BT: When my friend and RVEG teammate Daiyouga (pronounced day-YOU-gah) decided to make a trip to Liberia and asked if I would like to join him, it wasn't necessarily a quick answer. For him, the decision to go was easy…Liberia's civil war, which caused his family to flee the country some 20 years ago, had ended. For my friend, this was a trip home to rediscover family, friends and old sights, sounds and smells that flitted and haunted about the dim corners of my friend's memory.
For myself, it was a bit more complex. My thoughts on Africa created attitudes that eventually spawned their own civil war. One one side, fantasies of the beauty and history of the Motherland. On the other? My outright fear and disgust at incessant images of ultra-violence and perpetual despair. As an avid lover of the outdoors, I often rub elbows with many in the survivalist/preparedness communities. Its members can range from earthy, "granola" ultra-light backpackers to grizzled, hard men who sit in their homes--stocked with more food, guns and ammunition than the Washington Bullets' locker room. Yet, it is definitely the latter group that I find myself drawn to. Along with their prowess in fieldcraft, their knowledge of long-forgotten, old-world skills like skinningand well-digging reminds you that years ago, man could accomplish anything despite access to only primitive tools. Because let's face it. If the grid REALLY went down and stayed down, how many of us dazzling (sub)urbanites would have the tools and mindset to survive a long haul?
However, I also wonder how many of our crowd would actually leave the comfort and safety of the rual fortress (unarmed, no less) to walk the streets and truly experience a real, post-SHTF environment. After seeing several unsettling images from the Liberian civil war, I was not even sure that *I* was ready for such an experience. Yet, a trip to Africa represented more than another pushpin on the wall map. It would be an adventure travelling to a country that most Americans deathly afraid to visit. When I posted for gear recommendations on a message forum filled with actual tough guys and doorkickers, I got this response:
"Why? Do what you like, but it seems like a huge risk just to see first hand the condition of a place that is worthless, and that no one cares about.
I have a better option for you. Go buy a new pair of Air Jordans and a set of whatever clothes are trendy at the urban clothing store. Now walk through the ghetto at night.
There, you just saved a ton on airfare, and you'll probably only get pummeled and stripped naked. At least they won't cut your heart out and eat it."
Yikes! Though that represented the harshest reply, I received similar responses across different demographics. Though I knew it wouldn't be that bad, there was some measure of truth in that guy's assessment. Even after the war, Liberia is rife with several things that can kill you. There are mosquitoes carrying yellow fever, mosquitoes carrying the Usutu virus, and mosquitoes carrying malaria. Like most Third World countries, Liberia comes with the standard compliment of burghal accessories such as suicidal taxi and motorbike drivers, criminal products of poverty and of course, the constant specter of flash-violence. Even as I mulled over the trip, Liberia's eastern neighbor Cote D'Ivoire (or the Ivory Coast) teetered on the brink of civil war and was fighting active gunbattles mere minutes from Liberia's borders. To me, any man choosing the path of a survivor had to make at least one trip to a country who has recently gone through their own personal TEOTWAWKI. Liberia would definitely be a place where real, honest-to-goodness survival takes place.
There was also a matter of ancestry. My relationships with Africans have always been great--just as they with for any other race, or nationality. However, my relationship with Africa has been an interesting one at best. As a product of late 1960's/early 1970's America, I grew up smack in the middle of our Pan-African movement. As a young child, I remember Afro-centric marketing, dashikis, exotic images of African art and of course, the afro. Just like the Italians, Irish or any other ethnic group that made it to the United States, I was taught that our roots and blood came from the "Old Continent" and that Africa was my ancestral home. The only difference was that our trip to America was a bit different. Unfortunately, as I got older (and became a deeper student of world history), I became very conflicted about those teachings for a number of reasons:
- I was born in the great land of Hiawatha, Ipods, John Moses Browning and Barry Sanders. America is the land that my ancestors fought to build and defend. All of my grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles were Americans who loved American things. Most, if not all of my loves were American-made.
- Though it was the European slave traders who created and fueled the machine, there were indeed Africans who were willing cogs. Knowing this fact was hardly enough to build any resentment, but it did little to strengthen my affinities towards the continent.
- Okay. Even if the above weren't true, you mean to tell me that not a SINGLE entity on the entire continent sent a rescue party to come save my great-great-great-grandfather from brutal servitude??? Coming from an American culture that will send an entire battalion of futuristic death machines to retrieve the body of one soldier, this was another conflict.
Even if you remove those feelings, there was an even larger conundrum. As an African-American, tracing your deeper roots is a bit more difficult than opening an account on easyfamilytree.com and dedicating several weekends to the task. A search for even great grandparents can send one down a path endless rat-holes that lead to dead-ends, cryptic and decomposed slave trading records as well as expensive games involving mad scientists and DNA tandem repeat markers.
Yet, Liberia is a country that was explicitly settled and founded for freed American slaves, by freed American slaves (much more on that later). Considering that *someone* back in the early days of my family tree took the infamous "North American Job Fair Cruise" out of west Africa, Liberia represented a logical starting point to explore my origins. Perhaps I would not be able to mentally approach the trip to Liberia as a pilgrimage. But there was no doubt that it would make one hell of an expedition.
In the end, I was overtaken by a mixture of curiosity, fear, machismo and the explorer's compulsion to share candid scenes of the world with those who would not ordinarily set foot on or see these lands.
Daiyouga: For me, it was a very easy decision. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to return home to Liberia. Would it look the same? Would it be different? Would all those sights and sounds you’ve held on to all these years dissolve into a cloud of synthesized memories only to be proven false upon setting foot back in Monrovia? What would that first reaction be like?
I left Liberia in the back of a SUV in late 1990. I still remember looking back at our old house in Congo Town as we drove off and thinking to myself that this is probably the last time I would see this place again for a long time. What I didn’t realize is how true that would turn out to be. I knew I would be joining my siblings in the USA, but I thought it would be an extended vacation until all this so-called “war” stuff would end and afterwards, we would come back home. Sadly, that turned out to be far from the case.
Fast forward to two months later in January and we were settling into our new home in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Home...Michigan. Yes, for 2/3’s of my life I lived in Michigan. I grew up in Michigan. Went from elementary school to a working professional in Michigan. Michigan was home. But I never truly felt I was from Michigan. Similar to the first 10 years of my life, there was a big body of water outside my bedroom window. But it wasn’t quite the same. The waves were much calmer. The sunset was on the left instead of the right. The water was fresh and not salty. And of course the biggest difference of all, the weather. In Liberia, it rained from April to October, and was dry from November to March. In Michigan, it snowed from October to May, rained from June to August, and September was this confused month that could not make up its mind as to what sort of temperature it wanted to be or what form of liquid it wanted to drop from the sky. Michigan was a very different experience but one I eventually grew accustomed to. It became home. Everything from the Blossom Time festival to that 588-2300 EMPIRE jingle on the TV became the defining memories of my youth. But there was more. More than those memories in that small town in Southwest Michigan. There were memories of a small country in West Africa that had to be revisited.
It was with great surprise when I learned that BT would be joining me on my visit back home. I had many stories but only with your own two eyes could you really see what I was talking about. We booked our Delta flights and were ready to set foot in Monrovia. What would be waiting for us? We knew Liberia was rebuilding, but would it still be to hard to look at? Will my old neighborhood look the same? How will Monrovia look after 20 years? Would my descriptions of Liberia be as accurate as I remembered? Please stay tuned for Day 1 of our trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment