Anonymous (86.11.36.x) 18 Aug 2008 02:35
At first I bridled at this idea, that
"You cannot, except at a high cost, make permanent friends with Africans in Africa. The cost is a heavy dependency that expresses itself in every phone call, every email. The prisoner cannot treat a free person as an equal. As a foreigner you have the capacity to free your African friends. That is, to organize visas for them, invitations, sponsorships, and eventually, permanent residence in Europe via marriage or subterfuge, followed by years or decades of support, encouragement, and help. Either you act, and that will change your life in ways you did not plan, or you do not act, and then your friendship is meaningless."
But in fact that is quite right, it is not far wrong. The African continent for those who cannot leave it has come to be experienced more and more as a form of detention camp, an open prison from which it is becoming almost impossible to escape. This is an indictment of our global system of gulags and occupied spaces stamped 'it's mine/ours/not yours'. Apartheid is truly global. This is what globalization meant!
I prefer it when you write about Africa. Some of the short stories are really heavy, heavy. God! This was enjoyable, somehow, because you clearly enjoyed speaking from a position of security! Also admiringly of those whose lives are unfree… making a virtue of necessity is no virtue, if we consider…?! Thanks for this
Unexpectedly, Africans do not for the most part either feel sorry for themselves, or angry at foreigners. In my experience they have an extraordinary capacity for resistance, for positiveness, for finding pleasure and joy even in the most difficult of circumstances.
It is this capacity which the astute visitor can try to learn, and perhaps take back home.
