Keith B. Richburg's powerful book, Out of America, tells the moving story of a black American man who learned the hard way that he prefers to define himself as an American, a believer in those ideals enumerated above, than to define himself by his race. This realization was driven home during Mr. Richburg's event-filled and depressing tour of duty as the Africa correspondent for The Washington Post. During his tenure there he witnessed : the descent of Somalia into warlordism; the mass butchery of Tutsis in Rwanda by rival Hutus; the almost ludicrous murder rampages of bewigged young men in Liberia; the pandemic of AIDs across the continent; the rampant crime and violence in even the crown jewel of black Africa, South Africa; he saw all this and more, almost none of it edifying or giving any reason to hope for a brighter future. One theme ran through all these awful episodes; in every case the violence was a function of people defining themselves ethnically.
Africa is unfortunately not the product of a set of ideals. No country in Africa is really dedicated to the realization of a set of ideals. In Africa, we see writ large and bloody the bitter human harvest of tribalism. Let men define themselves by their tribe and here is what follows :
[T]here I was, drenched with sweat under the blistering sun, standing at the Rusumo Falls bridge, watching the bodies float past me. Sometimes they came one by one. Sometimes two or three together. They were bloated now, horribly discoloured. Most were naked, or stripped down to their underpants. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together. Some were clearly missing some limbs. And as they went over the falls, a few got stuck together on a little crag, and stayed there flapping against the current, as though they were trying to break free. I couldn't take my eyes off one of them, the body of a little baby.
We timed them: a body or two every minute. And the Tanzanian border guards told us it had been like that for a couple of days now. These were the victims of the ethnic genocide going on across the border in Rwanda. The killers were working too fast to allow for proper burials. It was easier to dump the corpses into the Kagera River, to let them float downstream into Tanzania, eventually into Lake Victoria, out of sight, and I suppose out of mind. Or maybe there was some mythic proportion to it as well. These victims were from the Tutsi tribe, descendants, they say, of the Nile, and more resembling the Nilotic peoples of North Africa with their narrower noses, more angular features. The Hutu, the ones conducting this final solution, were Bantu people, shorter, darker, and tired of being lorded over by the Tutsi. Maybe tossing the bodies into the river was the Hutus' way of sending them back to the Nile.
or this :
What I...noticed were the weapons--crude farming tools, really. Machetes and long panga knives, more typically used for clearing brush and chopping firewood than for severing human limbs. There were also clubs. Big, flat wooden clubs, smaller at the handle end and rounded at the top. They reminded me of the all purpose clubs Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble used to carry in the old TV cartoon. But with one small difference: To make the clubs more deadly on impact, the Hutu militiamen drove long nails into the end. That's what Rwanda has become, I thought. The country has reverted to prehistoric times, to a kind of sick version of Bedrock. And could these be fully evolved humans carrying clubs and machetes and panga knives and smashing in their neighbors' skulls and chopping off their limbs, and piling up the legs in one pile, and the arms in another, and lumping the bodies all together and sometimes forcing new victims to sit atop the heap while they clubbed them to death too? No, I realized, fully evolved human beings in the twentieth century don't do things like that. Not for any reason, not tribe, not religion, not territory. These must be cavemen.
And so, after three years of experiencing the continuing horror that is post-Colonial Africa, of seeing the dead, being threatened himself, having friends murdered, and seeing black Congressmen and Civil Rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Benjamin Chavis praise the African national leaders who condone this kind of violence against other Africans, who cling to power by any means necessary, who line their own pockets and those of their cronies while their people live in squalor, Mr. Richburg came to this jarring realization :
Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.
Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean. Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.
And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist - a mere spectator - watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that's when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them -or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.
[...]
Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.
