South Sudan - The New Road

Six years ago, I left America to join the United States Peace Corps, an experience that would change everything in my life, taking me farther from home than I'd ever been before and further from anything I'd ever known.

I've been back several times since. I traveled West Africa, went back to Nigeria and my village, biked through South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.

It was always a lark though. Travel, never work, a distraction leading me on the path to now.

I'm leaving for South Sudan, where I'll be working with Nonviolent Peaceforce as an International Protection Officer. I'll be living and working in one of the camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), victims of what has become a full-fledged civil war only a few short years after the country gained its independence.

At the moment, upwards of 800,000 to one million people have fled their homes due to the fighting. With the rainy season coming on, the threat from malaria, dysentary, and other diseases is increased beyond belief for those crammed into overcrowded camps.

My job will be to work with vulnerable communities - conducting conflict assessments, context analyses, and liaising with local leaders and international organizations to hopefully help in some small way. I won't know more until I'm in country, and by that time, I will probably have limited to non-existent access to the Internet.

Obviously, I've had a lot on my mind. Things that I haven't even fully grappled with yet. If you have any questions, hopefully this entry can answer some of them. Apologies that this will seem very disconnected. It's hard for me to understand these things even as I write them.

1. Safety and Security

Large parts of South Sudan are currently active war zones. The rainy season will wash out roads and make heavy artillery movements difficult.

I'm not so much worried about my own safety, but that may only be because we tend to reduce risk until we face it. The most difficult aspect of preparing to leave this time around are the hidden anxieties at play among everyone I hold close and dear.

For lack of a better way to describe this, I am, essentially, going off to war, and while I won't be fighting, I will still be exposed to all the dangers that accompany conflict.

There's a scene in the HBO miniseries The Pacific, where one of the main characters is driven to the bus yard by his father. Instead of a father-son heart-to-heart, the real possibility that this could be the last they ever see of one another, the protagonist's father is complaining about the car, worrying over the engine and the money he's already paid to get it fixed.

Father and son leave on bad terms.

It's a symptom of masculinity, the inability to reach out and express concern, worry, and fear when men don't cry. The car is a distraction. It's displacement. It's a father who can't or won't express his fears and love for his son because he can't.

My last few days at home was a powder keg. My dad cursed out the neighbor over the phone. He called to apologize. I was aggravated over little decisions, like my mother's simple question over what I'd like for my last supper at home. Dad was overly concerned about how I was going to get to the airport.

They were the little microaggressions of fear and insecurity, anxiety and defensiveness that are layered beneath other arguments. And I don't know if there's any easy way to deal with them.

2. Home

When I left for Peace Corps, it was a two-year commitment. There was an understanding that it would end. There's no such guarantee this time around.

Over the last six years, I have spent several months at home between adventures and opportunities. I am so, so, so fortunate to have the ability to do that, even if (at times) it does drive me crazy to be stuck in rural Indiana.

I've been moving further and further away from the idea of America as my home over the last few years, and I think my parents have slowly, albeit painfully, realized that I am never coming back. I was gone nearly three years from January 2008 until September 2010. I was at home for several months before leaving again for Washington DC, Nigeria, London, Turkey, and South Africa. I came back for a few months before leaving again to pursue job opportunities in DC, and now I'm off for South Sudan.

I don't know where I can claim as my own anymore, and as much as I will be working with displaced people, I often feel displaced myself.

I always have a home to go back to. I know that, and I'm more fortunate than most in the world. But when you've carried your home on your back for years, the idea of permanence fades. I've begun to wonder if I'll ever find a home again, or if I've permanently ingrained mobility into my life.

It's scary to think of choosing a place when there's still so much to see.

3. Career

From everything I've read and everything I've done, this new job seems to be exactly what I want to do.

And that is the most frightening thing I've ever experienced.

What if I fail? What if I'm no good? What if everything that I've been moving towards for the past six years is broken and shattered? Where do I go then?

There's someone very special in my life who pushed me to follow my dreams. Really pushed me in ways that no one else ever has. I'm so grateful for her for that.

But following your dreams is terrifying. Because what if you succeed? The fear of failure can keep us in one place - a safe place, secure. It's easier to have dreams when you know you'll never accomplish them. But when someone presents the ladder to help you reach for the star, you begin to wonder - what happens after? Working for your dreams is work, and beyond that, there are new dreams, new things to work for.

Maybe there are some Buddhists present who can give me better answers. I should be content with what I have, right? Then why am I forever yearning?

4. Next Steps

There's so much I want to see and do in this world, and as I've gotten older, I realize that I have to make choices. Because it's nice to have all the possibilities open, but I can't sit and stare at possibilities. I have to make choices - choices that close some doors but open others. There's no looking back. As Robert Frost wrote:

Oh I kept the first [road] for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We often forget the last stanza. The narrator isn't saying the road less traveled was better, or that he was better for taking it. The road he took made all the difference, but still he tells it with a sigh, because he will never know truly know the difference.

Time is a river. We'll keep it in the flood. It carries us all the same.

Best to get a little bit of a swim in then, I guess.

Reading Theroux in Africa

I had gotten to lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

That’s the closing paragraph to the first chapter in Paul Theroux's bestseller Dark Star Safari. It’s a book that sees him cross the continent from Cairo to Cape Town offering a glimpse into “the real Africa” – the one that tourists on their game drives and in their massive overland trucks never get to see, perhaps the one they never want to see.

It’s a return of sorts. Theroux, turning sixty on the last leg of his journey, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi, one of the earliest in the history of the program, teaching English at a secondary school in the highlands.

The book was written in 2003, before journalists, economists, and foreign policy scholars began to note that this century would be belong to Africa. No one seems to have told Theroux this. He notes continually throughout the latter half of the book how nothing had changed in the forty-odd years since he’d last lived in Africa. If anything, the continent was worse off than it was at independence. Men sit idle. The infrastructure bequeathed to African countries by former colonial powers is cracked and broken. The weeds of time have overgrown the school where he used to teach, choking the promise of national sovereignty and smothering decades of potential growth.

The Washington Post called Theroux's book “Relentlessly engaging…Theroux demonstrates how a traveler’s finely wrought observations…sometimes offer the best political and social analysis.” In some places, this is true. Theroux is at his best when he allows other people to speak for him. In Ethiopia, he meets a former political prisoner named Nebiy Makonnen, who spent ten years in prison for being “on the wrong side” of politics. One day, a new prisoner managed to smuggle in a copy of Gone with the Wind. The men, all educated, took turns reading it, hiding it from the guards. Over the course of two years, Nebiy translated the book on foil from cigarette packages. He would finish a section and give the pieces of foil to prisoners upon their release. It took him two years after he got out to track down the three thousand pieces of foil that contained his translations. The Amharic version, the only one that’s ever been done, is his copy. It’s the one that everyone reads.

These are the tales that make his journey great. Unfortunately, Theroux doesn’t give over his book to others as often as one would like. Instead, he treats Africa much like Cecil Rhodes or Henry Morton Stanley might. Theroux is the conquering hero, whether he likes it or not, forging a path through the darkest heart of Africa. He is derisive not only to Western tourists, who he faults for treating the continent like Disneyland with animals but also to Africans themselves who he attacks for not taking part in their own development.

Symptomatic of Africans’ disconnect from their own lives is the abdication of government responsibility for education, healthcare, and poverty alleviation. Instead, Theroux notes with continual and repeated disdain the hordes of disaster tourists who have taken over whole countries. Aid workers, in their white four by fours emblazoned with various agency brandings, are, in his mind, no better than the tourists who only experience Africa from the safety of a vehicle. In this regard, he echoes a specific political gripe of economists such as Dambisa Moyo and Peter Bauer - that aid is the problem in Africa, that NGOs have developed their own parasitic relationship to African poverty. They’re forever chasing the next donor dollar, undermining host country institutions so that they may keep their place and profit from the aid-industrial complex.

There are arguments to be made for and against aid, its conditionality, and its effectiveness. However, Theroux never speaks with an aid professional. Or if he does, we never hear that voice, the words as they come out of their mouths. He never attempts to understand how specific projects impact communities or contribute to development/underdevelopment. Whereas the Washington Post praises his finely wrought observations, it is more accurate to say that he watches. He sees without seeing, without understanding. He is guilty of his own particular prejudice, which blinds him to the everyday politics of a particular place. He is subject; everyone else is object.

What is worrying is that for those who haven’t visited Africa, Theroux's voice is one of the most well-known of the continent’s travel literature. I wonder whether if I had read his work before ever visiting Africa if I would have been blinded to the complexity of the continent, if I would have found my views distorted by his. While he does offer some cogent, brilliant points of political and social analysis, he distinctly ignores other realities.

Theroux was there for the honeymoon phase of African independence in the 1960s. He returns decades later to find those promises unfulfilled, and he wonders, “What happened?” He doesn't look outside the continent for answers and cannot, therefore, comprehend the failures of neoliberal economics from the 1980s on. He doesn't attempt to grapple with structural adjustment, which saw the World Bank and IMF force African countries to open up their economies and dismember government programs designed to industrialize infant economies. There’s no mention of the global price crash in the 1980s that destroyed the market for primary commodities such as tea and coffee in Malawi, Kenya, and Ethiopia or copper in Zambia and the DRC. Instead, he looks at Africans and asks, “What have they done?” He looks at aid workers and asks, “What are they doing?” One could claim that his role, as a traveler, is to look at the present reality, to judge it based on what he sees and who he meets, but without contextual history, his understanding of the present is warped by his ignorance of the past.

Theroux doesn't recognize his own privilege, and that might be the most grating thing of all. He harbors the arrogance of privilege, the faranji who is better than all the typical faranjis. He’s focused on his unique experience as better than those of other tourists without recognizing that he is often a tourist himself. He derides the public commuter buses, “bush taxis” or “kombis” depending on where you are. After one trip in the minibus, he vows never again, calling them a “death trap.” They are, no doubt, dangerous, but they are the reality for the majority of Africans who cannot afford buses, let alone luxury trains in South Africa or a private canoe along the Zambezi.

This arrogance is actually reminiscent of another famous traveler’s diary, Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps about his time in Liberia. Greene bushwhacked his way through Liberia for four weeks in 1935 with his teenage cousin Barbara in tow. He claimed his journey was unique, through unexplored territory. He was charting his own path. It’s a claim that is frankly absurd. Along the way, he met missionaries and miners, as well as a few other Europeans, plus, you know, all those Africans. As the preface to the Vintage Classic version notes, Liberia in Greene’s time had been independent for over a century. The Liberians had to push back against the English in Sierra Leone and the French in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to protect their territorial integrity against the imperial powers. Well-documented maps were one of the main weapons against imperial encroachment. There were plenty of them; Graham just decided not to take one. It makes for a better story.

Greene spent most of his novel complaining, a tone that Theroux adopts quite a bit throughout his trip. (As a side note, Greene’s cousin Barbara also wrote a book about their Liberian adventure. She handled it much better than he did.) Theroux expects misery, and he finds it. One gets the sense throughout his book that the trip is a convenient way to get away from everyone he knows back home. Unfortunately, he had to go to Africa to do it. One could call it masculine escapism or just recognize that Theroux is a bit of a misanthrope. “Happiness,” he claims “is banal subject for travel.” He was searching for misery, for the appalling, and he explicitly recognizes that he’s looking for it in Africa. He attacks the ‘disaster porn’ of the nightly news coverage of Africa (and there was a lot of it in 2003 with prominent civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, DRC, and Somalia) but can’t understand that his vision is often of a slower-moving disaster, that of chronic underdevelopment and little will among the people to change it. And by doing so, he participates in a form of victim shaming little better than that he himself criticizes.

So why is this book the subject of the final blog in my two week challenge? I hated Dark Star Safari. I powered through it in part because there are some genuine gems in his narrative but also because I didn't feel I could properly judge Theroux without reading his book in its entirety. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to reflect my vision of the Africa I know.

It didn't. Ultimately, however, I came to realize that I could do better. That’s the reason this blog caps the two-week challenge set by a very special friend of mine. There are many tales that I've told over the course of this blog, and many more I could tell. There’s a book in the works, I think. It won’t be a New York Times bestseller, but then, I don’t expect it to be. I've had enough positive feedback from my writing that I hope it can provide an alternative view of Africa. There are plenty of stories waiting to be told, plenty of people I met along the way. Time to get started.