2014 - 2020
Coming here was an attempt at salvation, a final grasp at living up to a legacy that was already sealed in the archives of history. All families have their period of greatness and ours had long dissipated by the time I came of age. There was nothing left for me in Texas, or so I thought.
So I set out searching for my own place in the world, a place where I could create a new legacy, one not yet written in stone, but one that was mine to write. This search set me on a course of migrations, nomadic movements that continue to haunt my thoughts.
Even now, when I make a cup of tea - a habit that has stayed with me - and I pour the milk and the clouds form, I am instantly taken back there, back to Africa, to the farmhouse in the foothills with the fog rolling down from the great mountain. I think of chai tangawizi next to the warmth of a fire and see the candelabra tree in the garden where the two lions laid roaring one morning.
Moments in time are burned into my memory as if they happened yesterday. I remember falling asleep as the sun rose after being up all night with the lions roaring just beneath our beds in the machan. And the time the whole country had turned green with the coming of the early rains and the grass had started to grow high all around us and we nearly stepped on the two female lesser kudu as we walked out away from the road.
I close my eyes and hear the guttural chanting of Maasai Morani at an ngoma in a village south of Arusha. I see the diplomats and foreign aid workers on the veranda at the new Sheraton and the purple flowers of the jacaranda tress that overhang the roadways. I think of long drives on unpaved roads or flights to some remote bush airstrip somewhere. I see myself waking up in a canvas tent next to the river with the hippos grunting in the early hours of morning.
It all feels like a dream and that any minute I might open my eyes and find myself sitting at the edge of small fire in a camp somewhere in the gray dawn of early morning and stirring the ashes from the night before the ironwood fire would come back to life and I’d pull the kettle from the coals, making a cup of tea and watching the sun rise over the river in the distance, waiting to see what the day holds. Maybe it’s not a dream, but a feeling, some foretelling of days that lie ahead.
So I set out searching for my own place in the world, a place where I could create a new legacy, one not yet written in stone, but one that was mine to write. This search set me on a course of migrations, nomadic movements that continue to haunt my thoughts.
Even now, when I make a cup of tea - a habit that has stayed with me - and I pour the milk and the clouds form, I am instantly taken back there, back to Africa, to the farmhouse in the foothills with the fog rolling down from the great mountain. I think of chai tangawizi next to the warmth of a fire and see the candelabra tree in the garden where the two lions laid roaring one morning.
Moments in time are burned into my memory as if they happened yesterday. I remember falling asleep as the sun rose after being up all night with the lions roaring just beneath our beds in the machan. And the time the whole country had turned green with the coming of the early rains and the grass had started to grow high all around us and we nearly stepped on the two female lesser kudu as we walked out away from the road.
I close my eyes and hear the guttural chanting of Maasai Morani at an ngoma in a village south of Arusha. I see the diplomats and foreign aid workers on the veranda at the new Sheraton and the purple flowers of the jacaranda tress that overhang the roadways. I think of long drives on unpaved roads or flights to some remote bush airstrip somewhere. I see myself waking up in a canvas tent next to the river with the hippos grunting in the early hours of morning.
It all feels like a dream and that any minute I might open my eyes and find myself sitting at the edge of small fire in a camp somewhere in the gray dawn of early morning and stirring the ashes from the night before the ironwood fire would come back to life and I’d pull the kettle from the coals, making a cup of tea and watching the sun rise over the river in the distance, waiting to see what the day holds. Maybe it’s not a dream, but a feeling, some foretelling of days that lie ahead.