The Nightmare at the Edge of Civilization - A Review of "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa" by Keith B. Richburg

A book that came out in 1997, to little fanfare, much opprobrium that deserves a new look in a world seduced by moral and cultural relativism.

I typically don’t write book reviews, but a friend recommended this book last year, and it has remained one of my more haunting reads. Which, maybe strangely, I did just after I gave birth to my second child. I'm not sure what it says about me that this was my preferred reading while nursing a week-old baby, especially given my newfound aversion to morbid things, but I somehow could not put it down. Maybe my curiosity got the better of me; the postpartum hormones made sure that the more ominous tones of its message were received.

The book is a first-hand account of the experiences in Africa, spanning over three years, five different countries - Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of Congo) and South Africa - and four different wars. The author, Keith B. Richburg, observes all this as a correspondent for the Washington Post and as an African-American man.

Richburg’s story begins with his childhood in 1960s Detroit, as “a black kid in white America.” Not exactly a child of the ghetto, Richburg grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood and went to a Catholic school. While his parents were working class, his father ascended through the ranks of the auto worker’s union into a career of over 40 years in elected office. He lays out fragments of his identity formation between the Detroit riots, witnessing white flight, and the tension he felt straddling two worlds between his friends from the neighborhood and his suburban high school classmates.

“After the game, I decided to walk the short distance home. But as my classmates were coming out of the arena to board the bus back to Grosse Pointe, they crossed the path of a group of black kids. Kids from my neighborhood. One of the white girls saw one of the black girls with an Afro comb, a pick, stuck in the back of her hair, and made some ill-advised comment like, “Why do you have that comb in your hair?” Probably not hostile—I didn’t hear it. Maybe she was really just curious. But of course, all hell broke loose.

So now you’ve got a bunch of white kids, clambering onto their bus back to the suburbs, and a bunch of angry black kids hitting at the windows with chains and bottles and anything else they can get their hands on. There were shouts and slurs flying in both directions. And there I was, on both sides, on neither side—not wanting to have to take sides. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

When I think back to that incident, I think about how I’ve often felt trapped between two worlds. I suppose I could say that it was always easier to walk away—to run, really—than to have to choose sides. ”

Richburg’s tone throughout the book maintains an air of exhausted apology. He knows that the revelations he’s laying out won’t have much of an audience in the upper echelons of America. He seems to be motivated by his own shock, more than anything, and by the sincere journalistic impulse of having the “scoop” on something that goes so outrageously against the grain. He writes the book from a unique vantage point, as a hopeful (quasi-)outsider to both African-American and African culture, and ends up on the now well-trodden path of the “It’s all so tiresome” meme.

In 1991, when Richburg landed in Kenya, Africa seemed to be starting on a path of healing and growth. After seeing decades of corruption and incompetence, the IMF, the World Bank, and international donors were getting tougher in setting conditions. “Accountability” was the buzzword, and the African strongman was supposed to be on his last legs. This encouraging pattern is not what Richburg encountered on the ground.

“When you stepped off a plane in Mogadishu, a horde of young kids—sometimes no more than twelve or thirteen years old—instantly surrounded you and the plane, leveling their AK-47 assault weapons and grenade launchers at your chest. They were usually shouting incomprehensibly, at you and at each other, as they demanded what often amounted to hundreds of dollars in bribes—landing fee, airport tax, baggage handling fee, security for the plane, even “entry” fee into the country. And you paid, willingly. I never traveled to Somalia with less than three thousand dollars in cash, always in small bills, tens and twenties, rolled up and concealed in various pockets and pouches and tucked away in a hidden money belt. Money was power in Somalia; a hundred-dollar bill pulled out at the right time could keep you from getting killed when a dispute over costs turned heated. But display too much cash all at once, and you could get killed anyway. You just learned how to operate in Somalia.”

Explosion in Mogadishu by Feisal Omar

The book excels at presenting the unique horrors of modern(-ish) warfare under pre-modern social arrangements, and I recommend reading the accounts. Still, they are too numerous to add to this review. One interesting facet of the wars that crested and waned under Richburg’s eyes, was the adaptability and almost nonchalant toughness of the civilian population:

“Like most other people in Somalia, Abdi found his world turned upside down in late 1990, when the fighting first reached the capital. He sent his family away to the countryside and hid in his house, eating only bread and bananas. He could hear outside the nonstop artillery barrages and rocket attacks that marked the final onslaught on Mogadishu.

Siad Barre fled, the foreigners were evacuated, and the rebels entered the city in January 1991. It was supposed to be the end of the war. But as Abdi and everyone else learned pretty quickly, it was just the beginning. The “liberating” army turned out to be nothing more than a ragtag bunch of kids from the bush—teenagers, really, and younger—toting grenade launchers and AK-47s and half the time high out of their minds from chewing khat. These young kids started carving up the territory, throwing up roadblocks all over the city, and celebrating their victory with an orgy of looting. Mogadishu became an urban free-fire zone. Abdi’s family came back, but he soon regretted it; his four-year-old son was shot and badly hurt by a neighbor kid carelessly playing with a loaded automatic weapon.

Abdi needed to try to eke out a living from the ruins, so he started selling bottled gasoline along the roadside. He made enough money to buy some food in the marketplace, which he resold again on the street. Business was okay until the random sniper fire around the city became too intense. Finally he ran into a “friend who had found a pretty lucrative job as a security guard for the IMC, and the friend was able to get Abdi hired. Abdi had never used a gun before—in fact, he had never picked one up in his life. As he related the story to me, he still managed a smile at the irony of his own transformation. “Now the teacher has a gun,” he said, grinning.

There was something ingenious about the survival instinct, I concluded. People who had once been bank tellers were now making and selling tea on the streets. Women learned how to make charcoal by compressing dirt and mud and rock together. Some kids came up with a lucrative business collecting old Coke bottles from foreign-aid workers, smashing them up, and then reselling the shards to use atop the high cement walls for security. Where else but Somalia?”

One of the more illuminating anecdotes in the book comes from Richburg's run-ins with prostitutes. As

Niccolo Soldo

has documented extensively, the AIDS epidemic that plagued the US starting in the 1970s was centered around homosexual communities and practices, because these are disproportionately more likely to lead to transmission (transmission in the case of unprotected vaginal intercourse with a seropositive individual has a 1 in 2380 chance of infection).

“Almost everywhere in Africa, prostitution is rampant, from the Florida bar in Nairobi to the disco at the mezzanine floor of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kinshasa, from the seedy bars of Kigali and Kampala to the lobby of the posh Lagos Sheraton, where girls with long, fake braids wink and smile at newcomers collapsing at the lobby bar for a beer after the treacherous ride in from the airport.