Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

By Jeffrey Gettleman

From Jeffrey Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, comes a passionate, revealing story about finding love and finding a calling, set against one of the most turbulent regions in the world.

A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past twenty years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling a teenage dream.

At nineteen, Gettleman fell in love, twice. On a do-it-yourself community service trip in college, he went to East Africa—a terrifying, exciting, dreamlike part of the world in the throes of change that imprinted itself on his imagination and on his heart.

But around that same time he also fell in love with a fellow Cornell student—the brightest, classiest, most principled woman he’d ever met. To say they were opposites was an understatement. She became a criminal lawyer in America; he hungered to return to Africa. For the next decade he would be torn between these two abiding passions.

A sensually rendered coming-of-age story in the tradition of Barbarian Days, Love, Africa is a tale of passion, violence, far-flung adventure, tortuous long-distance relationships, screwing up, forgiveness, parenthood, and happiness that explores the power of finding yourself in the most unexpected of places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780062284112

Jeffrey Gettleman

Jeffrey Gettleman won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from East Africa. He was the longest-serving East Africa bureau chief in the history of the New York Times, based in Kenya for more than a decade. His stories have appeared in National Geographic, Foreign Policy, GQ, and the New York Review of Books. A native of Evanston, Illinois, Gettleman studied philosophy at Cornell University and anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Book preview

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Dedication

TO MY CAMERADO

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Acknowledgments

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

About the Author

About the Book

Read On

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

One day my sons will ask why they were born in Africa; and now that we’ve moved on, I see more clearly all the reasons why.

In a big way, their early years in such a warm and beautiful place were inevitable, the accumulation of adventures and misadventures between their mother and their father, in Africa and beyond, together and alone.

I wish we were all back there now. I miss everything about that life. I miss the scruffy airports and the stubby bananas. I miss opening my curtains in the morning and looking out at our garden and seeing the flame tree blossoms lying lightly on the rich green grass. I miss feeling deeply connected to a part of the world where I wasn’t from but took me in as if I belonged.

We’ve gone back several times as a family to visit, and it’s always a mix of wonderfulness and frustration. I’ve never felt as alive as I did living in Africa. I’ve never felt as at home. But now that we’re looking out at the world from another continent, recapturing that feeling is like trying to re-enter a dream.

New Delhi, India

2018

Prologue

The biggest stories often start with a scrap of paper, a phone number and an obviously fake name. The first hint of this story came from my friend Louis, a French diplomat. Louis was a good source. He had wavy hair, a big, intelligent face, and a weakness for cinnamon liqueur, tall African women, and conspiracy theories. We were sitting on the balcony at Trattoria, an Italian restaurant on a bustling street in downtown Nairobi, having lunch. Most diplomats stayed away from bustling streets—and downtown Nairobi—so Trattoria afforded us a reliable degree of anonymity. We might have stuck out, two mzungus in the heart of the city, looking at each other across a table set with oil and vinegar and a red carnation peeking out of a chipped vase, but no one knew who we were. From where we sat, we could see the taxis and 4x4s edging past curbs painted in black and white. Crowds of people moved through the streets—university students chatting, holding armfuls of books, butchers in white coats, newspaper vendors balancing stacks of papers on their heads, lawyers from the nearby courthouse exchanging greetings in the distinctive Kenyan fashion, arms relatively straight as they shook hands, still clasping each other for a few moments as they chatted. In the doorways of the banks and forex bureaus leaned watchmen with wooden clubs tucked under their arms. They eyed the street cautiously. It was the daily Nairobi churn, lit up by clear sunshine beaming off the storefronts and windshields.

Louis picked up his linen napkin, folded it into quadrants in a practiced European way, and blotted his lips, red from arrabbiata sauce. He gazed off.

Who knows what’s going on in the Ogaden, he said, which meant, coming from Louis, something was going on in the Ogaden.

When I got back to the office, I called around to aid workers and human rights people who might know something about the Ogaden Desert, the poorest, most remote part of Ethiopia. That led to a meeting with a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend in a flyblown café in Nairobi’s Eastlands where I could have easily disappeared. A wispy Somali man named Abdi Farah sat across from me, close enough for me to smell the frankincense smoke he used to perfume his clothes. It was a light but unmistakable scent that cut through the café’s other smells of sweat, French fries, and roasting goat meat. He had bright, playful eyes and scars on his cheeks. We were mutually suspicious; we also needed something from each other. Abdi Farah leaned toward me and scribbled out a name and number on the back of a faded café receipt. When you get to Addis, he said, call this guy. Tell him Bob sent you.

Before I allowed myself to get too excited, I did a little more research. From a human rights contact of mine, I learned the Ogaden rebels were extremely well armed. Just the week before, I had banged out a quick story about how this same outfit had attacked a government oil field and killed seventy-five, but by the standards of this region, that hadn’t immediately registered as major news. Now I knew, from a military source, that the Ethiopian government was receiving covert help from the Americans. The Ethiopian army had sealed off the entire Ogaden Desert and was burning down villages and massacring civilians. It wouldn’t be easy getting in, the source said; there were checkpoints everywhere. That made up my mind.

As I heaped my gear into a pile in the middle of the office floor—my satellite phone, my Internet transmitter, my bug sprays and mosquito nets and notebooks and cords—my hands were shaking from a combination of excitement and dread, though at times like these I honestly couldn’t distinguish between the two. I could see the story: secret atrocities; clandestine American involvement; an underdog war, with a religious edge (the Ethiopians were predominantly Christian, the rebels Somali and Muslim).

Several days later, my wife, Courtenay, and I checked over our shoulders before ducking into a taxi in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. She perched the small bag with video equipment on her knees. We were headed off on a long drive east, toward the Ogaden. The road threaded through the cool misty highlands and flattened out into dry, fruitless plains. For two days we drove, until the lights of Jijiga, the last big town before you hit the desert, disappeared behind us.

Then we started walking.

We had a guide, Musa, a college student working undercover for the rebels. My first words to him were: Bob says hello. We followed Musa up sandy hills, down sandy hills, through swirling rivers the color of chocolate, the water warm and rich with sediment, strangely soft against our skin. The sky was coated with stars as we moved stealthily through profusions of bushes that bloomed in the dark and yielded a smell like lemongrass and basil that clung to our nostrils and our wet, sticky clothes.

When we finally reached the rebel outpost, located on a small hilltop, Musa took us back to the radio room. It was a single wire twisted around a thorn tree connected to a crackly CB. There we met the rebel leader in this part of the desert, who also used a nom de guerre: Commander Peacock. He was squatting on the ground, holding the transmitter in his left hand, shouting in guttural Somali, clad in cracked old boots and disintegrating camouflage. When he saw us, he slowly stood.

Welcome to the war, he said.

Now, at this point, if you’re wondering if we were absolutely insane to march out into the middle of the desert and place our lives in the hands of a band of freshly bloodstained outlaws led by a man named Commander Peacock, I can offer an explanation: the transitive property of trust. Reporters deposit their lives in it all the time. People I’d trusted had hooked me up with people they’d trusted who hooked me up with people they’d trusted. Peacock and I were simply two terminal points on a long line drawn by trust.

This is one of the things I’ve experienced most deeply in Africa, and I’ve felt it from Khartoum to Kinshasa, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic: that chain of connections, the surprising openness, the ease of movement—and I’m not talking about going from A to B, because it’s still hard as hell getting most anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. I’m talking about movement across worlds. There’s this notion, lived just about every day out here, that nothing’s easy but anything’s possible. I had been dazzled by my first hit when I was eighteen, captivated by the spirit, the energy, the differences, the feel. I realize now that those words conjure up nothing specific in anyone else’s head, but behind them are some of the brightest memories of my life: walking along Lake Malawi holding a stranger’s calloused hand, moving through villages with packs of people, the sandy paths littered with mango peels, feeling so connected to strangers it was like there was a set of jumper cables running between us.

It was this feeling that made me hop around from newspaper to newspaper for more than ten years until I got the one job I had always wanted, East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times (it’s a lofty title; there were no other correspondents for thousands of miles). I was put in charge of news from a dozen countries, a huge chunk of territory lying across Africa’s waist. And I had a camerado to help me decipher it, process it, survive it. To my surprise and joy, Courtenay had retooled from public defender to video journalist, which meant the two of us could go anywhere a scrap of paper or a fake name could take us. Whatever I had in my heart, I was now doing it.

We followed Commander Peacock to the edge of the camp. He pointed his rifle out at the desert and said, with the slightest flicker of amusement in his eyes: If they put ambush, never run. He patted his hand down, to mean lie flat. Courtenay and I exchanged a quick glance. We’d covered a lot of rebels—rebels terrorizing the hills of eastern Congo, fighting for autonomy in Darfur, shelling the towns of Burundi. This region, overly militarized during the Cold War and then basically dumped by the West when it ended, has more than its fair share of antigovernment feeling. But Commander Peacock seemed different. He had a gravelly voice aged far beyond his twenty-seven years and dusty dreads growing out of a receding hairline. He was tall and slightly bent, with questions coming out of questions.

Mista Jifri, how is your condition? he’d ask me over the next several days, and when I’d say I was fine, even if my feet throbbed from all the walking, he’d let loose:

Mista Jifri, are you creationist or evolutionist?

Mista Jifri, why Mexico too poor. It next to the US, no?

Mista Jifri, how does car insurance work?

I was really only able to answer the first one.

We covered at least a hundred miles, looking for the Ethiopians looking for us. Peacock appeared to know where he was going. He sometimes flashed me a goofy sideways grin that seemed to acknowledge that being a rebel fighter loping through the desert was a quixotic way to spend one’s life, but fuck it, it was interesting. He spoke passionately and repeatedly about creating an independent homeland for his people where the oil and gas resources went to build schools and the children’s bellies weren’t swollen with worms—standard rebel fantasies. The rebels were eager for ink, which is why they had invited us out here, but I knew what they were up against. The Ethiopians were one of Africa’s most ruthless regimes. They had MiGs, helicopter gunships, tens of thousands of infantrymen, and now the CIA helping them too. As I trudged behind Peacock, trying to keep up with him and scribble in my notebook and not trip on a rock, I dashed out, Heavily armed dreamers.

Courtenay was impressed. Look at these guys, she said. They’re carrying all of our shit, they’re happy we’re here, they’re blowing up people, but at the same time, they’re so nice.

I’m sure she did like them, but in that comment there was a subtle condemnation of me. We had been dealing with some painful fragments of our past, and even though we still shared moments of tenderness, that faith that two people draw from, and share from, was nearly gone. It had seemed as if going on this trip would recement our bonds, or maybe tear us apart. Some couples have a baby to save a marriage. We went into the Ogaden. It was a gamble, not made any easier by the hunger, the heat, the danger, and most especially the thirst, a very greedy thirst that stalked our every step. We walked for hours most days through thick thorn trees whose bone-white needles constantly cut us, the sun burning down, searing every inch of our exposed skin. The only water was the rare stream or mud puddle, and there was only so much we could carry. At each day’s end we were left with empty bottles and splitting headaches, our pants streaked with white salt stains, our urine like syrup.

You need to do something about this, Courtenay said to me one blazing afternoon.

What do you want me to do? I croaked back. I’m thirsty too.

Don’t be a pussy, she hissed. Do something.

Like what?

"I don’t know. But get me some fucking water!"

The soldiers around us kept their eyes riveted to the horizon. They pretended they hadn’t heard her. It grew so quiet, all I could hear was everyone’s boots digging into the sand and the clinking of bullets in bandoliers bouncing on backs. This was a nomadic culture where women were dutifully wrapped in cloth all day like marble statues, never to be unveiled; they spoke when spoken to, if they were spoken to. Every once in a while, they were beaten like dusty rugs.

I walked to the back of the line and sheepishly asked Peacock if he had any extra water. It was a serious taboo out here to ask for another man’s water. Peacock smiled knowingly and poured me most of his bottle. I jogged obediently back up to Courtenay, who took it from me, closed her eyes, and tipped it back like a can of beer. She handed me back the empty bottle and walked off. I wondered if that counted for anything in her mind.

This wasn’t the only reason we decided to leave three days later, but I knew I shouldn’t push it. We had spoken to dozens of rebels and villagers, collecting accounts of every abuse imaginable, and we’d probably get only more of the same. Soon enough the rebels might actually run into the Ethiopians, and who knew how that would go. It was time. Courtenay had gotten her video; me, my notes. My dirty-paged notebook detailed everything that I’d heard and overheard. It contained maps, organizational charts, code names and numbers. It was like a guidebook to the insurgency.

As we said good-bye, everyone was quiet. Peacock assembled the rebels into two straight lines. We exchanged a few final words.

Peacock, man, if you ever come to Nairobi, I’ll take care of you.

We both laughed. It was an absurd thing to say; Peacock said he wanted to die out here, and there was more than a good chance he would. But it was all I could think of. And I did mean it.

We hugged, my cheek against his tattered uniform. And Peacock being Peacock, he somehow arranged a dump truck that was working in the area to give us a lift to the nearest town.

We hopped out at Degehabur, a smudge of a settlement on the desert’s edge, about an hour away. The main road was dirt, lined with slanted shacks. Courtenay was wearing her yellow linen shirt and a pair of shapeless flesh-colored nylon camping pants that we called the sexy pants. We walked up to the gate of a guesthouse, one story, about twenty lonely rooms.

The proprietor took my wad of moist bills and handed me a tiny key that looked like it fit a suitcase lock. He barely said a word, faintly smiling. I was so pleased we had made it this far, I wasn’t thinking straight. And I was still new—I hadn’t been in this job even a year, I didn’t know the contours of this region or the brutality and trickery pooled in forgotten places like Degehabur.

I would’ve never guessed that as Courtenay and I crossed the courtyard, the comforting sound of her nylon pants swishing behind me, our new proprietor friend was slipping out the back door. And as we plopped down the bags in our room and I began to rummage through my backpack, I hadn’t the faintest intuition that a platoon of Ethiopian soldiers from a nearby army base was storming out of their barracks.

Hey, Courtenay said. Where’d you put the shampoo?

I’ll find it, I said back. Let me just take a quick leak.

And please get something to wash some socks in. Mine are disgusting.

I stepped into the courtyard, searching for a plastic bucket. Right as I spotted one in the corner, a green pickup packed with soldiers zoomed through the gate.

Three men jumped out, their tightly laced boots hitting the pavement hard.

You! one of them shouted in clear English. Get in.

He shouldered his assault rifle and shook it wildly in my face. My mouth went dry.

Get in truck!

More soldiers clattered into the courtyard. They carried assault rifles, belt-fed machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades. They were probably no older than Peacock’s troops, young twenties, but they looked like grown men, well-fed, crisp camouflage, none of that childlike smileyness in their eyes. They formed a tight ring around me, weapons drawn, and closed in. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew one thing: they were in that bulging-eyed, unreachable state human beings morph into right before they kill. If I opened my mouth, they’d shoot me. If I didn’t move quickly enough, they’d shoot me. If I moved too quickly, they’d shoot me.

I climbed into their truck.

Good things take time, growing, maturing; they need tending. Think of a garden of orchids, or for that matter, a marriage. Bad things happen fast, like a bone snapping. Courtenay stepped out of the room seven seconds after I had left it to find me encircled by a platoon of Ethiopian soldiers, the same ones the rebels were fighting, rifles raised at my chest.

What the hell is going—

They grabbed her by the arm and yanked her toward the pickup.

The soldiers jumped in, guns banging against the sides. They ordered us to sit on the floor, in the back half of the truck. I kept trying to tell myself that maybe they’d just drive us to a police station, lock us up for a few hours, shake us down for a bribe, then let us go. Just as long as they leave our—but no, that happened too. Before the driver gunned the engine and the guesthouse disappeared in a swirl of dust, the soldiers ransacked our room, ripping our bags out. We weren’t headed to a police station. I started to feel faint. And I still had to pee.

I glanced over at Courtenay. She was wearing a red bandanna around her neck, like a scout. The Ethiopians stood above her, rifles angled at her skull.

The truck idled for another moment and then jerked forward with a roar. These men could kill us, they could do whatever they wanted to us; any illusion of control over our own lives, our own bodies, had been wiped out in an instant. We were hurtling down a bumpy road to an unknown destination, the gray, gravelly desert slipping past us, and I started to hemorrhage energy simply trying not to freak out. And still I was freaking out. I had gotten Courtenay into this, and now I couldn’t get her out of it. If we survived, would she lose even more faith in us? Was this where my love of Africa had taken me? I know that a privileged white man falling suddenly—and inexplicably—in love with Africa is a cliché. So much so the French have a term for it, le mal d’Afrique, the Africa disease. It puts you under a spell and/or kills you. Maybe so. But I had worked hard to get here, and it took half my life.

As I felt the heat from the soldiers’ eyes on us—it didn’t seem like they were just doing a job, they seemed enraged at us, as if this were personal, as if we all don’t just have roles to play—the words that kept echoing in my mind were from Courtenay’s dad, from the evening we had left for Africa. It’s a clear memory but it seems to belong to someone else now. We were standing on the curb at JFK, her dad’s voice husky with sorrow. He too had been searching for the right last words, until he finally said: Take care of my girl.

I was doing a bang-up job.

Excuse me, I asked the Ethiopian soldiers. I swallowed hard. The truck’s floor was hot. Where are you taking us?

Nobody said anything.

I want to call the US embassy.

One of the soldiers whipped around, clenching his weapon.

Shut up.

Courtenay seemed far less scared than I felt. Her wide-set eyes were focused; her forehead was unfurrowed. I felt deeply torn that she was even here. I knew the government soldiers would stop at nothing, that they didn’t flinch parting flesh. At the same time, I’d be a liar to say I wanted to be alone. Courtenay was the one with good ideas, the one I had always clung to, the one who could figure a way out of this. Even though we were at a very fragile point, even though for years I had pitted my two loves, Courtenay and Africa, against each other for reasons I struggled to understand, I had finally accepted a truth that now guided me: If you’re with the one you love, the rest should be logistics.

I took one more look at her. She quickly looked back. I saw a dart of fear in her eyes. The doors were locked, the rifles hadn’t moved an inch, blinding light poured down from the sky. We both sensed it would be easier if we didn’t look at each other anymore. Or say anything.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

—Walt Whitman, the beginning and end of Song of the Open Road

One

ITHACA, 1990

Every day, after my 3:35 class ended, I hurried back to the frat house to check my mailbox. Many of the letters started the same: My beloved friend . . .

Some asked for a camera, others for clothes. Most asked for nothing, just sharing the news from rural Tanzania or backroads Malawi, the two agrarian countries where I had been five months earlier. One boy, Macfereson Banda, from Karonga, Malawi, wrote to see how our soccer ball was doing. When I played with it, he said, I was really feeling as if I am on top of the mountain. I won’t lie. We had met thousands of kids driving from Nairobi to southern Malawi on a homemade mission to bring aid to refugees. I didn’t remember who Macfereson Banda was. But I remembered that spirit, that drive to get close and stay close.

The letters from East Africa came in slender, tissue-thin envelopes trimmed in red and blue. The envelope was the letter, so I was careful slipping the blade of a knife under the seam. As I sat at a long wooden table in our dining room, happily rereading the week’s Africa mail, Michael Laudermilk sauntered in, wearing a Lakers tank top and thumping a basketball.

Gettlemern—mern was our word for nerd—what you doing?

Laudermilk—Milk—was my same year. He stooped above me. The ball stopped bouncing.

Those airmail?

Yup.

He bent closer, glancing at the stamps.

Africa, huh? You were there over the summer, right? What’s Africa fucking like?

I looked up at him. His handsome face was framed by glossy black hair. Milk was a star safety on the varsity football team, built like a gladiator, unjustly athletic. We weren’t close, and for the first time he seemed genuinely interested in something I had to say.

It’s like . . . My mind started to race. Like . . . I looked out the window, off into the naked Ithaca trees. I hated that question.

How much did Milk really want to know? What was I supposed to say? That question still trips me up, and back then I definitely didn’t have the poise to hop over it. My first Africa trip had been like a lucid dream—and I was possessive of this dream, because dreams lose their power if you start sharing them around. It began the moment I’d landed and stood eagerly in the aisle, peering out the windows, waiting for the stewardess to wrench open the door. When that dry canned airplane air rushed out and Nairobi’s fresh cool night air rushed in, rich and loamy, like a million wet leaves, it was an immediate intoxication. That’s how that whole summer went, our truck chugging down the road, one thing morphing into the next, things just seeming to happen, leaving behind this sweet, heavy, mysterious emotional aftertaste.

It felt like every day we discovered something; of course that was an illusion, but the illusion was rarely broken. Our summer was a road trip, we covered a thousand miles over four weeks across eastern and southern Africa, we did see a lot. The afternoon we rolled into Salima Bay, on Lake Malawi, was no more or less eventful than dozens of other long sunny lazy days we shared, but it remains deeply etched. Lake Malawi was an inland sea; you couldn’t see across it. The water was coppery, the sand by the shore burning.

We stripped off our shirts and ran in, pushing the water away with our thighs. It seemed to get thicker each step. Immediately we were surrounded by dozens of kids thrashing toward us, belting out Mzungu! Mzungu! Mzungu!—the equivalent of gringo. We couldn’t communicate, but that didn’t stop us from playing with the slippery little kids and throwing them into the water and wrestling on the beach with the bigger ones. They cheered at just about everything we did, and after I toweled off and dressed—in front of a crowd of about ninety-five—scraps of paper were thrust into my hands. Where from! What district! What village! The children wanted to be pen pals, and I scribbled out my address as fast as I could. They tugged us toward their huts, and I peered into one, a little round house, roof black from smoke. There was nothing inside, no toys, no balls, no books, no mattresses even, just blankets bunched up on a clean dirt floor. Malawi was one of the poorest countries on earth; I had never seen anything like this. I felt something on my leg. I looked down. A little boy, about four, was rubbing my shin. People here don’t have hairy legs. His warm little fingers tickled like a spider. As I was standing in the doorway of his house, checking things out, he continued to move his fingers up and down the ridge of my shin extremely lightly, feeling my hairs. It was one of the most intense moments of mutual curiosity I’ve ever experienced.

This was a different world. Personal space didn’t exist. Grown men walked down the beach holding hands, and once when I was standing in the middle of a pack of fishermen, I felt a set of rough calloused fingers interlace in mine. I liked that. I squeezed back. Wherever I went, so much warmth enveloped me; I could feel it opening me up. It made me think that maybe out here, you didn’t have to move through life hopelessly alone.

Our guide to this new world was just a year older. His name was Dan Eldon and I’d never met anyone like Dan Eldon. He’d blaze into a restaurant, snap a stiff salute to the waiters, flick them a cassette, and the next thing I’d know, there would be one white face in the middle of a circle of waiters, everyone grooving together and singing out loud in one voice with several different accents: Fight the power! We got to fight the powers that be!

The first time I saw Dan was in Mombasa, swimming in an ocean that was a shade of bright blue that didn’t look like any water I’d ever seen before; it was the color of Windex. Dan was paddling just beyond the waves. When someone pointed him out, I was surprised by how young and delicate he looked, after all I had heard. He was clean-cut, with a long face, dark eyebrows, and a square jaw, but still, there was something fragile about him. We had met through a fluke. I have a childhood friend named Roko, who was friends with this guy Chris, who came on the trip to film it and knew a guy named Lengai, who had grown up in Nairobi with Dan. Dan had organized a mission to help Mozambican refugees, and he invited a dozen students to drive from Nairobi to the border of Malawi and Mozambique, where he planned to donate a car and several thousand dollars to the refugee camps.

Before we left for Africa, I held that same vague patchwork of images in my head that many people hold, of suffering, disease, deprivation, and poverty. That part of Africa is real—but it’s only that, part of the picture. Even though we were constantly aware that we had so much more than the people around us—our Nikes, our flashlights, our Walkmans, money—even though we were surrounded by people who were clearly struggling, I rarely sensed any resentment, any bitterness. Curiosity, yes; we were oddities. When we walked through the towns, things would suddenly stop; people around us would turn and stare, shoe-shiners would be suspended in mid-stroke, and I’d hear them whisper to each other, "Something-something-mzungu." It felt like we were being worshiped, which felt wonderful—and disconcerting. It didn’t seem right to be regarded as representatives of some alien civilization that had just descended for a quick visit.

I soon learned that the playing, the wrestling, the endless grip-shifting handshaking, helped lower those barriers. My guard began to drop, inch by inch. I realized there was so much less to fear than I had originally thought. When we camped in the middle of the savanna in Mikumi National Park, animals all around us, big ones, so close we could smell their pungent musk, somehow it didn’t feel reckless. It felt as if they had their space, we had ours.

You guys ever wonder what to do with a landscape like this? Dan asked after we all sat down by a campfire. It’s, like, beautiful food you can eat; a beautiful woman you can kiss; but what are you going to do with a landscape this beautiful? Eager for Dan’s approval, we gazed out at the acacia trees silhouetted by the moon and the chest-high elephant grass rolling away for miles, wondering if there was any possible way to answer a question so profound.

* * *

I heard a thumping on the wooden floor, jarring me back to my senses. Milk. Bouncing his ball again. I had nearly forgotten he was still standing there.

Interesting, Gettlemern, very fucking interesting.

I don’t even know what cow-eyed sentences I’d uttered.

I’ll see you tonight. And don’t forget the garbage bags.

That night we called a meeting.

Get in close, fucking weenies!—that’s what we called the eager young men who wanted to join our house, fucking weenies. You know the rule of this house! We always stay close!

We shoved the weenies into a corner of the living room and began ripping apart Hefty bags and taping them to the windows so nobody could see in. Sam, another one of my brothers, struggled to crawl up on a table, slow as a grizzly, and then he reared up like one. Sam gazed down at the weenies and then opened his mouth and vomited on them. I was at a safe distance, but one weenie—Derek, from Baltimore—reached up, face distraught, and slowly felt the gooey chunks in his hair. We all pointed at him and howled. That’s how it went in our house. True humiliation was how we expressed our false love.

Maybe, looking back, I’m giving myself too much credit. But I think it was around this time that I began to suspect that I was on a collision course with myself. I knew I couldn’t keep this up. My fraternity was such a radical reduction of what there was on campus, let alone what I had tasted on that summer trip, let alone what I suspected lay out there in the even wider world. I was nineteen, a sophomore at Cornell University, and like any other teenager, desperate to fit in—and desperate to stand out. I’d allowed myself to be puked on and worse to get into that frat, and for no good reason; frats were simply what I thought you did at Cornell.

So I created my own alternate world: Africa. It was perfect. No one knew much about it, especially me. Of its fifty-some nations, I had briefly visited four: Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa. But I kept staring at the pictures in my scrapbook, rereading the Africa mail, writing to my buddy Dan, stoking my appetite.

It was a cold morning when I walked purposefully up our driveway, my worn-out Nike trainers, the same ones that had been such a fascination in Malawi’s sun-blasted villages, squeaking in the snow. I climbed the hill to Uris Hall, past icicles hanging in the gorge, a dark trickle running between the banks of ice. Up ahead loomed a nineteenth-century