If you are at all acquainted with classic literature, then you have most likely read at least one book by the great Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was an adventurer to the core, a man of passion and words, and when forged together, his passion and his words would forever change the course of literature. He seemed to have an eternal draw to distant, exotic lands and he delighted in writing about them. The Sun Also Rises takes place in Spain as does For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Have and to Have Not is set in Cuba, A Farewell to Arms covers Italy and other parts of Europe and The Old Man and the Sea takes place in regions of the Caribbean, particularly Havana. Perhaps my favorite book of Hemingway’s is “The Green Hills of Africa.” Hemingway seemed to have a special draw to the continent of Africa, spending about three months there, traveling across much of East Africa. He returned 20 years later with his fourth wife, and they explored regions of Belgian Congo, Rwanda, and Kenya. Hemingway was a hunter, a philanthropist, a thrill seeker and Africa was able to sate his every need. Hemingway once said,
“All I wanted to do was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already. Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting. But you are not alone because if you have ever really loved her happy and untragic, she loves you always; no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more.”
As I gaze into the vast jungles of Cameroon, bouts of steam rising from the ground like exhaust from locomotives, it is no wonder why Ernest Hemingway kept returning here. The land is as wild and dangerous as it is beautiful, the last living place of fairytale. Men have tried and failed to conquer it over the ages, dynasties have been erected, great empires of destruction, bent on sheer domination, and though the land has felt the ravages of war, has gazed into the faces of its molesters, it has remained unyielding.
I see this most strongly in the peoples of Africa. How many of us in the Western world could say, with absolute certainty, that we could brave famine, poverty, war, sickness and abuse, daily, and still find the courage needed to laugh, to cry, to wake in the morning filled with hope for our children’s futures? We love to create films and literature about apocalyptic events, about the world’s end, when for so many here in Africa, the world ends everyday. And yet, there is beauty and there is redemption. How is it that the woman on the roadside (the one in the bright, yellow skirt, hair tied back with a floral scarf, selling baskets carefully weaved by herself, the one who was raped by her own father, then exiled from her home when she was found with child, the one whose infant caught tuberculosis and died at six months old and who suddenly found herself braving the terrors of the streets, fighting for survival against man and beast) has the ability to smile? What strength lies in her that she does not long for death, curse God and forever forsake those who wronged her as a child? This is something for which I have no answer.
And yet, people are always telling me I am wasting my time, why go to Africa, it is a place of no hope. It is a place of darkness, corruption, of unimaginable horrors, a land rife with trial. I cannot help but think how ignorant they are, how foolish their words sound in my ears. Africa is a place of hope, a place of resolve, a land where one goes to grow. Do not tell me that Americans are any better than Africans, for in truth, I have found better company amongst women in the slums of Ethiopia than in all of the clean, well structured churches in America. Africa’s beauty is not in its land nor is it found in its resources. The beauty of Africa lies in the spirit of its people, and I think Ernest Hemingway discovered that 82 years ago.
“Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.”
-Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
MUSINGS OF A WANDERER 