Keith B. Richburg was an experienced and respected reporter who had paid his dues covering urban neighborhoods in Washington D.C., and won praise for his coverage of Southeast Asia. But nothing prepared him for the personal odyssey that he would embark upon when he was assigned to cover Africa. In this powerful book, Richburg takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to Rwanda to Zaire and finally to South Africa. He shows how he came to terms with the divide within himself: between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity.Are these really my people? Am I truly an African-American? The answer, Richburg finds, after much soul-searching, is that no, he is not an African, but an American first and foremost. To those who romanticize Mother Africa as a black Valhalla, where blacks can walk with dignity and pride, he regrets that this is not the reality. He has been there and witnessed the killings, the repression, the false promises, and the horror. His conclusion:…”Thank God I am an American.”
From my personal esperiences in Africa and especially in South Africa during and after Apartheid, Richburg gets most of it right but not everything he saw in South Africa agrees with my experiences. It’s still fashionable to demonize whites on South Africa but Richburg failed to grasp that in South Africa there were at least three kinds of whites, viz, the Afrikaners, the English and those from India. The laws were different for those people and for the blacks. South Africa today has been ruled by black people since Nelson Mandela was appointed president and unfortunately has one of the highest if not the highest murder rate in the world.
Views: 0
