THE AFRICA PASSION : An Essay : ‘How does such a land get under one’s skin? Will anyone believe me if I say I feel more comfortable there than anywhere on this earth?’

I first went to Africa when I was 16. Along with other American schoolboys, led by an English explorer, we sailed from Southampton, bunking in the cheapest cabin on a converted Liberty ship. For two weeks we rode Atlantic rollers and listened to the anguished anticipation of fellow travelers, Southern Africans returning to the continent of theirbirth. They sang songs, recited epic poems and, on our last night together, the youngest of them and I lay in the bow ropes, straining to catch a glimpse of the advancing shoreline. These new-found friends were breathless, almost hopeless in their attempts to describe what lay ahead. “The veldt,” “the game,” “dawn,” “the short rains,” splutterings acknowledged by the others with cheers of approbation. None of it meant anything to me. I went along with the charade, all the time suspecting they belonged to a secret society.

While, unlike them, I have never made Africa a permanent home, like them, I have come under the spell of the continent, especially that part of it defined by East Africa, the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia) and much of Southern Africa. A few years ago I wrote about this land’s first effect on me: “Those great Cape rollers had washed me ashore on an unresolved headland. Whisper ‘Africa’ to me now, nearly 30 years later, and still I smell dust and wood smoke and sweet sweat. I hear an emerald-spotted wood dove; I feel the evening breeze rising from the plains, drying my skin here on the crest of a hill; before me I see not just the distance but a link between time and space, folding in upon itself, wave after wave of prismatic heat, punctuated by a hollow horizon far away.

“As soon as I was beached in Africa I found what I had lacked in myself. Thus, drowned in dust, whiplashed by heat, scared sick by lions, I learned I was far from complete. I saw that souls and not just bodies suffer and adjust and swell in a sequence not dissimilar from Darwin’s Laws of Natural Selection. Because of Africa I came to accept that I would always be on the drawing boards, forever thirsty on a plain that reaches for the Southern Cross.

“Fair enough: Man was born in Africa. No doubt I’m happy to be home. But there is more to this wrenching continent than anatomical atavism. There is soul talk in the silence, stomach wails at dawn, gibberish of the larynx during that loneliest hour of the night. Africa has become for me, now middle-aged I suppose, a womb of questions, its smoky air just before the rains the amniotic fluid of self-doubt.”

The French and Belgians called this disease le mal d’Afrique , when deracinated colonists boarded planes and forever left countries like Zaire and Senegal. The Italians echoed these same sentiments once their misguided attempt to annex Ethiopia ended in 1941. Some 1,700 years before, Pliny suggested cryptically: Ex Africa semper aliquid novi . (There’s always something new coming out of Africa.) I call the condition “the Africa passion.” It is indeed a disease: It hurts and often it is life-threatening.

Most first-time travelers to Kenya and Tanzania will recognize the ailment. Perhaps, as they prepared for their safari, they had deliberated. There were many reasons not to proceed: State Department warnings, guerrilla action, rural bandits, urban crime, AIDS and malaria. But they bit their lips, went to East Africa and now, about two weeks into their safari, something happens. They mention how much they like the smell of this dust; they want to spend a little more time watching elephants or they note a desperate need to treat eye infections among the Masai. Might they stay a little longer--say, three days--to skin-dive at the coast or hang glide off Mt. Kenya, danger be damned.

They are bitten.

Recently, when I led a group of people through East Africa on the Catalina Flying Boat, the youngest (age 22) announced to me after two days in Africa that, while it was pretty, it frankly paled next to the Caribbean, thank you very much. One day after we had returned home after our two-week safari, she called to ask whether there were job openings in Tanzania for a 22-year-old American female.

Today, with U.S. troops in a sub-Saharan nation for the first time, I have been thinking even more about Africa. There is a popular belief among Americans who have never been to Africa that it is a murky land, ill-defined nationally, with loathsome health conditions and a contempt for elemental freedoms, including life itself. Many New World Africans look to Africa for inspiration, but some seem uncomfortable with a primitive, tribal and sometimes racist homeland. My fellow white Americans, especially those content to stay in the comfortable U.S.A., often glom onto the tragedies of Africa as proof of moral torpor.

When our troops return from Somalia, I think Africa will finally turn epic in the national heart. I think our fighting men and women may discover what a few of us have been fortunate enough to unleash as travelers. Quite possibly, some soldiers will settle back at home and, like Italians some 50 years before, will slip into a funk, trying to fathom the allure of a land where each day meant risk and horror.

Why Africa? How does such a land get under one’s skin? Will anyone believe me if I say I feel more comfortable there than anywhere on this earth? Park me on the Serengeti Plain and surround me with predators: I have completed my return from exile. I recog nize this country and, while it certainly makes no show of recognizing me, I feel acutely alive in my anonymity on an infinite plain molded from volcanic ash superbly adapted to growing grasses that will support many more quadrupeds than humans.

It came to me as no surprise to learn that a few miles from the Serengeti, there are footprints of humans much like mine. (Sadly, this early man site is not accessible to most travelers.) These ancestors shared my direction, perhaps even my pace and, who knows, my joys. I could put my foot in their impressions, squirm in the mud now turned to stone and compare toe sizes. It so happens these footprints are 3.6 million years old: the world’s oldest known human footprints. Their makers were the opportunists of these plains. They took note of wildebeest movements and they were quick to spot anomalies--a gazelle with a broken leg, a newborn zebra calf, circling vultures. With a little time, I could regain an instinct for such observations, too.

The Serengeti is virtually every traveler’s safari highlight. Many have told me it is like being on a great frozen sea. They say they become addicted to these knee-wobbling views. And that every kopje , or hillock, cries out to be climbed, as if it were a mast. Looking down on a great herd of wildebeest and zebra, moving past like a storm, is for them a sure invitation to dizziness and even seasickness. This is the first symptom, I maintain, of the narcosis of Africa.

I’ve taken my Serengeti calm with me throughout Africa. That is not to say I’ve never been scared. On the contrary. Elephants, lions, buffaloes have, at varying times, quickened my breath and sent me grappling up trees. I was once detained by Uzi-wielding militia in a small port on the Somalia coast. Another time, camping alone beside a track in Mozambique, I disarmed a drunk with a knife. My Land Rover has been stoned in Malawi. Yet I return to Africa each year for more. And I am like so many others.

Africa is a continent that implores the attention of all the world and, once it has possessed us, it taps into virgin instincts. In Africa, the fastidious can become cavalier about dirt, racists can jettison bigotry, fears can wash off like dust after rain. Often in Africa, travelers confess to me they no longer recognize themselves; I claim they may have become better than they would allow themselves elsewhere. Africa is a truce--and a truth--zone. No doubt, some will mistake an expatriate instinct to help as a form of neocolonialism: “palefaces” to the rescue of Africa. But assistance is not domination. And Africans rarely seem color-conscious in times of need.

Let’s be fair: There are undeniable rewards for a foreigner to live in Africa. A fisheries officer stationed on a remote shore of what is now Kenya’s Lake Turkana once confided to me: “In England I would be one amongst millions of people; here I am king.” Shallow instincts, no doubt. In much of Africa, whites are awarded preferential treatment.

At the emergency ward or at the bank teller, they often are invited to the head of the line. They may consider this and all other privileges a trade-off for life in a land where they must resign themselves to political impotence, even irrelevance. These expatriates are toothless, shipwrecked sailors on someone else’s shore. But, by virtue of not being an African, they--and even I--automatically assume a responsibility. We accept we don’t know the first thing about diagnostics, but when asked for medical help we do the best we can. We know we can’t distinguish between a carburetor and an exhaust, but suddenly we can fix a car.

And finally, we turn to the skies. A traveler, just arrived in Africa, may have given only the briefest attention to matters of the human heart or of our destiny, but here on this continent, we startle ourselves by considering the ephemeral. “To live in Africa,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, “you must know what it is to die in Africa.” At much the same period, Carl Jung came ashore and noted: “I found myself haunted by an impression I myself could not understand. I kept thinking the land smelled queer. It was the smell of blood, as though the soil was soaked by blood.”

In Africa, kings--white or black--are only kings in name, for they are judged, I believe, beside the immensity of the Serengeti. Everyone, in the end, comes up short, but if they are willing to clothe themselves only in a laugh, as is the custom in so much of East Africa, they probably will learn to be proud of their nakedness, their puniness.

When I lost the last of my parents, I turned to Africa. For one week, I camped with a friend on the Serengeti. For much of this time I regained an old, forgotten habit of silence. At every dawn we drove great distances to stalk crocodiles on our stomach or to scope for leopards, and at dusk I jogged beneath a kopje from where a lioness measured my pace. Our camp was raided by hyenas, prowled by lions, circled by elephants. Often at night I chose not to sleep, instead to listen to the continent stirring beside me. When the week was up, I had said a final farewell to my dad.

Perhaps it is Africa’s portentous indifference to man that turns us all into suitors. “If I know a song of Africa,” Isak Dinesen asked, “. . . does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?”

We who return time and again celebrate Africa’s answer. We revel in our anonymity, crow about our loss of self-importance. I have begun to see Africa as a continent with a wicked sense of humor. Those who don’t get the joke, I’m resigned to admit, can’t belong.

Have I explained myself? Have I made it clear why my heart invariably detects a psychic jolt as my southbound aircraft crosses the North African coast? Does it make sense I grow homesick for Africa a good day or two before the end of every trip? Have I mentioned I feel cleaner in Africa than I do at home? Have I said the air and the associations and the distances and the liberties of Africa startle you with the challenge that here you can truly live and not just let time pass?

No, this Africa business can never be explained. I have seen Hemingway and Dinesen and Romain Gary and Stuart Cloete and Laurens Van der Post and Rian Malan and all the best of the “palefaces” try, and they all skirt the essential. Africa responds to something beyond intellect. It is the place we all owe ourselves, not to stay, but to feel. Each of us, I contend, is in want of its beauty, suffering, welcome, indifference, capriciousness and its color-blind humanity--to be whole.

Travelers to East Africa will always leave with a commitment to return and soldiers in Somalia shall come home with much more than a tale of war.