Someone asked me today, “You really love it there, don’t you”,
echoing a question I have been asked repeatedly since I came home. This picture, posted on facebook by my friend
Christian, seems to sum up the answer to a question I have been asking
myself. “Why Africa”? Christian should know. He is a product of Africa.
The words that draw the picture are hard to read so I have
copied them for you, perhaps it will give you a glimpse of the Africa I see. I
decided to set it to some pictures. They are
the Africa I have seen, taken through my eyes. Perhaps they will answer the question.
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| Akobo Hospital, not enough beds for all the patients |
The real Africa is the one they never show you. The real
Africa is hidden beneath a veneer of poverty and hunger and death; a cancerous
mass on the face of the earth that the rest of the world term homogenous “Africa”.
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| Street scene in the market, Malakal, South Sudan |
The real Africa is submerged under corruption
and greed, underneath tyranny and ostentatious elite, underneath the faces of
the people they cannot feed.
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| Akobo, South Sudan |
The real
Africa is buried under shanty towns rife with dirt and disease where children
are forced to grow up much too quickly to survive. The real Africa is concealed under a no man’s
land of desert, bare and dry, unable to sustain green and healthy life.
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| sunset in Malakal |
No, that is not the real Africa. The Africa I know. The Africa that is
reflected in the warm sunshine you can feel burning inside you.
1 |
Akobo displaced people's camp |
The Africa that shines from a warm,
spontaneous smile.
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| Addis mountain trip |
The Africa that is
sky high mountains, of tropical jungle,
of golden sand dunes and lush
green grassland.
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| Addis Ababa, Ethiopia |
The Africa that is the
heart of different peoples, different languages, different cultures, different
identities, all who cal this land their home.
The and where moyo muti unomera pauno; where roots
take hold and don’t let go, solid as the baobab tree that has always been and
will always be there, standing and steady against the menaces of time.
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| Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Juba, South Sudan |
My Africa is where my heart resides even when I am long gone
and far away, where my mind drifts to across the distances of a never-ending
ocean.
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| Akobo air strip |
The real Africa can be smelled the
minute you step off a plane onto the soil and feel the air calling you and beckoning
you home.
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| on the road, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia |
The real Africa is the chaos and the calm that exist side by
side as honking cars zoom past on roads that run parallel to cows grazing peaceably
in a field.
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| location of my new home in Akobo |
This is the real Africa they
never show. This is the place I call home.
