Keith B. Richburg's Out of America

...After some hesitation, he accepted, having been assured by various "well-meaning academics and Africa specialists" that with the end of the cold war and the triumph of freemarket ideology the continent stood on the verge of an economic and political renaissance...

...Aside from one or two undergraduate courses, Richburg gave Africa a wide berth...

...Three decades later, there is more than a hint of that sentiment in Richburg's portrayal of Africa...

...When asked by Richburg about the suppression of democracy and human rights in countries like Nigeria, 136 DISSENT / Winter 1998 delegates became "defensive, nervous and inarticulate...

...The idea that Africa's tropical climate represented a "poisoned gift" was a standard nineteenth-century trope...

...No, please, press on . . . I want you to walk with me, hold my hand as we step over the rotting corpses . . ." The echo of Hemingway's classic story "A Natural History of the Dead" is unmistakable...

...The system of polygamy, combined with a "free-and-easy attitude toward sex"— promiscuity, he tells us, is "almost a way of life" in Africa—induces Africans to produce children without considering whether they can "afford" them...

...He did not have "a particularly 'black' childhood," he writes, "just a childhood, an average American childhood...

...The son of a union official, he grew up in an integrated neighborhood of Detroit...

...The irony, of course, is that the book is—or purports to be—not about America at all, but about Africa...

...And no African blood, nowhere...

...The Kru man knew this, so they both laughed loudly, for George's face was as African as Africa...

...The voyage left an enduring imprint on Hughes's poetry, but at the cost of certain romantic preconceptions...

...Just twenty-one years old, Hughes had produced the epochal "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" two years before, in which he traced a continuous river of black history from the Nile and the Congo to the "muddy bosom" of the Mississippi...

...He stands alongside the Kigera River in Tanzania, watching bodies float down from the killing fields of Rwanda...

...What such a claim overlooks is the fact that his analysis, however anathema to African-American leaders and some white liberals, is coin of the realm to the vast majority of white Americans, who are only too ready to believe that Africa, like America's urban ghettoes, is a lost cause, a write-off, a black hole...

...The fact that Richburg carries a black skin in no way inoculates him from this influence...

...Expatiating on the shared predicament of black people across the globe, he was dismayed to discover that his auditors considered him "a white man...

...Hundreds have published their observations and reflections, producing a virtual sub-genre of that most self-reflective of literary forms, the African traveler's account...

...In recent years, Goree has become a pilgrimage site for diaspora blacks, a religious shrine, eliciting profound reflection and, often, convulsive emotion...

...Since the early years of the nineteenth century, when the first shiploads of African-American emigrants disembarked in what is today Sierra Leone, thousands of black Americans have traveled back to Africa, retracing the passage of millions of African captives...

...Is there some flaw in the African culture...

...intervention in Somalia reads like an epitaph for Great Society liberalism: "No one ever calculated what you do next if the people you come to help have no interest in being saved...

...There is a man of my color...

...Or they come from the West Indies, as clerks and administrators in the colonial governments, to help carry out the white man's laws...

...As a student at a suburban private school, where his parents enrolled him after the riot, he had mostly white friends, most of whom had only the "vaguest sense" where he lived...

...THE CLIMAX of the book comes at Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal, one of the main transit points for Africans bound for New World slavery...

...How ought nations like the United States respond...

...After three years on the continent, Richburg is unable to answer his own questions or, more important, to see why they are badly framed...

...He experiences "revulsion at the horrendous crime of slavery"—he compares the site to Auschwitz—but "little personal connection or pain...

...I want you to see this," he told him...

...Imagine the outcry, Richburg says, if a white southern governor in 1993 had issued such a statement about apartheid South Africa...

...WHAT MAKES all this particularly frustrating is the fact that Out of America, for all its egregious flaws, poses many of the central questions of our age...

...The complexity of African-American life is captured in the diversity of those who have made the journey: sailors, missionaries, fortune hunters, artists, teachers, and, more recently, diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, journalists, and tourists...

...Richburg arrives "hoping to feel that same kind of spiritual connection," but none comes...

...The Rwandan genocide, the implosions of Zaire, Liberia, and Somalia, do represent fundamental challenges to the moral and political imagination of the international community, however misleading it may be to ascribe some essentially African character to the car138 DISSENT / Winter 1998 nage...

...Do you want to put this book down now...

...By the end of the book he is unable to bring himself even to type the phrase "African American...

...He remembers the riot because his father took him to see the flames...

...If all this sounds familiar, it should, for it is precisely the same battery of charges—indiscipline, promiscuity, lack of initiative and forethought —that is adduced to explain the poverty and "pathology" of America's black ghettoes...

...to a refugee camp in eastern Zaire, where the bodies of victims of a cholera epidemic are stacked like cordwood...

...Most of the bodies are naked...

...Columnists and commentators have lashed out at Richburg, branding him a lackey, a self-hater (equating disdain for Africa with "self-hatred" is a venerable tradition in black nationalist thought), a brainwashed black man...

...What bubbles up instead, "so unspeakable, so unthinkable" that he recoils from it, is thankfulness—thankfulness to the "ancestor who made it out," thankfulness that he is an American and not one of the "nameless, faceless, anonymous bodies" cascading over the falls in Tanzania...

...He suggests some of the ways in which foreign correspondents—a thoroughly sodden and cynical lot in his portrayal—shape a collective "story" about the continent, a story that inevitably highlights certain aspects of life DISSENT / Winter 1998 137 (killing and dying, preeminently) while excluding others...

...If recent studies of travel writing have taught us anything, it is that "seeing" is not so simple a thing, that even "open-minded" travelers, as Richburg claims to be, view the world through specific cultural and historical lenses...

...Few seem to realize that such attacks only lend credence to Richburg's pose as courageous dissident...

...He became a master of "not taking sides," insisting, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that an individual should be judged not by the "color of his skin" but by "the content of his character...

...So bleak is the prospect that Richburg finds himself feeling unexpected empathy for the illusory world of white South Africans: "It's an illusion because no matter how 'Westernized' their lives seem, they live in Africa, and I know what darkness lurks out there, beyond the fence, beyond the borders, further north, in the `real Africa.' So powerful is this inherited discourse that it seems to blind Richburg to the complexities of his own account—complexities that suggest a far more nuanced picture of African life and character than the book as a whole allows...

...In the months since its publication, Out of America has become a touchstone in America's ongoing race wars, joining the ranks of such books as Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character and Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's notorious The Bell Curve...

...We cannot and should not force them to undergo a metamorphosis in seconds," Virginia governor Douglas Wilder explained...

...Hughes's voyage, indeed his entire career, attests to Africa's pervasiveness in the intellectual and imaginative life of African Americans...

...Richburg anticipates objections to his account, and he adopts the standard defense of reporters and travel writers: "I've been there . . . I've seen it...

...He signed on to the crew of a tramp steamer and set sail for the Windward Coast, jettisoning all his books (except for a cherished copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass) in a final dockside ceremony...

...Assailing what he calls the myth of "Mother Africa," Richburg sketches a landscape of misery and senseless slaughter, full of people who "look like me," yet whose behavior and wretchedness he finds unfathomable...

...he asks...

...Now he resolved to trace that river to its source...

...But I am not white," I said...

...Some are disemboweled or missing limbs...

...Hughes was neither the first nor the last African-American to learn these lessons...

...This "comedy of misrecognition"—the phrase is critic Ken Warren's—contains a host of lessons...

...This unpromising culture has been further compromised, he writes, by decades on the "aid dollar dole," courtesy of the continent's ostensible "friends" in the West...

...At the University of Michigan, he resisted what he calls the "voluntary resegregation" of black students or, more prosaically, "the dining hall test...

...Tribalism" seethes through Africa, and "the potential for a violent implosion is never far from the surface...

...A few reviewers have come to the book's defense, commending Richburg for speaking unpopular truths, including the truth of AfricanAmericans' essential Americanness...

...In rejecting structural explanations for Africa's plight as "lies" and "excuses" for Africans' own deficiencies, in alleging a "conspiracy of silence" to hide the sordid truth, Richburg arrogates to himself the mantle of courageous iconoclast, just as conservative writers such as Thomas Sowell and Charles Murray have done on the subject of America's so-called ghetto "underclass...

...Richburg declares his disillusionment in the book's opening sentences...

...This assessment, he learned, had only partly to do with his straight hair and copper skin...

...Richburg's summation of the abortive U.N...

...and, as with Hemingway, the implication is that one is being shown unalloyed facts, and that it would be somehow cowardly to demur...

...Is there something in the nature of Africans that makes them more prone to corruption...

...Appearing today, at a time when millions of black Americans despair of the promise of America and look to Africa for identity and succor, the book has ignited a firestorm...

...But to tell the truth, George shaved a part in his hair every other week, since the comb wouldn't work...

...He acknowledges that the appearance of "anarchy" and "chaos" in Africa often reflects an outsider's failure to grasp "the norms and rules and codes of conduct" in unfamiliar situations...

...Rather than attack the substantive flaws of the book—its utter partiality, its relentless self-absorption, the virtual exclusion of African voices—critics have trained their sights on Richburg himself, denouncing him as a race traitor, even as an apologist for slavery...

...He was six when the Civil Rights Act erased the last vestiges of de jure segregation...

...And he pointed to George, the pantryman, who protested loudly...

...Along the way we meet a rogues' gallery of "buffoons and misfits," perhaps best symbolized by Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, who accumulated a personal fortune of billions of dollars while presiding over his resource-rich country's dissolution...

...And the Kru man's matter-of-fact explanation provides the most important lesson of all: that Africans have ideas and assumptions of their own, which often have little to do with the preconceptions of Western visitors, black or white...

...He concedes Africa's dizzying geographical, cultural and linguistic diversity, though it rarely inhibits him from offering sweeping generalizations...

...Here," he said, "on the West Coast, there are not many colored people—people of mixed blood—and those foreign colored men who are here come mostly as missionaries, to teach us something, since they 134 DISSENT / Winter 1998 think we know nothing...

...He was nine during the cataclysmic 1967 Detroit riot, which spurred white flight from the central city and transDISSENT / Winter 1998 • 135 formed his childhood neighborhood...

...He describes with telling effect a 1993 black "summit" in Libreville, Gabon, where a bevy of black American leaders heaped praise on some of Africa's most notorious military dictators...

...He alludes to the "heroism, honor and dignity" of "ordinary, anonymous people," and to the "endless little acts of kindness" he encountered everywhere he traveled in Africa...

...From that grisly beginning, we follow Richburg across the continent, leapfrogging from crisis to crisis: to Somalia, graveyard of George Bush's "New World Order...

...KEITH 13...

...This is especially the case when confronting a place as drenched in myth and stereotype as Africa, which has always figured in the Western imagination as a kind of netherworld, dark, stagnant, and irrational...

...Is this depressing you...

...in fact, the majority of the continent is not arable...

...Again and again, he resorts to direct address, usually at the grimmest moments in his account...

...I can part my hair," said George, "and it ain't nappy...

...And with each new horror comes a whisper: There but for the grace of God go I. \--- EEDLESS TO say, Richburg has little patience with the current African vogue...

...In his autobiography, The Big Sea, he recalled one of his first encounters with Africans...

...Nigeria's Ibrahim Babangida, who a few months later would annul the results of a national election, sending his country into a spiral of violence and repression, was extolled by Jesse Jackson as "one of the great leader-servants of the modern world...

...Again and again, Richburg asks himself: How can such things—how can such people—exist in the twentieth century...

...You are not black either," the Kru man said simply...

...The continent is a "jungle," a "quagmire," a "breeding ground for myriad viruses, germs, plagues, parasites, bacteria and infections that most people in the West probably never knew existed...

...Africans, he suggests, lack "discipline," a product, perhaps, of having evolved in a bounteous environment...

...And he is frankly contemptuous of the "self-proclaimed black spokesmen" who come to Africa and pronounce on its problems from the vantage of presidential receptions and "five star hotels...

...Whence comes this "maddening propensity to accept all kinds of suffering while waiting for some outside deliverance...

...The problem is exacerbated, again in both cases, by the "hypocrisy" and "double standards" of "so-called black leaders" and their white liberal fellow travelers, who refuse to place the onus of responsibility where it belongs: on Africans and African-Americans themselves...

...The response of the book's myriad critics has been scarcely more edifying...

...Richburg times the flow: one every minute or two, sometimes two or three at a time, a tiny trickle from an incomprehensible slaughter...

...George's anxious disavowal reminds us that, historically, the majority of black Americans have not shared the poet's pan-African convictions...

...Seen in this light, the controversy ignited by the book assumes a dismally familiar shape...

...in black American life, with Afrocentrism, Kwanzaa, kente cloth, and all the people who "hanker after Mother Africa, as if Africa is the answer to all the problems they face at home in America...

...He is working on a book on AfricanAmerican travel accounts of Africa...

...On the contrary, there are passages in Out of America worthy of even the most lurid nineteenthcentury "Dark Continent" account...

...Yet ultimately the force of such insights and qualifications is swallowed up in the author's "rage" and "overarching despair...

...So the Africans call them all white men...

...Many are bound hand and foot...

...Alas, neither Richburg nor his critics seem to have much to offer on these vital questions...

...In what ways are we in the West responsible—in both senses of the term—for Africans' plight...

...Bloated and discolored, they tumble over a waterfall, catching in the crags...

...Indeed, the very concept of "the West" crystallized out of encounters with primitive "Others," who purportedly embodied all the dark qualities that "enlightened" Westerners did not...

...JAMES T. CAMPBELL is the author of Songs of Zion: The African-Methodist Episcopal Church in America...

...He comes away with a lesson, which becomes one of his book's motifs: "This is Africa, and in Africa you don't count the bodies...

...One is also struck by the way in which Africa remains, more than 180 years after the end of the transatlantic slave trade and more than forty years after the onset of decolonization, a specter in the Western imagination, less a place in its own right than a screen onto which all of us, black and white, friend and foe, project our own dreams and discontents...

...The limits of Richburg's vision come most sharply into focus when he asks why Africa is in the shape it is...

...In an intellectual climate attuned to difference and to the demands of cultural relativism, what is the standing of erstwhile "universal" values, such as equality, democracy, and human rights...

...Based on Richburg's three years as African bureau chief of the Washington Post, Out of America is, like Hughes's The Big Sea, a tale of disillusionment, but one rendered not in wistful irony but in an outpouring of rage and horror...

...I'm from Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A...

...Coming of age in the wake of the civil rights movement, Richburg experienced the blessings and unexpected burdens of racial integration...

...Our job is not to interfere...

...It is a compelling technique, but does it exonerate the text of charges of bias and partiality...

...By his own account, Richburg makes an unlikely pilgrim...

...I want you to see what black people are doing to their own neighborhood...

...to Liberia, where marijuanasmoking soldiers, some just ten or eleven years old, wield AK-47s and "don women's wigs, pantyhouse, even Donald Duck Halloween masks before committing some of the world's most unspeakable atrocities...

...The best he can offer is a warmed-over version of "culture of poverty" theory...

...Fewer still stop to wonder what it says about American society that one black man's repudiation of Africa seems so profoundly threatening to so many...

...RICHBURG'S Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa represents the latest contribution to this tradition...

...You black," said the Kru man...

...In both cases, you're left with black people wallowing in a safety net of dependency...

...For the most part, the linkage seems to be unconscious, but Richburg occasionally makes it explicit, arguing, for example, that African leaders have come to view foreign aid "the same way many American blacks see government assistance programs as a kind of entitlement of birth...

...When his editors offered him the Africa post— assuming, incorrectly in the event, that a black reporter would have an easier time reporting from Africa—he felt "dread," dimly aware that the assignment might at last "force me to choose which side of the dining hall I would sit on...

...One of the Kru men from Liberia, working on our ship, who had seen many American Negroes, of various shades and colors, and knew much of America, explained to me...

...he muses...

...Richburg's description of his own phobia about AIDS is reminiscent of colonial representations of Africa as "the white man's graveyard...

...He continued to steer to that lodestar during his years on the Post's city desk, angrily rejecting suggestions that he should eschew criticism of local black officials in the interests of his "race...

...Don't point at me," George said...

...Watching this sorry "debate" unfold, one is struck by many things: by the contemporary tendency to collapse all political issues into questions of personal identity, by the temptations of posturing and preaching to the choir, by the yawning racial chasm that continues to cleave American society...

...Club-wielding Hutu militiamen are not "fully evolved human beings" but "cavemen," living in a "sick version" of Fred Flintstone's Bedrock...

...Under any circumstances, such an account would stir controversy...