I got drunk with three educated Basotho gentlemen the other night. We sat at Chocke’s Corner Bar in the scrub-and-bush mountains of Lesotho, sipping a red variety of South African boxed wine. The discussion revolved around colonial America and the situation in Israel. My mind wandered. I debated which of these men was HIV-positive; I considered making the short but chilly trek outside to the loo. Then the mechanic, five years of life in Britain under his tool belt, said something interesting. “Westerners not only live differently, they think differently as well,” he declared adamantly. I thought about what this difference meant to us (slavery, exploitation, apartheid—we whiteskins have always had the upper hand) and pondered what it meant to them. Wealth, no doubt; what else? As if to emphasize the point, the bricklayer offered seven cows in return for my hand in marriage. I chose sleep instead.
Several days later my brother and I made our way through the country’s highlands, on the bare backs of Basotho ponies. After seven hours of peaceful trudging, we arrived at the evening’s temporary home, a one-room hut perched on a hilltop. The stone-and-thatch structure was one of several on the family compound which housed Madame Selima, her unnumbered grandchildren, a cat and dog, some chickens, and a couple dozen feed bags full of Lesotho weed, which Taxman, our minimum-English guide, justified simply as “business.” Though Mme. Selima’s English was also quite poor, she was warm in that grandmotherly way, somehow being both friendly and unobtrusive. The kids, decked in layer upon layer of mismatched clothing cast off long ago by their counterparts in the United States, amused themselves with plastic bags and tin cans. They paused to peek curiously at our pale skin. They were interested in us, but not envious of us. They were also well-behaved, well-loved, and well-trained. The youngest, who still would have been in diapers had she been born in the other hemisphere, ignored us entirely. Instead, she focused her attentions on stripping the fuzz off a peach, an astonishing demonstration of the proper way to use a paring knife from a one-and-a-half-year-old.
Yesterday we made the treacherous journey down the abrupt Sani Pass, descending the 2,000 meter cliff that acts as an eastern border between the “kingdom in the sky” and South Africa. There we said our final goodbye to the rocky dirt roads, to the endless greasy plates of cornmeal and greens and to the drop-pit toilets of developing Africa. Exports from South Africa supply the southern half of the continent with Nescafé, car parts, and diamonds. And after six months of backpacking through eastern and southern Africa, this country that is said to be “the cradle of mankind” appears both lovely and foul, both urban and suburban.
Today I type this letter to Minnesota under the buzzing fluorescent lights of a chain store, surrounded by a vast tarred parking lot. Westerners think differently indeed. Crossing the border into the Africa that whites built, we trade subsistence for abundance, adequate for super-sized, polio and bilharzia for carpal tunnel and attention deficit disorder. It’s an awesome world that western civilization has built. It can also be garish, bland, and overworked. There are countless aid organizations, entrepreneurs, and volunteers determined to create a new Africa, a modern Africa. Perhaps it’s arrived. Tomorrow we head off to the largest Easter party on the continent—thousands of kids are expected to show up at a much-publicized rave in Johannesburg.