Return to My Native Land

By Ian C. Dawkins Moore

As a young man, I traveled in West Africa in search of my identity. I am a man of color, who was born in England. I visited West Africa in he mid-seventies before that area exploded into violence, and witnessed the displacement of its people. This story is about my encounters with real people in Africa and my personal observations of my time there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian C. Dawkins Moore
• Release date: Apr 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452343860

Ian C. Dawkins Moore

Ian C. Dawkins Moore was born under the sign of Aries in the year of the Tiger. He survived a British boarding school, the jock world of football hooliganism, hitch-hiking across the Sahara desert, and the two-tone culture of American racism. He is the published author of over 20 books, and he can still see the funny side of life- Be Well & Enjoy!

Book preview

I traveled to West Africa as a young man, searching for my identity. I am a man of color who was born in England. I visited West Africa in the mid-seventies, before that area exploded into violence, and witnessed the displacement of its people. My adventure lasted 18 months and covered the countries of Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. An adventure like this probably couldn’t happen today. The desert has encroached on the south, and poverty has forced people’s increased migration from the savannah areas to the coastal countries.

Violence has decimated some countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the borders have become much tighter and more dangerous places. This story, then, is about my encounters with real people in Africa—and my perspectives of the underlying issues of the African societies that I experienced throughout my travels. These experiences were an attempt to find my place in Africa and the World. The histories and sentiments reported are still accurate of an African mindset that is proud and divisive in its worldview.

My experiences represented a coming of age, a way to test my young manhood. Hopefully, the stories will be instructive and offer encouragement to young people worldwide to accept the challenge of their age and put themselves in a new environment from which they can learn about themselves and the unique contribution they have to offer the world. The stories in this book are intended to open people’s eyes to the real Africa. I plan to present a text to my readers to offer you a visceral experience of being with me on the mammy wagons charging through the forests. To have you sitting by my side as we hurtle across the Savannah landscape. To have you feel the suffocating heat in the swamplands of Sierra Leone. To take you to the humanity of the people you encounter in this x story. In so doing, you will connect to and strengthen your own humanity, and perhaps in a small way, this story will make all who encounter it a little more open and human, which is the first step for all of us in finding peace in this world today.

ALGIERS

I would arrive sleek and young in that country, my country, and I would say to that country whose clay is part of my flesh: ‘I have wandered far, and I am coming back to the lonely ugliness of your wounds.’

Now I have come.

-Aime Cesaire

It was a Wednesday when I set foot in Algiers, Algeria, on the continent of Africa; Wednesday, February 13th, 1974, to be exact, the same day of the week as my birthday. ‘Wednesday’s child has far to go,’ they say, proving to be prophetic. I was twenty-three years old. It was a glorious day, in my heart and in the sky. I bit on the excitement that rushed through my veins. Like the Greek on the steps of the Acropolis, the Jew at the Wailing Wall - I was a man, of African heritage, from Britain, setting foot on the great continent of Africa. After many years of blind confusion and servitude, I stood on the landmass from which part of my color had issued.

My mode of travel was hitch-hiking. Cheap and basic but reliant on any good fortune I could attract. My financial resources were meager, only $800.00 for the trip of a lifetime. My plan was to straddle the Sahara, push through the Sahel and penetrate the coastal forests, head for Ghana, and then venture to Sierra Leone, where I had some contacts that would allow me to stay.

My challenge was to test my youth in a continent that was the subject of so much scorn and see if its rhythms resonated within me. My singular goal was to confront my critics, all of whom insisted that I was not an African and could be nothing more than the product of my environment in London, England. At twenty-three, I had staggered through the storms of adolescence and early manhood in delirium, full of self-deception and the obstinate belief that life must get better. The turmoil was cultural—as a young man of mixed blood, there was never a time when I didn’t feel stung by the constant remarks around me which extolled the virtues of ‘purity’ and racial superiority.

The deception was that I continued to believe I was English, while all around me, the barbs of bigotry and spite burned deep coals of bitterness into my emotions. My obstinate belief in a better life came from the anguish of the messianic creed - the plaintive cry of the would-be Nazarene - and the hope that there was a life beyond the emotionless shores of England’s xenophobia.

So, when I finally decided to travel to Africa, it was against all the advice of my friends and colleagues. In various arguments, they told me to forget Africa and accept myself as an Englishman - albeit a black one - and use the skills of articulation I had acquired to fashion an existence suitable to my station in life. (Ah, that phrase - station in life! If everyone knew their place in the grand scheme of life, wouldn’t the world be wonderful?

Of course, this perspective does require that the class-conscious Englishman be on top!) I had nothing practical to gain from going to Africa. I knew enough Africans in London to realize that I would never be accepted wholeheartedly into their intimate communities. And my connection with my West Indian ancestry was little more than skin deep. The warring factions in Brixton, where I lived, cared little or nothing for a first-generation Jamaican of mulatto origin. Yet, I felt it imperative to make the effort of exploration regardless of these obvious shortcomings.

Like many Englishmen before me, I needed to escape the constricting world of privilege and snobbery in England to discover what kind of man I was. As a man of African descent, I felt I needed to journey to the African continent to connect with the other half of my identity. Mao Tse-tung is credited with saying, A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. My first step was the recognition of the need to challenge myself. So one day I packed my bags and left London. I would not return to London the same.

I left in the full glare of that city’s drizzling climate. Gray skies and blustering winds swept me onto the boat train to Paris. A brief stay with an English girlfriend living in Paris and I was off again to Marseilles by train. The allure of European life passed me by as, with my nose open, I propelled myself towards the African coast. I traveled across the Mediterranean from Marseilles in one of those lumbering, ocean-going ferry boats, bare boards, and basic amenities for the long night’s crossing. Twenty hours of disjointed rocking hemmed into the bow of the boat, a third-class citizen. The rough, wooden seats, sparsely covered with the slimmest layer of foam wrapped in synthetic leather, provided the cradle for my odyssey to the Promised Land.

The lounge was full of weary Algerians returning home. Their rugged, tired faces and disheveled clothes betrayed the anguish and servitude characteristic of their lives in Metropolitan France. All carried crudely wrapped bundles containing the fruits of their labors, hopeful even in their exhaustion that they would sustain their families into the future.

French customs at Marseilles had brought the humiliations of neo-colonial rule into sharp focus. The customs offices were housed in a vast dank warehouse structure. The few lights in evidence were dim specks that cast muffled shadows against dry rot walls. Above the seated customs chief, a stark-naked light beneath a metal saucer shade sent a harsh glare into the eyes of those interviewed and highlighted the taut expression of the uniformed man. All the travelers were bullied into one of those lines where nobody could see where they were going. With stops and starts for no apparent reason, we huddled up. Various officials in plain clothes scrutinized our faces, pulling some aside demanding to see what was in their baggage. I was finally brought before the Chief Immigration Officer.

Angleez, he said, pawing my passport and looking with suspicion up at me. Ou allez-vouz Algeria? Pourquoi? he barked. I don’t know, I answered in English.

Francaize, Francaize, he shouted. Then, Where you go, he

attempted in English before giving up in frustration and angrily throwing my passport back at me, directing me to the baggage inspection section. I wondered if I should have committed a crime to justify his inspired guilt.

I moved on to the Baggage Inspector. He was also more intent on humiliating travelers than assisting their border crossing. My clothes and personal items were thrown all over the examination table while he looked on with a mixture of amusement and spite as I gathered them up. I’d been subjected to similarly aggressive treatment by customs officials in Britain, but never with such genocidal undertones. I was fortunate. However—my fellow travelers were treated even more roughly, and as a result, it was hours before we were allowed on board the ship. And many of the faces I’d seen in the customs hall were absent when the last handful of travelers hustled aboard the vessel as we prepared to cast off.

I was choked with emotion when I disembarked at Algiers and saw the white colonial buildings stacked back into the hills. I wanted to kiss the ground, relish my spiritual rebirth. Still, the concrete paving stones and my hurried fellow passengers pushed me onward, across the dock and into the Algerian customs building. My excitement and desire to be out in the streets mingling with the people propelled me through the immigration procedures as if I were in a dream. I had none of the problems I’d faced in Marseilles, and before I realized it, I was scurrying out into the throng of people on the Boulevard Che Guevara. I had taken the precaution of joining the Youth Hostel Association before leaving London and so set off searching for the hostel in the south of the city.

After a murderous hike through the town, passing through the white portico colonial buildings of the European Section, the paved roadway gave way to cobbled and dusty streets as I passed into the non-European section of town. I was engulfed in a sea of people of different colors and characters on entering. There were women in richly embroidered veils and olive-colored young girls in pairs holding each other’s arms, their long black hair falling luxuriously down their backs.

There were blue-black faces, sepia bodies, blonde, blue-eyed kids, and ruddy-faced old men. Some were dressed in European clothes, but many were dressed in Jelabahs, the full-length, long-sleeved cotton gown, the national dress in Algeria. The side streets were full of bubbling humanity with searching, hungry eyes. People moved across limited space everywhere, clasping hands, sitting in doorways, smoking many-limed pipes, waiting for buses, rubbing shoulders, squeezing worry beads. Nobody seemed in any hurry to get anywhere. Time seemed suspended as the buses, cars, and pedestrians struggled with the dormant flow of humanity. Palm trees sprouted between the cracks of the tenement blocks, fighting for space with the lines of washing straddling the courtyards. All this delirious profusion of life poured the sun’s blistering heat. The whole tapestry moved before my eyes like a backdrop to the Arabian Nights.

After a two-hour hike, I eventually found the hostel, a simple concrete two-story structure with no sign indicating it was a Hostel. The doors were locked, so I hammered wearily for some time before the door was flung open by a black man dressed in tracksuit sweats. Annoyed, he took one look at me and snapped out,

Nigger, what you are making all that noise for? I recognized him immediately as an American.

Stung by his aggressive tone, I meekly said, I’m looking for the Youth Hostel, is this it?

No man, this ain’t no place for you to stay.

But my youth hostel book says this is a hostel.

Well, it ain’t anymore. So just go on back downtown and stay in one of the hotels there. He turned to go back inside, as I asked,

I’m supposed to meet someone here this weekend. Are you sure this isn’t a hostel?

Hey, man, all the hostels, hotels, and public buildings have been turned into schools for the kids from the countryside. There ain’t no room in the inn, Brother! He said the last word with emphasis and a penetrating stare. He wanted me to believe he was my brother. Yet as I walked back towards downtown, I couldn’t make out why this ‘brother’ had such a nasty attitude towards me. I’d met many black Americans before, but I had never faced that abrasive reaction. I repeated the arduous hike back to the Plateau Sauliere area of downtown, looking for another hostel, and wondering why black Americans were so strange. The facility I found downtown had likewise been taken over as a school for the local children, but my exhaustion was such that I didn’t care anymore, so I just sat on the center’s steps and rested. I must have sat there for an hour, watching people go in and out, oblivious to my existence. And as I watched the flow of humanity, I reflected on the moment when I knew I had to make this trip.

On a gray and drizzly London morning, the Afromuse took its first bite of my consciousness. Spiteful and depressed, I’d squeezed out of the rain and met my lost past. In the crumbling ruins of Strawberry Hill—a name that conjures up a time of indulgent privilege and ‘noblesse obliges’— the good citizens would interview prospective homeowners into their select band of bigots.

Here, surrounded by the overgrown moss layering the once petite nearby railway station, I heard my first Afromuse on a return journey to my school of yesteryear. Looking down the track, I realized that no longer would guilt-ridden parents be riding this route to see their little abandoned kids, children detained at the pleasure of Lord Shaftsbury’s benevolence. Spewed from the loins of culpable nineteenth-century politicians, this charity endowment was defunct, the haunt from which the emotions of my early manhood had rebelled and fled. The place I cursed, despised, and battled hard to forget. This curse of impregnated cultural denial that formed a steel net of fear and self-doubt around my bursting aspirations looked so small now. It’s difficult to conceive how these same bricks, walls, and pathways could have inspired in me such awe, such trepidation! I felt I could now crush the whole place in my hand, like some discarded pulp mail.

The elegant Georgian mansion stood aloof. The center clock kept its perfect time. The broad sweep of the giant fir tree still dominated a beautifully manicured lawn mowed with military precision. But the school buildings had gone. The sound of trenchant orders and the smell of burnt oatmeal were buried beneath new housing tracts. The old soccer field had been displaced by rows of kitchenettes, by living rooms overflowing with easy chairs. On that cemented over field, I had led soccer teams, blended blood and sweat together through ice and snow, heat and rains—frequently forcing grudging respect for this school of lost souls on the opposing players. All the hopes of my youth had been turned under the sod, like the desecration of Carthage. Nothing remained of the spirit but the salt in the wounds.

Choking back tears of remembrance, I stumbled into a nearby cafe/bookstore, hoping to escape into the hot wet comfort of the British nectar, tea. On a receding shelf used for registering incoming titles, I came across a small journal entitled Return to My Native Land, by Aime Cesaire, and read:

To leave…

My heart was throbbing with an insistent desire to give.

To leave…

I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it:

‘Kiss me without fear…And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak.’

And I would say to it:

‘My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those freedoms which break down in the prison-cell of despair.’

And coming, I would say to myself:

‘Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who cries out is not a dancing bear.’

Now I have come…

LEAVING EUROPE

Leaving Europe utterly twisted with screams and silent currents of despair,

Leaving timid Europe, which collects and proudly overrates itself…

-Aime Cesaire

These flashes of illumination sparked my desire to discover blackness for myself. Like some far-off siren’s cry, Cesaire’s words ignited in me a fascination with the exotic, the courageous. I felt the primary challenge of humanity - to be accountable for one’s actions and openly accept one’s mistakes and successes as two sides of the human coin! I rejected the egoist desire of materialist accumulation, social honors, and position. Here was a simple challenge to be honest and worthy of respect for human sake alone.

While the world of greed, crime, and callousness tempted one at every step. Cesaire’s poem gave hope to my disenfranchised heart by acknowledging the pain of a despised race. By taking pride in not having invented gunpowder or the compass and glorying humanity itself! I hungered to be reborn again in the insipid drizzle outside. It was my baptism to a new life, a faith in myself as a worthy human being wrapped in the skin of a crossbreed. This faith had to overcome the duplicitous hypocrisy propagated about my birth. This faith had to learn to stand like a reed and silently observe the waters of life unfolding. For what is life but a continuous learning experience?

The Afromuse was a vibrating rhythm, a resonant sensation with the oval face of an island girl, restful and serene. The passionate emotions of love painted her skin gold and turquoise. She had the power to open doors of consciousness for me. She turned a cathartic light on my deep wounds, the dungeons of despair I’d crawled into, and the fears that were too bitter to taste; on the doors, I’d closed shut years before, all were flooded with a new light of revelation. At first, I could not betray my pain. I carried it proudly, jealously, reverently. It had been a shield and comfort for so long, I couldn’t just discard it! It was one with my pride. But she understood my pride in the pain and made me look deep into the creases of that anguish. And as I searched around in that firmament of sorrow, proud of my storehouse of misery and misfortune, I was forced to clearly see the demons I’d created, feeding them with my bitterness and self-hate.

Yet the haunting trauma of a precarious identity, half white and half black, scarred my every action. The ‘two-ness that W.E.B. Dubois articulated in Souls of Black Folks was clearly developed within me. In the two-toned world of western society, I was forced to reject one part of me to accept the other. Society required that my lineage be pure, one-dimensional. But from my early years, I knew I couldn’t be a viable individual without reconciling the two sides of my disparate genealogy.

My parents were the victims of England’s social racism. What fleeting love they