Aha ni Afurika: This is Africa

Muraho mwese!Here I am again, one year older, and maybe wiser? As you all know, I went on a trip to South Africa during the recent school vacation, and it inspired me to write a blog about Africa in general. What does Africa mean? What images does the word invoke? Is there one Africa or are there many? I'll do my best to briefly answer these questions in this short blog.

We flew into Johannesburg first and spent the night in the airport before catching our 6 AM flight to Cape Town. Upon our arrival in Cape Town, we were struck first by the natural beauty of the area. We live in a beautiful part of Africa, with the hills, banana trees, and green valleys, but Cape Town was inviting with its simultaneous view of the ocean and sizable mountains. In the taxi from the airport to our hostel, despite a lack of sleep, we all marveled at what lay before us and began to make plans for out time spent there. It was during this taxi ride that one of us said for the first time, "This doesn't feel like Africa."

It would be a phrase that was repeated fairly often over the next week or so. When we found ourselves on a two-lane modern highway with familiar cars, in a restaurant with familiar foods and drinks, or in a neighborhood with houses similar to those we left ten months ago, someone would inevitably say, "This doesn't feel like Africa" or "We're not in Africa."

Of course, these statements come from an image that seems to be all too common among Westerners. It's an image of an Africa that is dry and dusty, plagued by natural and man-made problems, and, most notably, rustic, far-removed from our comfortable existence. But this image of Africa is holding back the very development that the world claims to desire. People come to Africa expecting to see, wanting to see, small huts with thatched roofs, dusty dirt roads, and vast expanses of savanna and desert.

These scenes certainly still exist in many places in Africa, including parts of South Africa, but our visit to Cape Town (and later to Johannesburg for a couple of days) show what Africa can be. It can be a place that mixes the traditional with the modern, the great expanses of wild land with modern bustling streets and restaurants.

As we returned to life in Rwanda, we also returned to a more "traditional" Africa, one of little if any electricity, no running water, and dirt roads that fill the air with choking dust anytime a car rumbles past. But, we never left Africa. Africa is developing, and the rest of the continent will catch up to South Africa. One day, instead of saying "This feels like Europe" on a visit to Cape Town, perhaps someone will say "This feels like Africa" on a visit to Barcelona.

Until next month, murabeho!