Gurda: In Mother Africa, Lessons For All Her Children

Original Story Published by: John Gurda for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Welcome home,” reads a sign in the Nairobi airport. It stands next to a glass case that contains a replica of an early hominid skeleton, reminding travelers that some of the earliest known fossils of our species were found in East Africa. It was from an African cradle that our ancestors spread across the globe, eventually reaching Milwaukee.

I was paying a return visit of sorts 50,000 years and a few evolutionary steps later. The trip, I confess, was not my idea. A journey to Africa had been on my wife’s bucket list since long before she knew there were buckets, and I agreed to go only after years of passive resistance. Africa, in my mind, was synonymous with desperate poverty, political chaos, and random violence — not to mention malaria and yellow fever.

Our 40th wedding anniversary seemed like a good time to give Sonja her wish. The result was nearly a month in Kenya and Tanzania, most of it spent on a small-group tour with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT). We found some truth in the stereotypes but by no means the whole truth. Africa, it turned out, has plenty to teach all her children, including those of us with pale skin and blue eyes.

There was, first of all, the novel experience of being a minuscule minority in a black society. We began the trip with a day on our own in Nairobi, a traffic-choked city of three million in southern Kenya. In an extended walk around the capital’s teeming center, we saw perhaps four other white faces in a sea of humanity that ranged from well-tailored businessmen boarding limousines to homeless gents sleeping in Uhuru Park. We were the ones visibly outside the mainstream — always an instructive experience.

But appearances, we learned, are deceptive. Kenya has 43 distinct tribes and Tanzania 120, many of them easily identifiable — to locals, at least — by nuances of skin tone, body type, dialect, dress and surname.

In East Africa, a Somali is as different from a Maasai as a Norwegian is from a Sicilian in America. Tribalism is a potent factor in national politics, a rough predictor of economic status and, not least of all, a tourist attraction. In some intriguing ways, the entire continent is what North America might look like today if the Europeans had all gone home and left the natives to govern themselves.

Because of OAT’s emphasis on indigenous cultures, we spent significant time in rural villages dominated by individual tribes — Kikuyu, Datoga, Hadzabe, Maasai — each with its own language, traditions, lifestyle and backstory, often traceable to the distant past. Vexing questions of identity and how to express it did not seem to exist. The villagers were who they always had been, easy in their skins, constantly adjusting to the world around them but anchored to ancient ways of life.

It was that cultural self-confidence, observed time after time, that made my heart ache for today’s African Americans. They have been severed, root and stock, from traditions that still thrive in Africa. In all but the rarest cases, what they can know of their story begins where the formative part ends, in slave ships.

My own ancestors endured brutal poverty as peasants in Poland and Norway. Moving to America was not so much an informed choice as an act of desperation. But African Americans faced exponentially harder trials. My ancestors may have crossed the ocean in steerage, but theirs came in chains.

The difference is most fundamentally expressed in story. Whatever hardships they weathered, my ancestors left their names for me to find and their villages for me to explore; the narrative is continuous. Many African Americans have obviously found solid identities here, but their path to the deep past, to the world of their ancestors, is effectively blocked. Small wonder that they have embraced tribal traditions, from hair-braiding to bold fabrics, with such eagerness, or that African Americans who visit the continent are frequently reduced to tears of anguish and joy.