into the breaking

It's easy for me to over-romanticize Africa, even the difficulties, because I tend toward that inherently; but also because there is, genuinely, so much scope for the imagination here. It is what I hold dear about it even when I am often lonely or tired or frustrated. Like today.

From Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There (A.A. Gill):

This is a true story. The man who picks up the towels and mops the floors in the gents' changing-room of my gym is an African - a diligent, friendly man. An American banker came in the other day with his bag of air-soled good intentions to work off a little personal surplus, and while he changed he engaged the janitor with that easy chat which seems to come with an American accent. 'So, you're from Africa, an African. Well, there's a lot about Africa in the news at the moment. It's complicated, isn't it?' He said all this in capital letters with a slow patronage. 'You must be really happy to be out of it. You know, to be here.' The African's eyes flicked round the changing-room. He smiled. 'Which country you from?'

'Liberia.'

'Oh, that was a colony, right? Whose? Which country ruled it?'

The African waited a beat before replying: 'America.' The American's face was a picture, the African's a carving. 'Really? The United States of America? You're kidding me.' The janitor went on folding towels. The banker went to jog off his newly acquired colonial guilt.

Africa is not what most of us think. To the northern world it's still a dark continent as impenetrable as it was 200 years ago. Full of unspeakable horror and unfathomable fear. The news reports, those two-minute trailers, drip blood and bathos. The myths and misconceptions about Africa may have changed emphasis over the years, but the sense of its otherness hasn't. The sotto voce developed consensus is that Africa's woes and suffering are of a separate order from those of the rest of the world. Africans have buckets of sympathy but thimbles of empathy. Because the lion's share of starvation, disease, corruption, ignorance, hardship, premature mortality and sheer heartbreaking loss rains of Africa, then by implication, and because they bear the unbearable, Africans can't be like the rest of us. Their suffering must be muscled by familiarity, their feelings deadened by repetition. In the arguments about the rights and wrongs of debt aid, trade, political reform and charity, Africans slip through the cracks between good intentions. They become merely ciphers, slices of pie chart and exclamations in an argument that turns out, surprise surprise, as ever, to be about us, our money and our conscience, our fine words.

One of the world's great experiences for an affluent westerner is to wake up in an African village - the sinuous smell of wood smoke, fat, sweat and dust, the crowing of cockerels in the chilly silver dawn, the long shadows of thorn trees, the twittering of weaver birds, the stretching dogs, the first buckets of water pulled from a wheezing pump, blowing on charcoal fires and, as the air warms, fat babies washed in enamel basins, men shaving in little mirrors, the scratching and nose-blowing, the hawking and pissing, toothbrushing and greeting, the treble rackets of tinny radios, the winding and wrapping of babies to backs and scarves round heads, a handful of mealie meal, a mango. A bicycle loaded with tools or onions, or a bed, or a grandmother, or a flock of hens that wiggles down the dusty red road to meet the day. Nowhere I've ever been starts each morning with such optimism as Africa.

So here, to set beside the catalogue of competing woes and misdemeanors for which Africa is pitied and accused, are a few other truths. Most Africans are not dying of AIDS or starvation, don't want to kill their neighbors, neither are they venal or corrupt. Most Africans work hard, are multilingual, are spiritual, kind, and love a joke with a passion, even a bad joke. Most are poor only in cash. Most seem to be very happy most of the time. Happier about less than we are. In fact, I don't know anywhere where you will hear so much laughter spread so thickly, and so few tears. You rarely hear African babies cry. Experts study African babies to discover the secret of their frankly perverse contentment. Perhaps they could sell a book about it to guilty, fretful western mothers. And most Africans have a huge respect for old people. Of course, you meet age halfway in Africa, but when you get there you're a person to be revered, because though most Africans have so little stuff, they have each other. They have their families, their villages, their tribes, their religions. I've been to a lot of hospitals in Africa and I've yet to see a patient who had to eat hospital food. Everyone is looked after by family or neighbors. We think of Africa as the great wishing well of charity, but they are creditors when it comes to giving.

I don't want to claim that all the other stuff, the pitiful stuff, is exaggerated. It isn't, but what makes it worse is that it happens to be a continent of such ragged joy and simple brilliance. The quantity of the problems obscures the quality of the lives they fall upon. One of the great poverties of our lives is that so few of us go to visit Africa. The constant news commercials of misery and death elicit pity, not tourism, but you should go. It is the most astonishingly engaging and addicting place and it's less frightening than the south of France in August.

This is another true story. I was once in the Serengeti and I came across a minibus-load of Japanese tourists. They were wearing disposable paper anti-contamination suits with face masks and booties. They brought their own dried food and the water to cook it in. They stayed in the bus as it was driven past animals and they'd spent four days in Africa never having touched it, tasted it, smelt it or shaken its hand. The average Japanese girl born today can expect to live forty years longer than her sub-Saharan sister.

This is the one place where travellers come and actively avoid meeting the locals. An African market, an African street, is far more exciting than any pride of manky old lions. You should visit Africans at home for all the usual touristic and economic reasons, because its good for them and good for you, but you should also visit them because familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It is the antidote to contempt. Familiarity breeds greater familiarity. Africa and Africans deserve to be included not just in the big stuff of the world - trade, medicine, politics - but also in the small, intimate, one-to-one stuff. They've had a lot of sympathy. What they deserve, what we all need, is empathy.

My first trip to sub-Saharan Africa was to write about big-game hunting in the Transvaal. The Boer white hunter drove me in surly silence, bouncing and grinding through a land that looked like God's rubbish bin for six hours. Finally we stopped and I got out, throbbing and furious, and he looked over the scrub and said: 'Welcome home. This is where you come from.'

We should all go home more often. Africans aren't some other benighted, desensitized 'them' from the darkness. They're us. They're family.

I spent two years in graduate school learning, very well, how to deconstruct something until all there is left to look at is a cold diminutive pile of ashy cynicism. Insightfully ripping something apart is a useful skill but it can morph into a bad habit, an instinct, lightening-quick because it makes you feel sophisticated and smart - which is to say smarter (than those poor sods and their flabby thoughts). It's the crack cocaine of academia. And life, probably.

Like real drugs, you don't feel good afterward though. "This is your soul. This is your soul stuck on scorn. [sizzle of frying egg] Any questions?"

My final year in undergrad, I had an advisor I worshiped: she was young, an anthropologist, smart as a whip, a tinsy bit edgy but still respectful. She cared. (I told her in a Christmas card to her that I wanted to "sit at her feet".) Her office door showed the best perk of being a professor: it was a trove of papered fascination for passersby to read, taped from top to bottom with book excerpts and pictures and headlines ripped from journals. I remember in particular this funny Paula Poundstone quote:

"What moron said that knowledge is power? Knowledge is power only if it doesn't depress you so much that it leaves you in an immobile heap at the end of your bed."

I am almost 29, which was her age then. And in light of having more or less survived my 20s, I say: Hallelujah, I couldn't agree more. There are a lot of paths to choose. I did smug a few years back. It's not good. I'd rather choose this: to error on the side of exuberance over superiority. It feels good to really love something. Jumping in deep is what romance, hoop dreams and all the best radio songs are really about. And life, maybe.

The book excerpt above is what got me thinking about all of this. Mystery is, yet, as I like to say. I'm asking you to embrace it.

the Vida Manjate family: four generations