African life stuns, yet stirs hope

The two white couples who had been seated in first class, bantering away in Afrikaans, also disembarked our flight from Johannesburg. But while the rest of us passengers ambled toward the immigration counter at Kamuzu International Airport in Malawi, the two couples were whisked away by a van that had been parked, brazen as the day, on the tarmac.

Constructed when the British still officially occupied and were riding herd over blacks in Malawi, Africa's poorest nation, the airport in Lilongwe, the capital, meets the barest standards. It has a single gate each for arrivals and departures. As of two Fridays ago, a sign handwritten in felt-tip pen on a sheet of plain white copy paper announced Kamuzu's "Business Lounge." The lounge furniture included a shattered glass-top coffee table and two sets each of sofas and chairs covered in a tweed-like teal fabric from yesteryear and stained brown from dirty elbows rubbing endlessly against them.

Do watch your step, or risk tripping on the frayed vinyl casing of a stairway leading to the airport's basement toilets. Kamuzu's disrepair perhaps accounts for the perfectly coiffed and tanned Afrikaaner couples circumventing, by special arrangement, immigration and the customs agent who rifled through the contents of everybody else's baggage with his naked hand.

The day I boarded the same flight as those two couples, I was three-quarters through another trip to Africa where I tell any among the black indigenous who indulge me that I am African born in America, that I'm proud to be an African, that I have hope for Africa's future. This is my way of walking in the land of my people's people, where the indigenous people, economically and in other terms, are more likely than not to be underdogs.

At the sight and sound of Afrikaaner jet-setters, chattering away in a language that had symbolized the evils of South African apartheid, I flinch almost automatically. White privilege and continued dominance in Africa - and the power of other non-African transplants - makes me want to vomit and cry and hurt somebody. I am only human.

Part of my assignment in Africa, a trip that mixed work and play, was to interview a prominent black pastor from Los Angeles who founded Save Africa's Children, a nearly 7-year-old project benefiting AIDS orphans. Like the pastor and his 50-person crew of mission-minded black Americans, I'd booked a room at a Lilongwe hotel owned by East Indians. East Indians also own the grocery market in that small complex. A white woman, a Brit, owns the coffee shop and, etcetera and on and on like that go the businesses in that area, though black employees were out front at each of them.

When several native Malawi pastors, bedecked in their clerical collars and best suits, arrived for a formal hotel dinner hosted by the Californians, they brought their wives, several of whom were barefoot and embarrassed by their insufficient attire. Seeing them shoeless, the Californians fell into a staggering silence.

And that also overtook me. Black Africa's burdens will not be ameliorated by the headline-making adoption of a Malawian baby by world-famous Madonna or her kind, the Californians told me, but, perhaps, by black Americans of affluence doing what other American tribes do for their ethnic kin in other countries, especially when their kin are in trouble.

The burdens of black Africa prevail, despite notable advances. Oil wealth raised living standards for some Nigerians. Here and there is a spot relatively free of war and hunger, but only here and there.

In South Africa, the mainly black-run government, which comes against daily allegations of corruption in news headlines, also has constructed 2 million of a promised 7 million units of housing for people who'd been squatters. (Some new homeowners complain of shoddy work.) The nation's number of Range Rover-driving, luxury-living blacks is mind-bending, considering that South Africa is a mere 13 years out of apartheid.

Those realities aside, Zwelivelile Mandlesizwe Mandela, Nelson Mandela's oldest grandchild, a tribal chief, businessman and Rhodes University graduate student, told me that 60 percent of South African wealth belongs to white people. Johannesburg-based journalist Dele Olojede, whose coverage of Rwandan genocide won him and Newsday a Pulitzer Prize, puts the figure closer to 80 percent. "The trick is that whites still hold the land," he told me.

I love Africa and am petrified by certain facts of black African life. As an African born in America, I must believe there will come a time when black Africans claim Africa for themselves, and own it outright.