The two men have similar backgrounds and share common interests. They speak the same language. Gerry is in his element. It is as though he morphs into DOCTOR MAN before my very eyes. His attention, like a glowing beacon, is palpable. Realizing that I have not been the recipient of it, I begin to feel somewhat inconsequential. Nan, however, is so welcoming and warm that I allow my shallow wave of insecurity to subside. Besides, once I slip into the conversation that I plan to write one book about my experience in Kenya and put together a second one, a children’s book with illustrations by the orphans, who will then receive the proceeds when the book is published, I notice that both Nan and Gerry’s dazzling, intelligent eyes sparkle like firecrackers. I am going to be an asset!
Nan and I go on to discuss all Kenya- and some non-Kenya-related details. For some obscure reason, the subject of birth control comes up. Nan chortles that were it not for contraception, she’d have spent all her younger years barefoot and pregnant. She and Gerry share a quick but decidedly bawdy, conspiratorial wink. I’m at a total loss to come up with a nifty rejoinder. I have only just met this elderly missionary couple and it is as though I am horning in on some young lovers’ honeymoon. I sit grinning like an awkward teenager as Nan, careful not to wrench her neck again, blushes and rolls with laughter. Regaining her composure, Nan suggests that I come over at the end of the summer, several months off at this point, when the weather is finest. She and Gerry will be making another trip home to the States in October and she states that I will not want to be in Kenya while they are away. I have no idea why. I ask how long she thinks I should plan on staying.
“Oh, at least a month. It’ll take you a week to get over the jet lag and culture shock, then a week to acclimate and figure out what it is you will want to do there. And then a couple weeks to get it going,” she recites as though she has said it just that way a thousand times.
“Figure out what I want to do? Won’t you folks have something lined up for me?” I ask suddenly, not so obdurate about being that arrogant, self-motivated, all-knowing itinerant.
“Oh no, Pam. We don’t presume to tell our visitors what to do,” she sighs, irritably shaking her head like she has also said this a thousand times and is frankly sick to death of it.
“Well, what types of things might I do?” I venture, ever onward into the fray, more fearful of trucking over there clueless and directionless than I am of a reprimand. My staunchly independent journeyer’s resolve is getting shaky, a signpost to which I should be paying attention.
“Don’t worry, dear,” she chirps, transforming mercifully back into the good-witch Nan that I like so much better and need to believe in. And then she utters it, the idiom that will crawl into my psyche and take root there, festering like a cancer: “Africa will tell you.”
It rings ominous but could be interpreted as exceedingly romantic. I decide to go with romantic. I am committed to being committed at this point and it is essential that I have faith. I repeat this saying, packed with every ounce of its implied poetic intrigue and self-aggrandizing import, to positively anyone who expresses the slightest interest in my upcoming venture. The mantra becomes the catchphrase of my experience in ways I could never have imagined. At my urging, Nan recommends a dozen books for me to read in the interim. I assure her that I will and ask if I might not impose upon their busy schedule one more time before they leave again for Kenya so that my husband can meet them.
“Weekends will be best for us,” I explain. “Joe works weekdays as the Pharmacy District Manager for a local drugstore chain.” At this, Gerry’s head whips around like it’s a trout caught fast on a whizzing fly line.
“He’s a pharmacist?” the doctor demands.
“Uhhh huhhh,” I answer tentatively, not at all sure where we’re going with this.
“We would love to meet him!” Nan chimes, all sweetness and light. Up to this point, Gerry has not taken his eyes off his wife for the entire time I’ve been sitting there, not even while deep in conversation with the young physician. But now he is looking dead at me and it is damn unsettling. We arrange to meet again the following weekend. In the interim, I gather and begin to consume the suggested reading material, plus rent relevant films, watch documentaries, and set up future meetings with folks who have already been to Africa. And O Holy Trinity! do I get an education.
Most existing books on the subject of Africa pluck quite successfully at my heartstrings by using a broad range of approaches. Autobiographical texts such as Blixen’s (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen) quintessential Out Of Africa, and Elspeth Huxley’s classic, The Flame Trees of Thika, use a pen to sketch the sub-Saharan landscape in a haze of romantic mystique. Alexander McCall Smith’s delightful collection of fictional stories about the people of Botswana create characters to whom I can relate and sympathize with in an African setting that feels familiar and pleasantly non-horrific. The Poisonwood Bible fictionalizes, via the voice of an American missionary family, what Christianity did to Africa half a century ago. Its message ignites in me a feeling of collective guilt and a gut-crunching dread of ever going over there. As does Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, except that he compares his present-day experience on the continent to a previous venture several decades earlier, consequently assailing me with an exhaustively bitter but brutally honest summation. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is perhaps the fictional prototype for this harsh approach and its subsequent aversive reaction. The Constant Gardener by le Carré creates foreign intrigue in an all-too-believable scenario in which the corporate, predominately white, world selfishly visits unspeakable evil upon third-world people.
The film industry is also popping out stories of this genre like popcorn—Blood Diamond and Catch a Fire, to name a couple. They make for stirring, emotionally gripping theatre, but one cannot judge a book by its movie. Hotel Rwanda illustrates vividly what the tribes in Africa are doing to each other, while Black Hawk Down melodramatizes what American military forces have unsuccessfully proposed to do about the unrest. The Last King of Scotland reminds us how deftly African leaders can turn on their countrymen and dispose of hundreds of thousands of their own. Finally, there is a plethora of appalling personal accounts by Africans detailing the dreadful treatment they and their brethren have received at the hands of foreigners. When I can stomach them, I find they are indisputable records of immeasurable historical importance. The new docudramas such as Tsotsi, which don’t allow us to look away from the reality that remains for today’s indigenous African urban dweller, move me to tears.
There are the heaps of photography books, those that mostly take aerial shots of wild animals, such as Robert Haas’s spectacular collection titled Through the Eyes of the Gods, that make me want to go on safari, or those that concentrate on the ravages of disease, poverty, starvation, war, and genocide that make me physically ill. Wangari Maathai won a Nobel Peace Prize for Unbowed, an unflinching memoir of oppression, perseverance, and hope in her native Kenya. In addition, there are the vacation books, formulaic travel agency fodder, but I don’t even venture there. I advise anyone desiring to experience real Africa, not to either.
Hollywood is literally and figuratively all over the map with the Dark Continent and they aim to pluck my purse strings. From Oprah to George Clooney, Angelina Jolie to Madonna, HBO to CNN, Bill Gates to U2’s Bono. But starlets like Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, and Liza Minnelli one-upped them fifty-some years ago, venturing over to aid poor Ethiopian children in Africa long before it was in vogue to do so. There are brochures advertising the dozens of religious charitable organizations with their hands out, along with a smattering