Back Again

When I started this blog at the beginning of 2009, just before I left the U.S. for a ten month jaunt in Namibia, I imagined it would be something that other people would want to read: a blog about a remote corner of Africa, scarcely inhabited. I would fill posts with useful anecdotes and observations about life, politics, and culture. In short, it would capture a small piece of a nice little adventure.

Well, I’m now more than eight months in, with less than two months to go, and “adventure” strikes me as a disgusting word for reasons I can’t quite specify. I am writing this post on my laptop in my flat in Eros Park. It is well past midnight here, but I don’t feel like going to sleep. I’ve been spending the after-hours surfing the web, doing a little work, but yeah, mostly surfing the web. I am listening to jazz music right now. It vaguely lightens my mood, but mostly I feel depressed and homesick. In the time I have been gone, my 5-year-old daughter has finished her year in kindergarten, started the first grade, and next week is going with her grandparents to Disney World. My son is now almost three weeks old, being cared for by his mother, my wife. In the next two months I will miss my daughter’s sixth birthday, and my wife’s 32nd birthday.

I suppose at this point it is customary for me to say that these sacrifices are in the name of some noble cause…providing malarial nets for poor children or helping people with HIV. But here in Namibia I do neither of these things. I spend a lot of time in the archives. I look at dusty old documents about insignificant court cases that are sixty, seventy, eighty years old. When I am outside of Windhoek and in the north, I walk into people’s homes and ask them strange questions about physical torture, fear, and death. I record these conversations and type out the words that were spoken later. I think some of the people I interview are amused by me, but many seem genuinely frightened. This is sometimes only apparent afterwards, when you listen back again to the interview, and hear the hesitation that creeps into the voices of the people speaking. Today I was listening back again to an interview I conducted with an eighty year old woman last month. She was doing fine with my questions for the first 10 minutes or so, but then (and this escaped my attention at the time) her granddaughter, sitting in another room, started shouting to her that she should shut her mouth or otherwise I would have her killed. I only heard this later, on the tape. After that the old woman’s demeanor changed noticeably: her answers grew more reluctant, short, evasive. She sensed danger. While I was cycling through my usual list of questions, she was probably wondering what I might have done to her if she answered me in the wrong way.

There are lots of sophisticated ways to interpret an encounter like this one, and I am sure I could faithfully recite most of them. But it’s bullshit. The granddaughter was actually an ignorant girl who needlessly frightened her grandmother for no reason other than that I was a white man asking questions. I’d say that this attitude is a legacy of colonialism, but this girl would have been born after the last South African tanks left her region. There are virtually no white people living anywhere near her. What she knows about me is based on ignorance, rumor, and fear. Thinking about it now makes me angry, not because it ruined an interview, because I have plenty of those, but rather because this sort of thing exists in the world and is far too common. I mean, really. What has the world come to when a tall white guy can’t go around an African village and ask people about corporal punishment without being regarded as suspicious?

Oh, right. The world came to that a long time ago. We’re just living in the aftermath.

To get back to the “sacrifice” I have made for this research: I knew when I undertook this journey that I wanted things to be hard. But I am now getting to the point where I want them to be easier again. I wanted to research something that causes most other people to look away. I wanted to stare at something that makes other people uncomfortable. I think I’m reaching the point now where I’m ready to start looking the other way again.

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