Africa: A Home I Can Be Proud Of

I’m writing this as I’m reclined on a lounge chair, covered with a thick, brown beach towel, in front of a glistening, aquamarine pool. The server, dressed in a crisp button down shirt and black slacks has just bought me a large sparking water with a side of sliced lime. A pop song featuring some woman with a voice too squeaky for my liking is playing in the background. A bald man, the color of oak tree bark has steadily and repeatedly been swimming his way from one end of the pool to another, like a slow moving metronome. And a group of White 20-somethings alternate between being on their phones and gabbing. It’s my first day in Accra, Ghana and I am experiencing the same feelings I have felt every time I am blessed enough to visit one of the countries in Africa.

I feel so blessed to be here. I am struck that it’s actually a remarkable feat that I am here: not because of the cost or the roughly 24 hours of travel, but because America taught me and every American that Africa is not a desirable place. It is miraculous that Black Americans are able to love ourselves since we have always been told that we are from nothing. That our “nothing-selves” would want to visit that allegedly “nothing-place” from which we originate is both revolutionary and astounding. It is a testament to who we are.

Think about it: what was your first introduction to Africa? (And I’m intentionally saying “Africa” because that is the first and consistent way that we are taught to think about our home continent — as a monolithic entity, not the rich tapestry of 54 distinct countries). I cringe every time someone tells me that they are going to Paris (a city), Italy (a country) and then to Africa (a continent).

I remember being up late when I was young and there were only 5 television stations watching Sally Struthers, the blond, White actress from the popular show, All In the Family, pleading to television viewers to donate just a few cents a month to help feed the emaciated, Kenyan kids with their bellies bloated, tan dirt caked on their bodies, empty eyes, and flies landing on them as if they were cow dung, who surrounded her. She was clean, well-dressed and perfect. They were Black, dirty, and destitute — so weak that they wouldn’t even swat the flies away. I was from there. They were my ancestors. I didn’t want to be that.

The poverty found in the land from which I originated was further emphasized at least once a week when I would sit at the table and refuse to eat all of my dinner. “There are kids starving in Africa,” my mother or father would admonish me.

Africa — the place that was captured in colorful pictures in National Geographic and Life magazines, with shirtless women, breasts shamelessly sagging on their bellies, with rings stacked around their necks to lengthen them and disks put into their ears in mouths. I was from them? These people were so native, so backwards, so unfamiliar, so odd.

I understood that it was a threat when White peers would tell us Black kids to go back to Africa. I was less than them. They were from grand places with royalty and princesses (I wanted to be a princess, after all). Africa was even small on the map (it’s been just in this decade that it was revealed that the size of Africa was minimized on all U.S. school maps and books). Their people were civilized — dressed like us and lived like us. We, the Black kids, were from some god-forsaken hell — Africa. Who would want to go back there: a dirty, miserably hot land of dust and gloom?

How could I possibly be as good as them? I came from a lesser world. Based on what I learned in school, I almost wondered if slavery was a small price to pay for the opportunity to leave Africa and live in America. Slavery raped us of a certain grounding that ancestry, home, family, and history brings. Then it killed a part of our esteem when all they told us about where we were from was that it was dismal. How can I be a flower, if my seed is that of a weed?

I don’t think I really believed I could bloom until I went to Africa myself. My eyes revealed all the lies I had been taught. Is there poverty in Africa? Yes, extreme poverty — just as I have witnessed in every place I’ve ever visited (in Europe and Asia), including many parts of the United States. There is also such extreme beauty, thriving cities, amazing food, hip restaurants, gorgeous sprawling houses, incredible shopping, and such beautiful people. More importantly, it’s home –a home that I am so proud of.