the edge of downtown, there are rows and rows of new apartment buildings, most of them totally unoccupied.

The road system is well developed, and although potholes have recently appeared abundantly inside the city and on the highway to the Tanzanian border, I am assured that repairs will be made; road tolls are actually used there for improvements. Travel along the highways and across the border is closely monitored by police and is facilitated–“lubricated” is Peter's term–by a well-established system of bribes; what isn't volunteered is suggested in place of a visit to a police station to discuss improper documents or an imaginary infraction. This is the ugly part of travel in Kenya.

At the business and service levels Kenyans are much nicer. They are very fluent in English, efficient, and relaxed with visitors. All with whom I have dealt are black; I don't recall ever seeing a white employee at the Norfolk, for example. That hotel and its facilities are used by Africans and Caucasians alike, and the service to both is exemplary. Outside the Delamere Terrace the well-dressed passersby are inevitably black, and the many young men dressed in the corporate dark blue suit reflect the success of the local business community. The shorts-clad spreading hips, bony knees, and spindly legs invariably belong to white tourists; it amazes me that even a quick glance in the mirror doesn't persuade them to dress as Africans expect but don't demand.

The countryside of Kenya is beautifully verdant and productive, at least within a few hours' drive of Nairobi, and is indistinguishable from France or England until one sees black faces or hears Kiswahili. The apparent prosperity seems somewhat shared. In the upcountry inns and lodges that we visited white influence was sometimes evident, but blacks efficiently conducted the businesses. Our main concern as we passed through town after town last December, shortly before the national elections, was the obvious, almost militant association of each region with its own tribal candidate.

Tanzania, in terms of beauty and potential productivity, easily surpasses the other two countries. In one sense its fertility is its biggest problem; all one need do is stick seeds in the ground and a few weeks later harvest the crop. When I first took up residence at Ilboru, I observed that one teacher-neighbor already had the best of my three plots under cultivation; an unmet neighbor was steadily encroaching on a second plot from below the crest of the hill; and an old Maasai herdsman occasionally tethered his goats to any convenient location on my house, including the front door handle. So when another teacher-neighbor asked to “make a garden” in my remaining plot, I readily acquiesced.

For an hour or two before sunset that night and the next, he scratched around with the clumsy, large-bladed hoe-like implement that is used for all earth-moving projects here, from ditch-digging to weeding, and then he disappeared. I thought he had changed his mind about gardening. A week later, however, alternating rows of maize and beans appeared among the weeds–he is not all that serious a gardener–and I marveled again at the ease of survival here. Meanwhile, the much tidier plot on the uphill side had matured, been harvested, and then carefully replanted with onion sets. Since Mama and her housekeeper worked within a few feet of the house just outside the uncurtained bathroom, I started scheduling visits to that area with more than the customary care. I noticed one day that the Maasai tethers were too long to keep the goats separated from the onions, but I decided, somewhat joyously, since neither side had requested permission to occupy my space, not to risk an international incident by intervening.

Tanzanians are happy, friendly, unambitious people, who for the most part are totally indifferent to the hard work and competition of the capitalist world, except to envy the fruits of its labors, and to steal you blind once your back is turned. Even my students ask me to give them things, and if I did, they would only ask for more. That I am spending a half million Tanzanian schillings monthly just to live here–which suggests how nearly valueless the local unit of currency is–would make no impression on them even if I mentioned it; to them all whites are infinitely wealthy. They show little gratitude toward the volunteers who try to help them; by now, after all these years of foreign aid, they expect it. Nearly a billion dollars annually goes into education and development projects, and the country by all accounts is much worse off now than it was at independence thirty years ago.

I have mentioned and illustrated the nonexistence here of any significant infrastructure many times previously. In recent weeks electricity has been available much of the time, although it's off right now. East Asians dominate business and black-market money operations and appear to make fortunes. Many Africans, mainly from the dominant Chagga tribe, also operate small businesses successfully, but I think on a smaller scale. Religion is taken very seriously and is decidedly fundamentalist in philosophy; perhaps this adds to the ease with which all that happens, or doesn't happen, is unquestioningly accepted.

The countries mentioned above are among the most stable, or at least quiescent, on the continent. The litany of African disasters is chanted each morning by Western radio and television and is far better known to you than to me; I have preferred to make my own observations and judgments in ignorance. I just learned, for example, at the end of January from a New Yorker article by Roger Angell that Toronto had indeed defeated Atlanta in the 1992 World Series. I was in Nairobi on Super Sunday and inadvertently learned the score of that annual fiasco; the tragic disaster to the “Lunatic Express” a few days earlier seemed much more immediate. And Peter tells me that Rwanda has re-erupted, which strongly suggests I won't be traveling in that direction next June and July.

In Eastern and Southern Africa, with their vast populations of game within easy access, the struggle for existence and survival is more obvious. Life and death seem so natural and acceptable here. Perhaps this makes it easier for me to comment on the fate of nations and peoples; perhaps this also makes it more likely that my opinions are wrong. I sincerely hope so.

The Republic of South Africa strikes me as the last of the European colonies, and like its predecessors, it must inevitably change, probably soon. The disparity in racial populations is so great that there seems absolutely no way for the white minority to enfranchise, meaningfully, the black majority and simultaneously retain its control. Almost nowhere in Africa has a black elite been trained for positions of leadership, and almost nowhere in Africa has the indigenous leadership been other than corrupt and all too often ruthlessly and murderously violent. Can South Africa's destiny be any different?

My knowledge of recent African history is nil, but if any place seems to have had an indigenous population capable of maintaining the structure taken over at independence, it was Kenya. The country seems to be operating stably right now with apparent black control. The big worry remains the possibility of intertribal warfare in an attempt to gain by force what was not won at the ballot box. Neither Mr. Bush's equation of democracy to multiparty elections nor his choice of ambassador was highly regarded here; his strong positions in the Gulf and Somalia are, however. To me Kenya remains a question; it could go either way.

And what about Tanzania? Well, Tanzania seems the happiest disaster of them all; it will simply sleep into extinction. Life is easy, the people seem complacently content, and hamna shida (no problem). The electricity is off? We'll burn candles. The candles are gone? We'll read by the fireplace. The trees have all been cut down? We'll survive in the dark. Hamna shida.

It's impossible to know what the ordinary Tanzanian thinks, but I can say that among some, at least, there's a wish for more European involvement than just the current aid programs. A return to colonialism is clearly not the answer, but government concessions to foreign investors who in turn do something positive for the country and its people rather than simply exploiting resources and exporting profits, seem beneficial. I learned recently that there are significant new initiatives by US AID and the World Bank, among others, to encourage privatization of local business. Once when Peter and I were comfortably situated in some resort or other, he talked with an employee about a neighboring business that was in obvious decline. “What's their problem?” he asked. “Their entire staff is black,” the employee responded. Peter looked around the room and commented, “Well, all of you are black, and this place is doing well.” “True," was the reply, “but there's a European in the office back there who's in charge.”

One day at Ilboru recently, I was chatting with Mr. Lolo, my colleague and neighbor–it was Mama Lolo's onion patch that fell victim to the Maasai goats–and unexpectedly he began discussing the problems of government and other organizations managed entirely by blacks. The main gist of his comments was that such operations inevitably become corrupt as well as nonproductive. Only with white involvement can honesty and efficiency be attained, in his opinion.

So I will not be surprised if three of the most exciting areas in Africa fall into decline, one into racial violence, another into internecine warfare, and the third into a new form of human sleeping sickness. Perhaps it’s an inevitable consequence of the world's increasing population and declining resources. I expect this trend will be as impossible to reverse as the sickening ethnocide in what was, for much too short a time, Yugoslavia. (For a breathtaking opinion of what may ultimately happen to us all, read “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” beginning on page 58 of the October 12, 1992 The New Yorker.)

Such a forecast does put my reasons for being here in question and may very well shorten my time of service, especially when viewed together with the housing shortage and other administrative problems at Ilboru. On the other hand it may make even more important the friendships I share with my students. There always is the possibility that one of them will become the leader his country so desperately needs.

“...It is a matter of some irony, then, that Rodney King himself, around whom the rage of the children of Malcolm had billowed, turned out to be consummately one of the children of Martin when he appeared before cameras and, pained and stunned, ventured the appeal, in a halting, stumbling, voice that yet had an eloquence beyond all the roaring of those days, 'Can we all get along?'

“It was toward that simple but ultimately civilized sentiment that Malcolm was making his last pilgrimage. He undertook it against fearful odds–odds that, after all these years, still confront his people. For the rest of us, then, the parable of Malcolm X should serve as an urgent warning. We must at last come by the recognition, the conscience, and the will to somehow make it possible for Malcolm's children–the still dispossessed descendants of America's aboriginal crime of slavery–to continue the journey that he began.”

“The Children of Malcolm,” Marshall Frady, The New Yorker, October 12, 1992, p. 81.

W. Vance Johnson

21 Feb 93