"There but for the grace of God...."
[Excerpt from Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (Basic Books)]
By Keith Richburg
It's a feeling that I was really unable to express out loud until the end,
as I was packing my bags to leave. It was a feeling that pained me to admit, a
sentiment that, when uttered aloud, might come across as callous,
self-obsessed, even racist.
And yet I know exactly this feeling that haunts me; I've just been too
embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I
know how: There but for the grace of God go I.
You see, I was seeing all of this horror a bit differently because of the
color of my skin. I am an American, but a black man, a descendant of slaves
brought from Africa. When I see these nameless, face-less, anonymous bodies
washing over a waterfall or piled up on the back of trucks, what I see most is
that they look like me.
Sometime, maybe four hundred or so 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 cargo hold of a ship for
the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World. . . . .
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 thirty-five 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. . .
. .
It might have been easier for me to just keep all of these emotions bottled
up inside. Maybe I should have written a standard book on Africa that would
have talked broadly about the politics, the possibilities, the prospects for
change.
But I'm tired of lying. And I'm tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and
the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people
who've never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid the
corpses. . . . .
Condemning slavery should not inhibit us from recognizing mankind's ability
to make something good arise often in the aftermath of the most horrible evil.
. . . . We are told by some of our supposedly enlightened, so-called black
leaders that white America owes us something because they brought our ancestors
over as slaves. And Africa--Mother Africa--is often held up as some kind of
black Valhalla, where the descendants of slaves would be welcomed back and
where black men and women can walk in true dignity.
Sorry, but I've been there. I've had an AK-47 rammed up my nose, I've talked
to machete-wielding Hutu militiamen with the blood of their latest victims
splattered across their T-shirts. I've seen a cholera epidemic in Zaire, a
famine in Somalia, a civil war in Liberia. I've seen cities bombed to near
rubble, and other cities reduced to rubble, because their leaders let them rot
and decay while they spirited away billions of dollars--yes, billions--into
overseas bank accounts. . . . .
So excuse me if I sound cynical, jaded. I'm beaten down, and I'll admit it.
And it's Africa that has made me this way. I feel for her suffering, I
empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever
I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another
refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestor got out,
because, now, I am not one of them. In short, Thank God I am an American.
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