T HANKS to Bill Clinton's trip, Africa is hot. Not, hot hot, like temperature hot. But hot, as in trendy hot. It’s tough being
out of AfricaIn fact, Africa's so hot, it's cool. That is, if you ignore the local hot spots like Liberia, where civil war has raged for years, or parts of Africa where slavery is more than just theoretical. There are many great things happening on that continent.
I never considered myself a trend-setter, but I am able to report that I lived in Africa when it was only hot in the "watch me fry an egg on the back of a water buffalo" sense.
I was a 5-year-old military brat. My father was assigned to an Air Force base in North Africa in the not-so-garden spot called Morocco. And while few 5-year-olds remember much about that time of their life, Morocco has a way of burning a lasting impression into a kid's mind.
I didn't realize until much later that it was the totality of the strangeness of the place that created such vivid memories. It was a combination of little things, like the fact that my little brother spoke Arabic before he spoke English, thanks to our live-in housekeeper, Fatima. Or that we had a goat instead of a dog. Or that we were sent off to kindergarten with a kiss from our mom and the kindly warning, "Watch out for scorpions." You ever want to see kids run to school, directly to school, without passing "Go" or dilly-dallying around, tell them to look out for scorpions on their way. It was like, "Bye, Mom"... Zoom ... "Hello, teacher." Four seconds flat. School's out? "Bye, teacher" ... Zoom ... "Hello, goat."
The only thing I don't remember about Africa is the scenery between home and school.
Morocco is in the desert, although we didn't know that. We just thought the landscape was extremely under-cared for. The only green was a patch of grass in front of the "Base Ops" building on which the American flag flew from a tall pole. For the longest time, we thought that little green spot actually was America.
WE had a yard boy named Mohammed, which was odd, because we had no yard to speak of and this particular "boy" seemed to be about 70 years old.
Mohammed used to ride up on his bike every morning with a freshly baked round loaf of sourdough bread strapped to the back fender. I don't know if it was the fact that the bread was baked in an adobe oven in his village or the nice coating of dust it picked up during the ride in, but it was the best tasting bread I have ever had in my life. Nearly 40 year later, the smell is still distinct in my mind. Bread was the only thing Mohammed brought to eat, but he always shared it with us kids.
All that was considered normal to us at the time. It wasn't until we returned to the United States that we learned that most cities don't have a casbah, where snake-handlers mingle with camel handlers and waterboys walk around with sheepskin canteens selling water from brass cups. Most Americans have never seen a locust swarm that turns the sky dark, and frankly, this is one American who never wants to see another one.
In Georgia, when we learned we would be taking a bus to school instead of dodging scorpions, we thought, "Piece of cake." And we never thought that the world could actually be too green, too wet and the air just too bland, with none of the aromas of wood fires, leather shops and musky livestock.
I admit that I was rather cynical of Bill Clinton's trip to Africa. I thought he was just fleeing from his problems here in America. But the more I watched, the more jealous I became. Like writer Isak Dinesen, whose beautiful memoir is as close as many will come to that ancient land, I was sorry to be "Out of Africa."