Say the word “Africa” in the western world, and images arise of poverty, hunger, desperation. Emaciated children with fly-blown eyes, old women staggering uphill with great loads of firewood balanced on their grizzled heads, men with machetes, boys with machine guns, corrupt political bosses with fancy women and gold-plated toilets. These images make us cringe and shudder, or toss a few bucks at aid agencies, or sign petitions for Darfur. They emphasize Africa’s “otherness.”
But there is another Africa less sensational, the Africa of hard-working, sometimes-muddled, sometimes broken-hearted middle-class Africans: teachers, physicians, government clerks, businesswomen, IT specialists–people who work in cubicles, or grade papers, or swing shifts at the hospital. People who have cars and car insurance payments. People who hook up satellite dishes to the outsides of their houses so they can watch old Hollywood movies when they wake up at 2 a.m. with insomnia. People who have electricity and indoor plumbing, who cart their children to violin lessons and art classes. People who hire less-affluent relatives to care for their aging parents, who try, despite the constant pleas of neighbors who come banging at their doors daily, to save a little for vacations in Mauritius or to take their teenagers to Disneyworld or the Louvre. They have kitchens like this one, and in their kitchens, battered wooden tables, and around those tables the history of their families’ trials and conquests has been lived and told, wept over and celebrated.