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Can You Belong On A Different Continent? Or Is That Just Colonialism Talking?

where to buy Latuda cream If you will indulge me, let me share with you a long excerpt from Karen (Isak) Dinesen, the beginning of her superb memoir Out of Africa. It is long and descriptive, but instructive, and I will have some things to say about it:

http://thehistoryhacker.com/2013/11/08/the-civil-war-a-lecture-part-two/?replytocom=2138 I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent. The colours were dry and burnt, like the colours in pottery. The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grow in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic and romantic air like fullrigged ships with their sails clewed up, and to the edge of a wood a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating. Upon the grass of the great plains the crooked bare old thorn-trees were scattered, and the grass was spiced like thyme and bog-myrtle; in some places the scent was so strong, that it smarted in the nostrils. All the flowers that you found on the plains, or upon the creepers and liana in the native forest, were diminutive like flowers of the downs,– only just in the beginning of the long rains a number of big, massive heavy-scented lilies sprang out on the plains. The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.

The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of the hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created great Fata Morgana. Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be. (3-4)

Steaming up from this passage, and indeed from throughout Dinesen’s superb book, is the refined essence of colonialism, and if it were not such a natural part of our cultural equipment, it might be shocking: this adulterous delirium for distant lands, this sensuous delight for what is not one’s own. Dinesen was a Dane, and the British colonial project in Kenya helped make her the owner of that farm in Africa, six thousand acres of farm, and made all its inhabitants, who were living on their ancestral land, mere “squatters” – for by British law no “native” could own property. The book is so shot through with sensitive observation and sensible generosity that there is no reason to disbelieve her self-portrait as a kindly mistress to her squatters, though they suffered the instability inherent in all despotisms: when her crops failed and she lost the farm to her creditors, which wrenching, slow death is the story of the book, the new property owner cleared the old villages and drove the “squatters” from their traditional homes.

Here I am, where I ought to be. How could equatorial Africa be where a Dane from the grey North Sea “ought to be”? What claim can a white woman lording it over the natives on her stolen six thousand acres of Africa make to words like “ought” anyway?

And yet – I do not deny that Dinesen probably had that feeling, and I find that I too can wake up in Africa with the same feeling in my heart. I don’t know precisely how this feeling comes to reside in us: perhaps it is our childhood education, where the first animals we learn are the lion, the elephant, the hippo, the zebra, the giraffe, so they are more familiar and intimate to us than the animals we actually grow up beside. Perhaps the paleontological knowledge that Africa is the mother of all humanity makes us more willing to believe we all belong here. Perhaps Westerners find themselves at home wherever they have power – wherever their dollar furnishes their table with good food, and buys the service of less powerful others. These are all the obvious and more rational explanations. But maybe there is something odder and more mystical – that Africa has some other, deeper, appeal. And there is the high probability that our nationalities do not exhaust the possible lives within us. A Belgian, confined to the possibilities of Belgium, would never see a mountain, and a Malawian never see the ocean, and neither would ever see a desert. But mountain and ocean and desert could play into their lives, and have meaning, and they could respond to such places, if given the opportunity.

This breaking out of the limitations of nationalism comes in various forms with various names. When it is somewhat permanent, it is called immigration or expatriation or colonialism, depending on the power dynamics involved; but in any of those instances, it is at least possible that a person could, by leaving home, go to the place where they really belong – that they could wake up and say, finally, Here I am, where I ought to be.

Love has the power to make us at home, almost anyplace on the globe; but law and culture and money and history and the distaste of the foreigner which is typical for human beings, limit us. Dinesen’s book is a reflection of that limitation, and African history in the past decades has shown many examples of it, where the Postcolonization – if I may call it that – has mostly rid the continent of Karen Dinesens. The more striking example of this is Zimbabwe, where the political powers in the country more or less decided that Africa was most emphatically not where white people ought to be (Robert Mugabe, still the dictator there as well as current head of the African Union, still says as much today). South Africa has already seen several waves of emigration of whites and Indians in the past two decades, and probably will continue to see more.

Race is frustrating because it is so terribly simple: it takes all people and throws them into only four or five categories. And yet it is very difficult to escape. When you are with people of a different race, and they know nothing else about you, that is generally all you are: a person of that race. And with that comes all the history, and all the problems, and you cannot escape it. When you are all alone, you can say, Here I am, where I ought to be. Nature does not contradict such a statement, if it is felt. But as soon as you enter into human society, there are other people, who have opinions as to where you belong, and they have ways of making their opinions felt.

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