Betty Maragori reports on her experiences of visiting the US. The big thing that she experienced for the first time in the US was hard wired virtual segregation. There were no signs designating white and black zones, but the reality of segregation was visible to an untainted African eye.

I went to study in the USA in the 1980s in the time of what was to me the inexplicable presidency of Ronald Reagan. It was an enigmatic presidency for me for two reasons. First, at my university and amongst the mostly left leaning circle that I was to hang out with it, I never found anybody who had voted for him. The second reason was that for me Reagan was clearly challenged on the intellectual front. I could not believe that a nation with all that maendeleo or development, we in Africa so covet, would tolerate some folksy guy who could have come from a darker and more ignorant century. Certainly the cool left leaning students at C University had no time for Reagan.

In my two years in the US the only person I found who would publicly admit to voting for Reagan was a 65 year old black man, in Albany, Georgia, the father-in-law of my cousin. Pops, as he was called by his children, in that quintessential African American manner would routinely proclaim his love for President Reagan, loudly to people, in the presence of his children. Pops broke two rules I had come to accept about voting patterns in America, first that black people were not members of the republican party and second that they always voted for the Democratic party. To this day I am still left with the question, “So how did President Ronald Reagan win with such landside victories twice, if only one black man in the South voted for him”?

America’s Presidents and War

Eight months into America, I had imbibed the paranoid conspiracy theories of my Marxist circle and lost my African ease. Late one night I turned on the television to find the President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan ranting and raving in the most alarming manner about the “evil empire”. He was referring to the former Soviet Union, America’s then mortal enemy country of cold war days. And you thought “Axis of evil” was original? Do you see a pattern here? This is clearly the language of America’s dumb dumb presidents.

Twenty years later as I watched the elections that brought another dumb, dumb unfathomable US president into power, George Bush Jr., I realized that my vantage point with its emphasis on linear “development” or maedeleo had warped my thinking. Until that instant, I had thought development also brings highly enlightened people who would not lie about the presence of weapons of mass destruction to bring pain and destruction to innocent women and children many miles away in another country. For what, for oil, (I can’t believe that), to get revenge for daddy, (that’s too weird) to get their way (what way, the American way in Baghdad?) To be right about a perspective? (Probably the only right answer outrageous as it may seem).

For us in this part of the world, things like technological advancement, elimination of hunger, industrial development, foreign vacations, microwaves, one doctor per 100 people, four lane highways, per capita income of US$ 30,000, a new car every two years, pensions, social security, (pick your top ten) all of which come with development also lead to progress, to maendeleo. And ultimately to enlightment, the cherry on top of the development cake. We think, surely in America or Europe there must be such enlightenment that people, ordinary people everywhere must have become immune from the dictates of the baser human urgings like fear, malice, jealousy, racism, intolerance, corruption, violence, the need to declare war for dubious reasons, religious fanaticism, (again pick your top ten).

I now realize of course that human beings may have made huge technological advances such that they can send men to the moon or invent the internet and they will still rely on some form of magic, juju or alchemy for managing their lives. The advances have not created certainty. In fact they create even more uncertainty and the threat of a backlash which can take people deeper into the bosom of their juju side.

Impressions of the American South

I went to visit my cousin’s in-laws in the American south in Albany, Georgia for a week and discovered I could not hear so I took to endless grinning and nodding my head. I left those people thinking I was simple in the head. But I couldn’t understand them and I soon got tired of asking them to repeat themselves so I withdrew into an African grin of protection and lost my reputation in the process. They speak English in the south so it wasn’t the language and there was still a language barrier. The long dragged words that go on seemingly forever lost my short attention span. I found that my mind had wondered before the end so I never heard the finish. Caaaahhhn aaaaah speeeek to Eyyyyd Coooook is what I thought I overheard a woman in a bank asking. It was shocking to hear, like somebody caricaturing an American. I tried not to laugh and asked my cousin-in-law what the woman was saying. And she translated, “Can I speak to Ed Cook?”

Virtual Segregation in the American South

The other big thing that I experienced for the first time in the US was hard wired virtual segregation. There were no signs designating white and black zones any where in Albany, Georgia that I saw. Indeed on the surface all seemed well in race terms. But even my Republican cousin’s father-in-law made sure he hid his de-segregated business to keep up appearances. He was in business with a white person because it was a good business cover that allowed him to get white business. The trick was he had to keep his partnership hidden so that he could get and keep that lucrative white business. He passed himself off as a worker in the business. I know the logic is challenging.

The two groups occupied the same physical spaces, they ate at the same restaurants, entered all buildings and transport from the same entrance, sat anywhere on buses. And yet my stranger’s eyes quickly saw through this façade and identified the fault lines of virtual segregation. The new apartheid still did not allow the twain to commune freely even as they congregated. As soon as I stepped into those spaces I could feel the barriers. There was a sense of forced togetherness. If the gap between the two races could speak it would say, “OK we have to share this same physical space but we are not giving up our right to be separate. They can take away our right to segregation but they can’t take segregation out of our hearts.” It was in what was missing in the interaction between black and white. There was no ease, peacefulness, insignificance, silence, freedom, love.

What existed in that gap was tension, a hateful watchfulness and worst of all an embryonic violence that was always ready to grow into fully-fledged adulthood. You could feel it. This violence ebbed and flowed and hung around like a dark threat. When I was amongst black people everyone was relaxed. They are a very laid back people, but in the presence of a group of white people in the segregated spaces there was an all round tensing alertness, an expectation of something unpleasant.

Black and white people occupied those common public spaces differently too. White people seemed to strut and begrudge black people’s presence. It was white people who still seemed to be the bona-fide owners of the space. Black people were the interlopers, but they had no choice, they had to occupy the spaces, otherwise they risked recreating segregation by their absence. But the sense of threat in those spaces implied that Black people occupied those spaces under peril. Desegregation had been about pulling down the limits placed on the existence of black people. It was not white people who were fighting to sit in the seats reserved for black people on buses or to use the black only entrances. Desegregation demands that white people cede space and privileges that define their superior place in society.

Race in the North

My experience of race in the American north was not one of absence rather the north was racially clandestine, a state I much preferred. It gave me freedom to spend many more hours in a day being just another human being. The colour of my skin was not a constant conscious presence foisted on me by open racial hostility. Thank you but I am not black, I really am just a person. I am an African living in Africa so although I have many identifies being black is not my premier identity. That is the advantage of growing up black in Africa.

When I brought this to the attention of my southern black relatives-in-law they made that claim that always bemuses me. “I like the south they said, the boundaries are clear people here are not hypocrites like in the north. I know where I stand here with them.”

“I know where I stand?” What the hell is that? What I understand from that telling statement is an admission on the part of black people that it’s OK for there to be limits on a black person’s existence. I never heard a white person say things like that, only black people. For a person simply because of the hue of their skin to know where he or she could go and what he or she could expect from their world? In other words there was a limit of possibility which means that there was no possibility at all. And it was fine for white people to have veto powers over the dreams, scope of existence of black people. You can dream so much and no more. You can aspire so far and no further, these are the limits on your movement. And black people accepted this proscribed world and were happy that they knew their place in this controlled world. That world was a banned dream which they passed onto their children and this was done with the active connivance of black people. To know my place?

I understand how dangerous the world in which black people live in the south. I imbibed a small part of that fear many thousands of miles away from movies and media reports of the Ku Klux Klan. So much so that I arrived in America terrified. For four days I refused to leave my sister’s apartment because I was sure the Ku Klux Klan were going to gun me down. Living with that dreadful history can skew any one and the wonder is that black people have lived to step out of the shadow of such terrors and nightmares. The journey has had its negative impact that sometimes their ability to see beyond the boundaries of their terror has been compromised. A person exposed to these negatives on a daily basis for most of their life will loose their perspective. Such an environment can beat down the most-thick skinned, sanguine, optimist man and woman and create an oversensitive “defensive human” who can no longer see the forest for the trees and perceives racism under every bush. Such an environment can leave people severely embattled and debilitated. Centuries of actual and virtual lynching that black people are subjected to in the USA will do that.

This is where Africans can lend their sight when the dreams have been extinguished. We have the same racial reality because our existence in the world gives us the same reference points. Yet we live in our own homes largely amongst our own people. We are not vested in only a racial reality. Our human reality predominates. We can fly above “black person negatives” and separate fact from damaging fiction.

* Betty Wamalwa Muragori is especially interested in how Africans are constructing new identities as they redefine their place in the world. She believes in the power of words. She has a BSc degree from the University of Nairobi and MA in Environment from Clark University in Worcester Mass. USA. Currently Betty works for an international conservation organization in Nairobi, Kenya

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Everyone knows it is always the colonialists fault
Our mania for land is no different.
For the past forty years, we have blamed our bad habits on the colonialists.
We lived in a land of guiltless natives before they arrived!
Our fascination with land has joined the rank of one of our vices.
Kenyan vices.
Women, wine and land.
Not necessarily in that order.
We obsess about it, we want it, large tracts of it, small pieces, plots 4m by 4m.
Our fixation has become an irrational passion that we kill for.
Land is a soothing mistress.
A sense of calm soaks those who possess it.
Owning land gives me comfort. I know I won’t fall if I lean back.
My mother the land is there to catch me.
I don’t know how to be any other way.
When people from other states express astonishment at such an attachment, I am equally perplexed that it does not exist in their lives.
How can a person live without this ardor?
Without the satisfaction that comes with possessing your very own piece of land?
At such times I sense myself at an impasse trying to cross an unbridgeable chasm.
Me on this side with my land, and they standing there, puffs of smoke, with no substance at all.

II
I longed for land of my own even when I was a child.
When I was unhappy, I would dream of running away to my very own secret island.
To live off berries, rabbits and delicious little edible birds, the fruit of the land.
No prizes for guessing where I got those images.
The British are guilty - again.
This time as imperialists.
Enid Blyton, Robinson Crusoe, Paradise Lost, Lassie, Dr Bwana.
A mish mash of sources filling my head with the make believe adventures of white people in the bush.
Continuing the grip on my imagination.

III
But let’s not blame all the British.
The set that came to Kenya is guilty of this particular mania.
Lords and Ladies of the realm, from a tiny island only 244,820 sq. km. with 60million souls.
And those few still managed to own large chunks of it.
Can you imagine what they saw when they came to this country back then?
Miles and miles of empty land, owned by no one?
Would you endure the land lust that gripped them?
They had to have it. And they took it any way they could.
Purchasing it from owners who did not possess it.
Procuring with currency to captivate guiltless natives
Gunning down unyielding resistance
Conjuring up flocks of compliant faithful.
They carved out chunks of that long ago empty land, 100,000 hectares for this Lord, 200,000 hectares for that Lord.
Four of them ended up owning land the size of the original island.
They came and stayed for 120 years.
Enough time to infect us all with the contagion.
Like a genetic fever they passed on their obsession.

IV
After we got most of our land back, at independence, we discovered sadly there wasn’t much of it that was any good.
At least that’s what we were told in school, what was written in our books, what our government officers repeated in board rooms across the country.
What we came to believe.
Some facts and figures about Kenya. It covers 582,650 sq. km.
82% cannot support modern farming. It is incapable of growing cucumbers, carrots, cabbages and lettuce. The terrain is too harsh.
Only 18% of the land is any good.
So we are back to the small island after all.
Soon the new country was gripped by the same land-scarcity-fever of that original small isle.
Too-little-good-land chased by 30 million people growing ever more greedy by the day.
That’s why we kill for it.

V
It was predictable that we would soon start stealing land with the calm soig froid that other people pick pockets.
We even invented a special term for it.
“Land grabbing.”
That’s what we call it.
As if you could snatch a piece of land and carry it, unseen, wrapped up in your pocket.
Vehement denial follows the apprehended land thief when the pilfered land is pulled from its hiding place.
Loud protests of, “It’s mine! Here’s the title deed to prove it!” follow.
And indeed he has a genuine title deed just like yours.
Title deeds have became accidental pieces of paper drawn up by government officials gone seemingly berserk
One as real as another.
There is just one small problem. I am the one who has to pay the loan I borrowed to buy the land in the first place.
I have only reached half way; I still owe another five million shillings!
I can’t very well go to my bank and say, “Sorry I’m not going to be paying that loan now because the land has been stolen.”
I am afraid of looking sloppy.
All those years my mother would have been right.
I am careless after all.
The signs were there early on when I kept loosing my school sweater.
Now I have gone and lost my land!