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Africa began with no call, no sign, no indication. The gate for boarding at Heathrow International Airport opened and that was the start. All rows, all seats, all passengers crowded like a Haitian voting-poll, but eventually formed into two snaking lines as black as a cobra’s sheen. A few white spots speckled the arrangement, I among them. Suddenly, the minority I sought was found—and it was me.
Another African Day
Camron Karsten2006-02-18 20:22:17
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fair share of corruption. For sure, it's part of my reasons to not return.”
Wayne, Lisa’s boyfriend, whom also was born and raised in Zimbabwe, expanded, “All of Africa has its unrest and uncertainty. That is Africa. That’s its birth, its culture.”
“Yet you love it, right?”
Both Lisa and Wayne nodded, but he continued. "I’ve been around Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, and South Africa. Each place was brilliant, and each person I met marvelous.”
Lisa also visited parts of Angola and surrounding areas and agreed. “It’s the leadership, and it’s on the level of governance, where the rubbish is found. It’s the people, their culture, and the lifestyle that makes the brilliance of Africa.”
To me, Africa was an unknown (and still is), and this unknown is the prime drawing power that brings me to its exploration. Like a blank sheet of paper, my penmanship must have its form; my ignorance of not knowing, not doing, must be amended. And this ignorance over the years has been filled with stories and images presented by the media. We all know them—poverty, food shortages, the massive weights of debt, HIV/AIDS, malaria, dysentery, war, machetes, AK-47s
Lagos, streets, the veil protecting our white minds. Not for long, we immersed within the hawkers and the beggars, the peoples of Nigeria in Africa's 2nd largest city.and the genocides, dictatorships and their arms supplied. At home, the mailbox becomes filled with stuffed folds and sheets of coupons. Half of these are addressed to me, and rarely is the case in which it is anything other than a charity my name succumbed to like lopped arms. They ask for money with the accompanying reports and photographs of Sudanese children turned soldiers and families of Niger and Mali holding in their hands with what remains of next season’s seed. The babies infected with HIV, the white doctors there to help, the impoverished, the diseased, the indebted—and
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See photographs from:
Nigeria Gallery
