A Tale of Six Africans/I am Baga, Nigeria.

In the wake of the Boko Haram atrocities, I returned to this blog entry, one of a few I've written about nations in Africa and their people. It was worth looking at it again, because I think that recognizing how we are more alike than different is a way to giving a damn. I also think we need to see good and positive and downright wonderful things about the 47 plus 6 island nations and its people. And I needed to remind myself not to wait until a movie is made or a memoir written to pay attention. This was written eight years ago, but I still resonates with me.



In January of last year [2007] I caught a cab home from work. As we drove along I listened to the talk show the cab driver had tuned into on the radio, it was one of those call-in shows, and the subject was homeland security. I don't remember exactly what was said, because I really wasn't listening too hard. But the driver was. After a few minutes of the men on the radio prattling on about whether our government should be allowed to wiretap American citizens, the cab driver, who was black, and I believe African (I could not read his name on his license, posted in the back, and which usually holds a clue to citizenship, but detected an African lilt to his speech), said, "I would like to call in."

"Why don't you?" I replied

"Because," he said, "I'm afraid they will start investigating me."

I couldn't believe it. I asked him how he thought they could do that if they didn't even know who he was, and he said something about tracing his cell phone. And I thought, what a crazy pass we've come to when a cab driver in New York City, or anywhere in the United States is afraid to call a radio show because he believes that our government might trace his phone, and open a file on him. Or worse.

And then I said, "You call in anyway. The last time I looked around, we still had a democracy, and the right to free speech and our opinions. If you stay silent, then you will not be heard, and you will not be counted. Have courage, or get some quick." I don’t know if the driver ever took my advice. He did smile at me, but his expression led me to believe he was only half-convinced by what I told him.

A month later, I was traveling to Chicago on business. I caught a taxi into the city. The cabdriver was Nigerian. He told me this before I could ask. He also told me he had a master’s degree in computer engineering and worked part-time building computers when he was not driving a cab. he said he loved Nigeria but that it had bad leadership, which had led the country astray. We got caught in a traffic jam, and during the time it took us to get from the airport to my hotel, he told me how funny Americans can be with their misconceptions of Africa. In all seriousness a passenger once asked Kofi—that was his name—if it was difficult to live in a hut. He responded by saying, quite solemnly, that his family actually lived in trees—that his mother had one tree, his father had another tree, and when Kofi wanted to visit one or the other, he jumped from tree to tree. The man believed him for a minute. In fact, Kofi is from Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, a city as congested and modern as any in the United States. Kofi told me that other passengers had asked him why he was in the United States. His answer? “I came to America to enjoy the fruits of the labor of my ancestors.”

Wow!

Kofi came to mind a couple of weeks ago when I was on the campus of my alma mater, Rutgers University. Our magazine put together a moving museum, an 18-wheeler outfitted to promote the magazine, but also, simply put, to bring black history to the people. A young black man entered the trailer and was watching clips that we were showing from African-American Lives Pt. 2, the series created by Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in which he traces the ancestry of prominent black folks. I watched part of it with him and we began to chat. He told me he was first generation African from Ghana, but had become a United States citizen. He had been thinking a lot about the Africans who were brought here as slaves so long ago. It hadn’t occurred to him until recently that he might be related to people who long ago became African-Americans. It was quite possible, and with more and more advanced DNA tests, even possible to prove. He liked the idea, and so did I.

Another young man from Ghana, who became an American citizen, Derrick Ashong, grabbed the attention of many of us when he eloquently spoke about his reasons for supporting Barack Obama. The overwhelming response prompted him to make a second video, which you can watch here:



He came to the United States when he was a child, and when his family was about to go back, there was a coup. So he grew up in the Middle East in Qatar, which he points out is not a democracy. The first time he ever got to cast a vote in any election was in 2000, and the fact that he is free to vote in a democratic election is a blessing that he does not take for granted. And something, I add we should not take lightly. Ever.

Freedom and peace and the horror that comes when both are taken away was not more hauntingly brought home to me than when I heard the story of Imaculeé Ilibagiza, a Tutsi tribeswoman and survivor of the 1994 Rwandan massacre. One day she was a happy engineering student, the next Hutu tribesmen, many of whom had been friends, classmates, neighbors, where slaughtering Tutsis, including her family and friends. The reasons for the genocide go deep, as many who are reading this must already know. I’m ashamed to say I dimly remember news reports while it was happening, but didn’t really pay attention until Don Cheadle starred in Hotel Rwanda, and the brilliant Raoul Peck (whose films on the assassination of one of Africa’s greatest leaders, the first prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, should be standard for world history curriculum) made Sometimes in April a decade after it happened. Ilibagiza, along with several other Tutsi women, were given refuge in a tiny bathroom in the home of a local Hutu pastor’s house. To hear her speak, you would never know that when she came out of that room 91 days later, her entire family had been slaughtered, as well as many of her childhood friends. The woman has reached a place that would be impossible for many—a place of complete forgiveness. How she came to that place is told beautifully in her book Left to Tell.

A few years ago I was visiting my mother for the weekend. On Saturday nights, we turn to Public Television, which almost never disappoints. That Saturday, there was a mini marathon of films by the late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembené (Black Girl, Moulaadeé, Xala, and more). When we tuned in, his 2000 film Faat Kine was just beginning. What a revelation! The title was the name of the main character, a successful businesswoman who owns a gas station in Dakar. The plot is really a day in the life of Faat Kine, but it is punctuated with flashbacks of her struggle to become successful in a patriarchal society that has not always been sympathetic to women, to put it mildly. The wonderful shots of Dakar, another cosmopolitan African city in its exteriors and interiors, brought balance to my own Americanized vision of countries in Africa. But what I loved the most is the humor with which Sembené infused the film, his tribute, as he says, to “the everyday heroism of the African woman.” It is a treat for me to watch a black woman, who knows her mind, making her way through her life as if she were queen of the universe. Here’s a good review, and here's to the Imaculeé's and the Faat Kine's of the world!