I am not an Afro-pessimist, though. Apart from the obvious unchecked proliferation of people and the inevitable disappearance or extinction of wild animals, it is not certain what Africa’s future will be. But what is happening in Africa now is also happening with greater subtlety in the rest of the world: the diminution of resources, the vanishing of work, the growth of urban areas. The difference is that Africa’s population is growing much faster than that of any other continent. There are estimated to be a billion Africans now. Within four decades it will be two billion people — most of them living in cities, in countries without industry, without sufficient food or water or energy, countries that are poorly governed and insecure. It is projected that in a few years Nigeria will grow to a population of three hundred million, in an area the size of Arizona and New Mexico. Donor aid can take some credit for what little infrastructure exists. But donor aid and self-interested foreign governments and “rogue aid” from China and North Korea — money proffered with no questions about human rights — all these are largely responsible for the persistence of bad governments, too.
The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly, with his decades in power, along with his vain, flitting shopaholic wife, his hangers-on, and his goon squad, is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear. When I complained to a bureaucrat from Burkina Faso (because that country, too, was on my proposed route) about the persistence of tyrants, she raised her voice and said in a froggy accent, “It is the réalité!” — because her own country was governed by a longstanding (twenty-five years and counting) clinger to office. It is not a reality at all, but a fantasy of power promoted by the tyrant.
Most politicians believe their own lies, but the foreign-aid givers make them worse. Take the corrupting forms of foreign aid away and popular desperation might become productive, rebellion leading to elections that might improve matters in the long term. A better alternative to the endless gift-giving is investment. Yet investment is more trouble than the grandstanding presentation of donor aid, requiring more accountability, more humility, more patience, and greater risks — and, of course, less colorful mythologizing of the effort, the photo ops with destitute children.
Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants — and turned some of them into rebels. The colonial-mimicry of post-independence Africa has been a continuation of this — more scavengers, more pleaders and panhandlers. And the consequence of each new civil war or outbreak of religious strife or warlordism is that there is more willful damage to repair — more land mines left behind, more burned-out villages, more amputees, refugees, and orphans.
There will always be lions and elephants and impalas in Africa, because there will always be one sort of game park or another. If many animals are eaten or their habitats destroyed — or if, like the rhino, the wild dog, the quagga, and the giant sable antelope, they face extinction — there will be private reserves and fenced-off game farms where other large animals can be viewed. This is the case today in South Africa, where for a price you are guaranteed an African experience, even if it is no more than the commercial thrill of a glorified theme park that offers the illusion of what Africa once was — if not an Eden filled with animals and people living in relative harmony, then a still-forested land of market towns and viable cities and mud-walled villages, with its soul intact.
But the giraffe on the game farm and the ridable elephant on the bush concession are not for me either. Once you have seen animals in the wild, it is impossible to enjoy the sight of them behind an enclosure, no matter how vast the enclosure. “What’s the difference between this and a zoo?” Trevor shrewdly inquired in Etosha, in Namibia, as we sat behind the fence at Okaukuejo with the hundreds of German tourists watching the floodlit eland drinking at the waterhole. And Trevor knew: We had seen all of this before. Nothing to report.
Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial, though it didn’t matter when I first started traveling as a youth, and later as a middle-aged man: I believed I had all the time in the world then. My travel was open-ended. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back,” I used to say to my family. I vanished into countries and was so far out of touch I seemed to evaporate. I had no idea where I was going, but it was a joy to be on the move, and I kept finding places where I wanted to live — a great incentive in travel, the sense that I would discover a new home.
I recall traveling through Afghanistan and down the Khyber Pass to the lovely town of Peshawar, thinking: I could live here! How wrong I was. Peshawar became a city of refugees, fanatics, mujahideen, suicide bombers, and a bazaar of the Central Asian drug and arms trade. But I was tempted to drop out in other places in the world — dropping out seemed to be one of the temptations in travel, that I would remain in Bali or Costa Rica or Thailand and never come back. I had not yet discovered what Camus wrote in his Notebooks, 1942–1951: “When a man has learned — and not on paper — how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, the illusion that others may share, then he has little left to learn.”
Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing — a groping in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness. In travel, as Philip Larkin says in his poem “The Importance of Elsewhere,” strangeness makes sense. Yet the more I traveled, the greater my homing instinct. As I grow older, the consolations of home take on a deeper meaning.
Although I lived for more than six continuous years in Africa, and kept returning, I resisted the temptation to stay for an extended period. I never met anyone who said, as the Dutch missionaries in long-ago Malawi often did, “I plan to be buried here.” I once played with the idea of founding a school in the Malawi bush, until I realized that it was not for me to patronize Africans by running a school for them, but for Africans themselves to take on that responsibility. There are still outsiders who are prospectors, adventurers, and entrepreneurs in Africa, and I know some of them, but none are in it for the long haul, and all have an exit strategy. It concentrates the mind to be in a place where you know you have no future.
Time means so much more to me now than it did. These days, keenly aware of wasted time, I hear the clock ticking more insistently. I hate the idea of travel as déjà vu. Show me something new, something different, something changed, something wonderful, something weird! There has to be revelation in spending long periods of time in travel, otherwise it is more waste. Another effect of the deaths of Nathan and Rui da Câmara and Kalunga was this very insight. Was I where I wanted to be, doing what I loved? The answer was sometimes Yes, sometimes Where am I? But more often it was What am I doing here?